Lately, despite her best efforts, she’d been recalling more: the hazy thrill of secrecy from keeping things quiet at work, waking up in a hotel room, sun too bright and a splitting headache, walking the snowy streets of a mountain town arm in arm and laughing.
He bought her a car, which seemed like proof of his generosity, or in hindsight, of the transactional nature to their relationship. They drank a lot.
She could not remember anything about their time together without feeling a stifling heat of regret and shame and she didn’t want Laurel anywhere near that feeling.
Tim Meeker had ultimately been as disposable as he’d wanted to make her.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said to Lena now. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry for you, Annie,” Lena said. “I wish I’d been there to protect you from him.”
“He wrote me a check to go away.” Annie’s eyes welled. It still, after all this time, shocked a little, how stupidly hopeful she’d been when she slipped inside this house.
“He wasn’t a good person.”
“I need you to listen, Lena,” Annie said. “Please. What happened later that night was my fault. All of it.”
FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER
Tim wanted Annie to know that she would not walk away empty-handed. He made her sit next to him, in that stupid desk chair, while he left a voicemail for HR: His assistant Annie would be leaving for greener pastures. He was authorizing a generous departure bonus to be issued to her immediately.
“If you want a work reference,” Tim said to her, “just write one up and get it to Maureen. I’ll sign anything.”
He leaned forward, pressed a cold hand to Annie’s bare knee. He forgot himself for a moment, and his index finger traced her patella. When a mocking peal of laughter slipped through the open window from outside, he stopped himself, turned the gesture into a brusque pat.
Annie’s hand was on the doorknob when he said her name.
“You should leave through the garage,” he said. “Take the back staircase down, then a left through the mudroom.”
She stopped in the hall, balanced herself against the wall. The band returned from their break, and she staggered downstairs to the grind of guitar chords, the lead singer’s shouted count: One two three four—
It was after she stepped into the garage, cold and fluorescently lit, and saw Tim Meeker’s little hunter-green two-seater that her numbness splintered, gave way to the warmth of rage.
Annie tasted metal as she looked around the room at all the toys—the kayak, the skis, the bag of golf clubs with that stupid knit tassel hanging from it.
She was just seventeen, you know what I mean
She hoisted a club, cool and heavy, out of the bag. It took several swings to break the front headlights.
Annie was half aware of the beat shifting underneath her. She paused to catch her breath.
’Cause you’re fine and you’re mine and you look so divine
And then she walked around to the back of the car and smashed the brake lights, too.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Lena wanted to press her hand to Annie’s mouth.
Stop talking.
But Annie did not. She hugged a throw pillow to her chest and pulled its tassels as the words bled out of her.
She was the reason, Annie said, that Bryce didn’t see Tim on the road. Lena must hate her. Lena watched Annie and realized that yes, she did. She hated Annie with a passion too consuming and fiery to be contained. The hatred was going to erupt and spill over both of them like molten lava, preserve them, charred, in this spot forever.
And Annie would never know the real reason.
Maybe if Annie could shut up for a moment, but no, she kept gushing out her truth, and it changed everything Lena knew. The facts that Lena had just now—after fifteen years—started to accept hadn’t been facts at all.
Annie claimed she’d give anything to do that night over, she’d been close with Bryce in high school, and he was such a good person, he had deserved the future she had stolen from him.
Aside from the therapist, Mike was the only person who knew. He was Annie’s best friend from college, always a little in love with her, always right there with her. They’d never even told Laurel’s grandparents.
After Tim’s death, all of those stories came out about his DUIs, and Annie remembered the ones Tim had told about his own father. She supposed a part of her had been petrified for Laurel from the beginning.
It was incredibly frustrating that Laurel didn’t understand how much better it would have been, to keep believing Mike was her biological father. You lied about the most important thing in my life, she had accused, and Annie couldn’t make her see that the lie had been a gift.