“What did you tell Celeste we’ll be doing?” Jo asked.
“I told her the truth,” Harriett said. “I know we agreed to keep everything between the three of us, but Celeste is important to me and secrets are such a bore. Besides, she’ll know soon enough as it is.”
“And she’s okay with it?” Nessa wasn’t so sure.
“Finding evidence that two girls were murdered?” Harriett seemed perfectly at ease. “Yes, she’s okay with it. She trusts me to know what I’m doing. And I trust her to tell me if I don’t.”
That night, Jo tossed and turned in Nessa’s guest room. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Harriett had said. At two in the morning, she texted Art and discovered he couldn’t sleep, either. He called from the lake house, and over the next three hours, Jo told him everything. She didn’t gloss over details or embellish ugly truths. Art stopped her here and there to ask questions, but when Jo was done, he sat quietly on the other end of the line. She could feel the pain in his silence, and she hated herself for hurting him.
“I’m so sorry, Art,” she said through tears. “It’s my fault that man broke into our house. I tried to do the right thing, but I put our family in danger. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened to Lucy.”
“Listen to me. You did not send that man after our eleven-year-old daughter, and I refuse to let you take responsibility for the actions of a psychopath like Spencer Harding,” Art said, putting his foot down. “What I still don’t understand, Jo, is why you didn’t tell me any of this earlier. Were you worried I’d do something to mess things up?”
“No!” she cried, horrified by his interpretation. “I was just hell-bent on doing what I needed to do, and I was worried you’d try to stop me.”
He cleared his throat. “What exactly are you trying to do?” he asked.
“Make the world a better place for girls like Lucy,” she told him. “But my efforts backfired. Now I have to deal with Spencer Harding or our family will never be safe again.”
“Why would I stand in your way?” Art asked.
“To protect me,” Jo said.
“You don’t need protection. You think I don’t know that? This newfound strength of yours—it isn’t so new. You’ve always been strong, Jo. That’s one of the things I admire most about you. But you have an Achilles’ heel. You get frustrated and impatient when things don’t get done the way you would do them. Then you take on the burdens all by yourself. And you’ll just keep on taking them, one after another, until they finally crush you.”
As much as she would have loved to argue, she couldn’t ignore the truth in his words.
“What should I do?”
“Tell me everything from now on, and let me help you,” he told her. “And let me do it my way. As strong as you are, we’re stronger together. You may be the concrete, but I’m the rebar.”
He’d tossed out the last sentence as a joke, but it lingered in Jo’s mind until the sun came up. During the years she’d worked in Manhattan, Art had gotten up early each morning to make her coffee. And he’d greeted her with a drink every night when she got home. They may have been small things, but Jo could have listed a thousand such gestures. Maybe Art hadn’t found success the way she had. Maybe he hadn’t mastered the arts of housecleaning or lawn care. But throughout their marriage, he had given Jo the support she’d needed to grow. She knew that as strong as she was, she would have crumbled without him. If Jo was going to survive, she needed him back.
At seven in the morning, clutching steaming mugs of coffee, Jo and Nessa piled into the car. Before heading to the marina, they stopped by Jo’s house to pick up the scuba gear. As Nessa pulled into the drive, Jo looked up at the dark upstairs windows facing the street. Two belonged to the room Lucy had slept in since she was a baby. Jo bit her lip hard to hold back the tears.