It was true: she should be glad it ended this way, with the cop walking away from her, fumbling his phone from his pocket, tapping at the screen. He didn’t glance back, and she thought that this, too, was a good sign. When Bird arrived, he was focused on Adrienne; now it seemed like he’d forgotten all about her. She watched the cruiser pull away from the curb and down the street, disappearing around the corner, and then watched the gentle movement of the trees in the lamplight as silence descended. She held her breath. A moment later, the quiet was broken by the ambient sounds of city life: the electric buzz of the streetlights, the far-off wail of a siren. But the street stayed empty, and the breath she was holding came out in a satisfied whoosh. She supposed he might be trying to fool her, hiding around the corner or a few streets down, but she didn’t think so. For now, at least, it seemed that Ian Bird had decided to leave her alone. And by the time he sought her out again . . . well, things would have changed.
It helped, she thought, that she hadn’t lied to him about everything. My husband is away: True. He took the Mercedes: True. That Adrienne had once said she wanted to see Copperbrook in the fall, and Lizzie, seeing an opportunity, had offered her the week in peak leaf-peeping season: This, too, was true.
But Adrienne hadn’t forgotten. Christ, she wished she had. It could so easily have been the truth: that Adrienne had ignored Lizzie’s offer and then simply forgotten all about it. It was exactly the kind of thing she would do. But no: she’d told Lizzie to go ahead and hold the week for them, and she and Ethan had arrived in Copper Falls the previous night, right on schedule. Right on time for everything to go utterly, irretrievably wrong. And what a relief it had been, when Bird finally said the words—Lizzie Ouellette is dead—and she could stop pretending not to know, pretending she hadn’t been there. It had taken every ounce of restraint she had, to keep from leaping around like a lunatic and screaming the truth aloud: Dead, she’s dead, and he’s dead, too.
I don’t know where Ethan is.
Another lie.
She locked the door. She climbed the stairs, ignoring the picture that had caught Bird’s attention, turning left at the top of the landing, moving purposefully. She walked to the bedroom, to the bed, freshly made with clean sheets only an hour before, back when she’d still imagined that there was some kind of happily-ever-after at the end of all this. Gently, she lifted a pillow from the bed.
Then she pressed her face into it and screamed.
All day long, she’d been practicing her lines, telling herself a story, repeating the words until they felt true. This was who she was: a woman who woke up thinking about possibilities. Who realized she needed to take control. A woman who spent the day making plans to secure her future. I don’t want to be one of those women who gets blindsided by life.
And after all that, she almost had been.
Almost.
But now she could see with the most incredible clarity. She knew how things had to be—because she was out of options, a realization that should have been terrifying, but instead felt like freedom. Every door had shut, every exit closed off, save one. Just one. One chance to make it through this, if she was strong enough to take it.
Though she had no way of knowing it, her instincts were correct. By the time the clock struck two a.m., Bird was nearly two hundred miles away; he wasn’t there to see the big, black Mercedes roll down the alley behind the Richardses’ home, easing into the courtyard alongside the smaller Lexus. He wasn’t there to see the tall man with a buzz cut and day-old stubble who got out, glancing cautiously at the dark windows of the row homes to either side of number seventeen, and fumbled with a set of keys until he found the one that unlocked the back door. She had told him to stay away until morning, but of course he hadn’t listened.
He never fucking listened.
She heard the creak of the door and his heavy tread on the stairs, halting and uneven, the brush of his fingertips against the wall as he reached out to steady himself. There was a thump as one foot hit the landing, and then she saw him, a shadow, lurching past the honeymoon photo and emerging into the living room. He was breathing hard, and sweating; she could smell it, rank and sour, an early warning of the withdrawal to come. Soon he’d be saturated in it, his hair damp, his armpits soaked, shaking and moaning with pain. She waited patiently as he moved toward the bedroom, not noticing the shape of her melting out of the shadows and following behind. He bumped against the wall as he stepped halfway through the bedroom door, peering in the direction of the bed.