“Let’s try this,” Selena said. “I think the question we all have to answer is, Will we be able to live with ourselves if we do it? And will we be able to live with ourselves if we don’t? What feels better? What feels safer? What feels more right?”
Kira and I nodded carefully, thinking. Selena, ever the lawyer, was the voice of reason. I was glad she was here. I was glad both of them were.
Kira spoke up, finally. “I want to say yes to Isabel,” she said, but her voice was unconvincing. “I really do. He’s a terrible, destructive person, and Isabel wouldn’t ask this of us if she wasn’t sure that this was her only way out. We should have said something when she went missing, and we owe it to her to be here for her now, after we didn’t step up when we had the chance before. But—but it’s murder, you guys. Murder.” She looked at us each for a long moment, making sure we understood.
“I’m scared, too,” I said. “Terrified. But the thing is that I really do want him gone.” Yet again, my own words surprised me. But they felt right leaving my lips. As much as I’d assured myself several times over the past week that I didn’t know Isabel all that well, that her disappearance couldn’t have had anything to do with me, the truth was that I’d learned everything I needed to know about her that day that I’d seen her on a park bench, talking to Naomi. I did know her. I believed her that this was the only way she could be free. I trusted her.
And if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t just want to do it out of friendship for Isabel. I wanted to do it for myself, for every woman he’d made feel powerless and every woman he had yet to meet whose life he’d shake off course and whose self-worth he’d demolish. I wondered, for a moment, if the drunk girl at the Milling Room bar had made it out unscathed.
I disappeared into my head for a minute and conjured my mom. I wondered what she would think of all this—of what I’d done, of what I was thinking of doing. I thought of how she’d always told me to trust my intuition.
And, crazily enough, my intuition seemed to be telling me I should help my friend murder her husband.
“God dammit,” said Selena, finishing her wine and looking out toward the ocean.
I shivered as we exited the hot tub and walked back into the house. In the midst of everything going on, we’d forgotten to bring towels. But there was no way to know if I was shaking from the cold or because of what I was pretty sure we were going to agree to do.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Friday, October 9
While the rest of our Montauk trip was hardly the restorative girls’ getaway I’d envisioned, it was a relief to have everything out in the open, to know that Isabel was alive, and, for me personally, to know that I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance—at least not directly, not in the way that I had feared. And we knew that, in a matter of days, we’d be able to start putting all this behind us, because we all agreed that, if we were going to do this, we weren’t going to waste any time.
We spent much of the rest of the night talking through the plans. We sat around the table and talked, and then when we couldn’t sit any longer, we walked on the beach, occasionally grasping hands or elbows because it was so dark, the noise from the crashing ocean keeping our secrets safe. When we got back to the house, we went over every detail again. Doing everything we could to flush out every possible hiccup or surprise or misstep or unanticipated outcome. We took breaks to refill wine or when one of us needed to pump. We ordered pizza from a place called Best Pizza down Montauk Highway and ate every slice. We argued until we agreed. And then we were done. We went to bed very late and I slept like a rock, well into the morning.
When everyone was awake, we ate blueberry muffins that Vanessa had picked up from Round Swamp Market. For some reason, I was starving, and food tasted better to me than it had in months. It was like I was remembering my body’s own likes and needs for the first time since Clara had been born. After we were full, we went for another walk on the beach, not even mentioning Connor, or what our return to the city and subsequent days would look like; we’d ironed all that out yesterday, as much as possible. Instead, we did what we always did: talked about our babies. How amazing and adorable and frustrating and all-consuming they were. How lucky we were. How tired we were. How beautiful and hard it was to be a mother. I knew Vanessa must have been thinking of Allison as we talked and how her sister wouldn’t get to experience all that we were discussing.