“Yeah, I did. Up into the Shenandoah like I said. David—the man who adopted me—used to take me up there to decompress whenever I needed to get away from things.”
“You have to know how that sounds,” she said.
“Oh, you think I don’t know?” he said, showing her his shackled wrists. “Did you ever read Macbeth in high school? This Scottish king, he has one of his rivals murdered, guy named Banquo. Then Banquo’s ghost starts haunting the king. Doesn’t say anything. Banquo, he just stands there. Staring. Judging. Kind of like how you’re looking at me now. Except I didn’t do it. But I still got to deal with her damned ghost accusing me of hurting her.”
“I want to believe that.”
“I didn’t kill her.”
“So what happened?” Con asked.
“Damned if I know. Why do you think I drove up to the mountains yesterday? None of it makes any sense. The first year? Best year of my life. She was in such a sad place when we met. But after a few months, she really came out of it and seemed happy. At least, I thought she was, I don’t know. Everything just seemed on the upswing. Things were really clicking for me with the team. She was busy with her music, writing all these new songs. And we got married. Didn’t make a big deal of it, just went to the courthouse. Sort of the last thing either of us expected, but it felt right. We were even talking about selling the house and moving downtown. Man, she hated the burbs, but I guess you know that better than me, right?”
It was like catching a few stray bars of music and trying to imagine the entire song. Her need to know the story in more detail was unbearable. But visiting hours were brief, and she had too many urgent questions to indulge her curiosity now.
“What changed?” she asked.
“Nothing. Everything? She just became distant. If I asked, she always said everything was fine. Things were real busy with the team, and eventually I stopped asking. I know I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have been, but I thought when the season was over that we’d go somewhere. Get back on track, you know? Now, I find out she’d been taking all these trips to Charlottesville while I was on the road.”
“Was she having an affair?”
“I don’t know,” Levi said, voice rising. “The way the police describe it to me, they’re talking about someone else’s life. Like she’s hiding bruises from people, and the neighbors saying we fought all the time.”
“You didn’t?”
“No, never. Part of me wishes we had. Maybe if we’d had it out, she’d still be here. I just didn’t try hard enough. Or maybe I never had a chance. What do you think? You’re her. Did she ever love me?”
Con didn’t have an answer, so she didn’t offer one. They sat there in the indistinguishable murmur of nearby conversations. It was a terrible irony. They were each haunted by the same questions: Who was Con D’Arcy, and why had she married Levi Greer? Con knew who she’d been before meeting him, while Greer only knew her afterward.
“So, what do I call you? Just can’t be calling you Con, you know? That would mess with my head.”
Since the beginning, she’d been fighting to convince everyone that she was Con D’Arcy. But it was more complicated than that. She was and she wasn’t. She was some of that person—they shared so much—but no matter how many questions she asked, no matter how much she learned about her missing eighteen months, they were never going to be her eighteen months. Any more than the original Con D’Arcy could know what she’d been through in the last few days.
“How about Constance?” she suggested.
“You hate that name.”
“It’s weird that you know that.”
“What’s not weird about this?” he said. “Alright, Constance it is.”
He smiled at her then for the first time since she’d met him, a bemused, crooked smile at the sheer absurdity of his situation. She saw what her original must have seen in Levi Greer: a sweet, quiet man who had been through hell as a kid and come out more or less intact. Well, he was back there now, and try as she might, she couldn’t talk herself into his having had anything to do with it.
“So, what else do you want to know?”
“If you didn’t kill her, who did?”
“Isn’t that the cops’ job?”
“The cops think it’s you; I don’t. You really want to roll the dice that they’ll come around?”