“I’m sure he’d understand, Lydia,” I told her. “You’ve been going through a lot.”
Lydia cast a glance at the living room, where Dean and Pete were chatting animatedly. “You have no idea, Anna,” she said. “Constantine has been so good to you. You don’t know what it does to you…”
I didn’t point out how after my horrible breakup with Joel, I had fallen apart. And she had abandoned me. She had been a terrible friend to me. A terrible person.
“You know what you need to do,” I told her.
She looked up at me, frowning. “What?”
“You need to talk to Cassie,” I said. “Make peace with her.” I put my hand on the bottle of wine I’d brought her—the one I had known she wouldn’t touch because it was an inferior brand. “Go see her tomorrow. Bring her wine as a peace offering.”
Later, after everyone had too much to drink and were watching television in the living room, I slipped into Lydia and Pete’s bedroom. It was funny how nobody even noticed, but then again, I was the only sober one there. I didn’t dare drink if I knew I’d be responsible for Andrew later. I’ve heard horror stories about horrible fates of babies left in the care of drunk parents.
The bedroom was as expansive as the rest of their apartment. Dean and I live well, but you could fit two of our bedrooms into theirs. I sat on her bed, gasping at the softness of the bedspread. I lay down on the bed for a moment and it was heavenly. Like sleeping on a cloud. If I had this bed, I never would have developed insomnia.
Reluctantly, I sat up again and walked over to Lydia’s antique dresser. I removed one of the burner phones from my purse with a tissue from her vanity table and dropped it into one of the drawers, nestled between two pairs of designer jeans.
Then I went into the master bathroom. I thumbed open the medicine cabinet. Lydia’s sleeping pills were in there, but not just that. God, they had enough pills in there to kill a horse. I emptied three-quarters of the bottle of sleeping pills into my hand, then grabbed some of the Xanax and a bunch of Vicodin. I doubted anyone would notice when I dropped them into the bottle of wine I brought.
There was, of course, a chance Pete might have finished off the bottle of wine that evening and never woken up. That would be even better—when a husband is murdered, they always look to the wife.
I was surprised by the anger I felt for Lydia as I emptied the pills into the wine bottle. I hadn’t felt this way in years. Not since Francesca.
There are three people in my life who wronged me:
Lydia, Francesca, and Joel.
Lydia saw a few cracks in my otherwise solid relationship with Joel, and encouraged him to end it so that her best friend and sorority sister Francesca would have a shot with a great guy. I believe Joel would have asked me to marry me if Lydia hadn’t intercepted.
Francesca went along with Lydia’s plan to seduce the man who was rightfully mine. I have no idea if she got pregnant on purpose so that he wouldn’t be able to leave her. I suppose not, since she never ended up telling him her news. If she had survived, he surely would have forgiven her and married her.
It was so easy to follow Francesca back then. Easy to swipe her keys from her purse. Easy to use those keys to drop her entire bottle of sleeping pills into the wine bottle she had on her counter, then watched the combination of alcohol and benzodiazepines do their trick. I led her to the bathroom. I found her razor.
She didn’t have a chance.
I didn’t intend it to look like a suicide. I left clues that the whole thing had been staged, and Francesca hadn’t taken her own life. The clues were meant to lead to Joel—meant to send him to jail for a very long time for murdering his pregnant ex-girlfriend. But the police were lazy. Joel was questioned, but the death was ruled a suicide.
Joel was despondent over Francesca’s death. He took a long leave from work, but he didn’t go to prison. He recovered. He went back to work and then started dating Cassie. He fell in love with her. They’re going to get married. They’re going to have children together. They’re going to grow old together.