“Fuck,” he muttered. Then a loud whisper: “Hello? Are you here?”
“Hi,” she said, behind him, and he yelped and whirled to face her.
“Jesus! What the fuck? I thought you would be asleep. You scared the shit out of me.”
“You were supposed to wait until morning,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you that?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I didn’t know where to go. I was afraid I’d get lost, and then . . . and I don’t feel good, anyway. I didn’t want to spend all night puking in some shitty motel.” He squinted into the dark. “I can hardly see you. What happened? With the police? Did they, I mean, do they . . .”
“The detective came. We talked. I didn’t tell them anything.”
He leaned against the wall, a slump of relief.
“Come on,” she said, beckoning. “I want to show you something.”
With a groan, he followed. Away from the bedroom, farther down the hall. Into the office. She brushed her fingers over the desk lamp, and a soft glow filled the room. He leaned against the doorway, bringing a hand to his face to massage his temples.
“I feel like shit.”
“This won’t take long.” She knelt behind the desk, out of sight. Her fingers touched the keypad.
He cleared his throat. “So, the detective. Was it like you thought? He was looking for Ethan?”
“No,” she said without turning around. “He was looking for you.”
Dwayne Cleaves, sweating and sick and still wearing Ethan Richards’s too-small college sweatshirt, which he’d put on that morning, dropped his hand from his forehead and gaped at her.
“See, he thought you’d come here.” She took a long breath, then turned, glaring. “Because you just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You had to go telling your idiot friends, including that fucking dipshit drug dealer, that you’d been fucking the rich city bitch who was renting your lake house. That’s what the police officer told me.” She kept her eyes on him as he stared back at her. In her left hand, the latch on the safe opened with a barely perceptible click. Her voice became a singsong drawl. “Dwayne and Adrienne, sitting in a tree, F-U-C-K-I-N-G. The cop told me you were bragging about it. He said you were showing people pictures. Is that true? You took pictures?”
“Listen,” he said, his voice panicked. He took a hurried step forward. “Look, just let me expla—”
She turned to face him then, and he stopped talking. Froze in place. His eyes, glazed and huge in the dimly lit room, were fixed on what was in her hands. Dark and sleek and fully loaded.
Well, I do declare.
“Wait,” he said.
She cocked the hammer.
“Lizzie,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Not anymore,” she said, and pulled the trigger.
Part 2
Chapter 19
Lizzie
I told you death has a way of making you honest.
And I told you the truth.
I just didn’t tell you everything. An incomplete truth is still the truth, and so I left out a few details. Not just about that terrible day at the lake, but about what came before. I never told you about how a carelessly secured log rolled off a truck and over my husband, crushing his bones to a pulp, and as I drove to the hospital—the same one where, two years before, I’d cradled the corpse of my stillborn son—I felt a brief, fierce flush of satisfaction at the idea that now Dwayne would know how it felt to lose a piece of himself.
I never told you about the first time I found him passed out on our bed with the rubber tubing still wrapped around his upper arm, or about the wave of visceral disgust and contempt that surged through me as I leaned in to see if he was breathing or not. I never told you how I put a finger under his nostrils, and when I felt the damp heat of his shallow breath, I briefly wondered how hard it would be to clamp a hand over his mouth, pinch his nose shut, and hold him down while he smothered.
I never told you how, in that moment, I hated him. Hated him for every broken thing he’d stamped on, for every broken promise, for our broken stupid life, which he could escape at the tip of a needle while I was left here, living it. I hated him more than I’d ever hated anything, a loathing so fierce that it felt like something with a thousand legs crawling around alive in my belly, and I never told you how I bent close to his ear and whispered, “I hope you die,” so quietly that I could barely hear the words myself, so quietly that there was no way he could possibly hear me, and I nearly screamed when his eyelids fluttered and he muttered back, “I hope we both die.”