Aaron grabs a notebook from his briefcase and flips it to a clean page, clicking his pen repeatedly against his leg.
“Well, Dianne, if you could just start by telling me your full name, for the record,” he says. “Then we can get into the disappearance of your daughter.”
“Okay.” She sighs, sucking in another cloud of smoke. When she exhales, I watch her eyes grow distant as she stares out the window. “My name is Dianne Briggs. And my daughter, Sophie, went missing twenty years ago.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“What can you tell us about Sophie?”
Dianne glances in my direction, as if she had forgotten about my existence entirely. It feels wrong that this is the way I’m meeting my would-be future mother-in-law. She clearly has no idea who I am, and as long as I can avoid giving her my name, it should stay that way. I no longer have Facebook, so I never post pictures of myself online—and even if I did, Daniel doesn’t speak to his parents anymore. They aren’t invited to the wedding. I wonder if she even knows he’s engaged.
She seems to consider the question for a second, as if she’s forgotten, lifting her hand to scratch at the leathery skin on her arm.
“What can I tell you about Sophie,” she echoes, sucking down the last of her cigarette before putting it out on the wooden table. “She was a wonderful girl. Smart, beautiful. Just beautiful. That’s her, just there.”
Dianne points to a single, framed picture on the wall, a school portrait that features a smiling girl with pale skin and frizzy blonde hair, a turquoise backdrop that looks like pool water. It strikes me as odd to see her class picture displayed—that, and nothing else. It seems staged and unnatural, like a sad sort of shrine. I wonder if the Briggs family wasn’t big on cameras, or if there just weren’t any moments worth remembering. I look around for pictures of Daniel, but I don’t see any.
“I had big dreams for her,” she continues. “Before she went missing.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Oh, you know, just getting out of here,” she says, gesturing to the room around us. “She was better than this. Better than us.”
“Who is us?” Aaron asks, resting the tip of his pen against his cheek. “You and your husband?”
“Me, my husband, my son. I just always thought she would be the one to get out of here, you know. To make something of herself.”
My chest lurches at the mention of Daniel; I try to imagine him growing up here, getting buried alive in the clouds of cigarette smoke and mountains of trash. I’ve been wrong about him, I realize. His perfect teeth, his smooth skin, his expensive education and high-paying job. I had always assumed those things were a product of his upbringing, of his privilege. That he is inherently better than me, than damaged Chloe. But it isn’t; he isn’t. He’s damaged, too.
He doesn’t know you, Chloe. And you don’t know him.
It’s no wonder he’s so meticulously clean now, so immaculately put together. He’s been trying so hard to become the exact opposite of this.
Or maybe he’s been trying to hide who he really is.
“What can you tell us about your husband and son?”
“My husband, Earl. He’s got a temper, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.” She looks at me, smirks a little, as if we share some kind of unspoken bond over men. The things they do. Boys will be boys. I divert my gaze from the bruise beneath her eye, but this woman isn’t stupid. She must have caught me looking. “And my son, well. I don’t know much about him anymore. But I’ve always worried that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.”
Aaron and I glance at each other, and I nod at him to go on.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that he’s got a temper, too.”
I think of Daniel’s hand on my wrist, squeezing.
“He used to try to fight off his daddy, protect me when he came home after a night of drinking,” she continues. “But as he got older, I don’t know. He stopped trying, just let it happen. I think he got desensitized. I guess I can blame myself for that.”
“Okay.” Aaron nods, scribbling notes in his notebook. “And how did your son—I’m sorry, what did you say his name was?”
“Daniel,” she says. “Daniel Briggs.”
I feel a squeeze in my stomach as I rack my brain to remember if I’ve ever mentioned Daniel’s full name to Aaron. I don’t think I have. I glance over at him, at the concentration warping his forehead as he scrawls the name on his notepad. It doesn’t seem to register.