I didn’t know the half of it.
I woke at noon to the sound of Adrienne’s phone clattering to the floor. I bolted upright, my head aching, heart pounding, guts coiling with instant and instinctive dread. The cat, who had been asleep in the crook between my thighs and my belly, leapt off the bed and streaked out of the room with an indignant meow. For the second day in a row I was waking up in this room, her room, but if anything I felt even more anxious and out of place than I had yesterday. That first morning, Dwayne had been sleeping beside me, and we were still us, and I was still me. Not now. Not anymore. The whole room seemed like a minefield: the dresser alone was covered with photographs of places I’d never been to, jewelry I’d never worn, mementos of a life I hadn’t lived. I stared at it, my skin crawling. There were five perfumes in heavy glass bottles collected on a little tray, and I felt an absurd but all-consuming panic at the realization that I had no idea what they smelled like. It seemed impossible that only two days had passed since I’d pointed a shotgun at Adrienne Richards as she pointed a finger at me. Since the blood, the fire, the long and silent drive south, with Copper Falls lost in the dark behind us.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and breathed deeply, trying to calm down, but every breath only filled my nose with scents that didn’t belong to me. The sheets, the clothes I was wearing, even my own hair; I smelled like the salon where I’d had it dyed to look more like Adrienne’s, where the stylist had frowned and asked me if I was sure, was I really, when my natural color was so pretty. I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose and took another deep breath, then sighed it out with relief. I fucking stank, but in a way that was fully familiar, yeasty and a little sour, like something inside me had gone slightly off and was starting to leak out of my pores. My armpits still knew who they belonged to, at least.
The phone had fallen into the slim opening between the bed and the wall, and when I crawled under the bed to retrieve it I understood why: it was lighting up with alerts, and the incessant vibrating had buzzed it closer and closer to the edge of the nightstand until it had gone over the side. It committed suicide, I thought, out of nowhere—which made me want to laugh until the phone lit up again, a new missive coming in.
It said, in all caps, KILL YOURSELF.
“What the fuck?” I said, aloud, but of course there was no answer. I was alone in Adrienne’s house, and the only one here to receive whatever messages the world wanted to send her. I stared around the room again, looking at all the things in it that didn’t belong to me, that were now mine anyway. My hand with the phone in it dangled at my side, periodically buzzing. I stepped into the hallway and began walking toward the front of the house.
There was something happening outside. I could hear it as soon as I got near the kitchen, the murmur of voices rising from the sidewalk below. I walked to the window and looked out; below, a gaggle of reporters was clustered out front, jostling for position near the door. One of them was looking up as I looked down, and he shouted and gestured, a dozen heads swiveling to look in the direction of his pointing finger. Looking at me. I darted backward, but it was too late. They’d seen me. So that was it: while I was sleeping, someone must have leaked the story about Dwayne to the press. I dismissed the scroll of messages and opened the phone’s browser. It wasn’t hard to find the story, blasted out overnight. COPS RUSH TO ETHAN RICHARDS’s HOME AFTER 911 SHOOTING CALL. Someone, a neighbor maybe, had snapped a picture of me sitting on the curb in the middle of the night, hunched in a blanket while police swarmed all around. It was a low-quality photograph, taken from a distance; you couldn’t see anything except my hair, falling in a coppery sheet on either side of my face. The caption called me “Ethan’s wife, Adrienne,” which was a relief even as I knew Adrienne would have been infuriated by it: after all this time, her husband’s infamy was still the most interesting thing about her.
“And now he’s dead,” I murmured. The news was vague on that count: whoever had taken the picture knew about the body, but not whose it was, and the reporter had been careful to use words like “allegedly” in describing what might have happened. The commenters on the story, though—they weren’t being careful at all. They were absolutely sure that Adrienne Richards had killed her husband, and more than a few of them seemed to be annoyed that she hadn’t offed herself, too. That bitch was just as guilty as he was.
I wondered if things would get better or worse once the truth came out. Not the actual truth, of course, but the “true story,” about a sordid affair between a socialite and a redneck that ended with a series of bangs. Worse, probably. Adrienne had been right about one thing: this was a hell of a story. But the way she’d imagined it, she was going to be the victim. The survivor. The hero.