Maybe she would have been. Maybe the real Adrienne would have found a way to make herself sympathetic to all the people who wanted to see her suffer. But as her phone buzzed in my hand, as I scrolled the messages that kept rolling in like an unstoppable tide of malice, I thought she must have been fooling herself. No wonder she was fucking Dwayne and doing drugs; no wonder she never complained that the lake house had no cell service, no Wi-Fi. It must have been the only place where she could escape from herself—or the self other people imagined for her, grotesque and hideous and with only the barest resemblance to the real Adrienne. A woman so vile that you, a stranger, wouldn’t think twice about telling her to kill herself. I found myself shaking my head. Adrienne Richards was a privileged bitch, but fuck, she wasn’t a monster. I watched the messages lighting up her phone like you might watch someone else’s house burning down, except that I didn’t have the luxury of just watching. I was the one inside the blazing building. It was my face feeling the terrible heat, my skin starting to blister.
In my hand, the phone began vibrating urgently, and I almost pitched it across the room before I realized that it was ringing: Kurt Geller’s name appeared on the screen. I sat heavily on the floor and tapped the screen.
“Hello?”
Geller’s voice was annoyed. “Adrienne, are you all right? I’ve left you several messages.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice tremulous. “I . . . I didn’t see. Someone took a picture last night while I was outside with the police and now it’s on the internet. My phone—it’s horrible, what people have been sending me.”
“Ah,” Geller said, his tone softening. “I’m sorry to hear that. It was bound to happen, unfortunately. You remember how it was with Ethan.”
I had no fucking idea how it was with Ethan.
“I’ve tried to forget,” I said cautiously, and Geller chuckled a little.
“Well, we’ll handle it the same way. I’ll send someone for you; he’ll escort you from your door. Can you come to the office this afternoon, three o’clock? I spent some time this morning on the phone with a friend in the district attorney’s office. We have things to discuss, but I’m optimistic.”
“Okay,” I said. “The press—”
“Don’t talk to them,” Geller said. “Don’t talk to anyone. I’ll draft any statements on your behalf after we meet.”
After I hung up, I stayed where I was, watching helplessly as notifications kept lighting up the phone’s screen. The phone on the table rang once and I scrambled to my knees to pick it up, listened as a woman’s voice said, “Mrs. Richards? This is Rachel Lawrence. I’m a reporter with—”
I hung up. Then I unplugged the phone.
As I scrolled back through Adrienne’s messages, it suddenly occurred to me how strange it was that her cell phone wasn’t ringing off the hook. She had hundreds of contacts saved, but apart from three missed calls and two voice mails from Kurt Geller, not a single person with a direct line to Adrienne had tried to call or text her. Instead, she was inundated with messages from strangers. The picture I’d posted to Adrienne’s account yesterday was racking up dozens of comments. She had more than a hundred unread emails, the most recent crop mainly from reporters or television producers hoping to get an interview. The police didn’t seem to be saying anything for the moment—every story I read said only that an unidentified male had been pronounced dead at the scene—but that would only last so long. As bad as things were now, I realized, they were only going to get worse. After all those years in Copper Falls, I thought I knew how it felt to be hated. But this . . .
Surprise, said Adrienne’s voice in my head. You should see your face right now.
Kurt Geller’s car arrived promptly at quarter to three, nosing up to the curb as the gaggle of reporters jostled for position. I was ready, showered and dressed, wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat and a pair of oversized sunglasses that I’d found in Adrienne’s closet. They were the same ones she’d been wearing several years previous, when she and Ethan were photographed leaving their home at the height of Ethan’s financial scandal, which I knew because I’d looked up the picture online just an hour before. It was like a costume on top of a costume: me, dressed up as Adrienne Richards, dressed up as nobody at all. I looked ridiculous, but then again, so had she. Neither one of us looked good in hats, and I would probably have to wear this one for weeks. This particular hat, every time I left the house, for as long as the press wanted to camp out on my doorstep.