“I did find something.” Nerves prickle my insides. “Burke—he doesn’t have social media. Not even a LinkedIn. He always said he had no interest in using Facebook or Instagram, and I just assumed it was true, the way you’re not on it either. But after what happened, Andie and I went on Facebook and searched for his wife. Her name is Heather, according to the journal entries. So we searched for Heather Michaels. There are tons of women named Heather Michaels, but we narrowed down the search by location, to New Haven, since that’s apparently where they live. And we found her, Dad.” I swallow hard. I pull out my phone and go to my recent photos, where I’ve stored a screenshot of Heather Michaels’s Facebook profile. Her picture is of a family—a petite blond woman in a fitted sweater who must be Heather, three college-aged kids, one of whom is Burke’s doppelg?nger, and Burke. The five of them are standing together at what appears to be his son’s college graduation, their smiles wide and bright. I can’t bear to see the photo again—I’ve looked at it too many times to count since Andie found it—so I hand the phone to my father and stare at the intricacies of the pristine countertop, the tiny speckles of marble buried in the stone.
My father says nothing. At least a full minute passes. When I finally glance up at him, his face is white as a sheet, and I notice the phone is slipping in his fingers.
“Dad?”
“I know her.” He speaks slowly, placing the phone down carefully, as though it were a ticking bomb.
“You do?” I stare at him, shock seizing my chest. “Heather Michaels?”
He nods weakly, finally dropping his gaze to meet my own. “She used to babysit for you and Nate. Heather. Heather Price.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Burke
OCTOBER 2019—TWO DAYS WITHOUT SKYE
Heather claims to be rushing out the door to work. She says the most profitable time for Uber drivers is the night. I don’t believe her—she always used to say early mornings were busiest—but I let her go, for now. I need a moment alone in my house.
When she’s gone, I march straight upstairs to the office where Heather keeps her laptop. I flip it open and turn up the brightener—she always turns the screen light all the way down before she closes it—and type in her password, which I know is her initials followed by the numbers for the kids’ birthdays. But Incorrect password flashes on the screen. I try two more times without success—she changed it. She hasn’t changed her computer password in at least a decade, and now she changes it.
Frustration drowns me and I drop to my hands and knees, scurrying through the papers on the floor and in the desk drawers. It’s mostly recent bills and forms from Maggie’s school, and I’m hit with a sinister wave of dejection at the reminder that I haven’t lived in this house in nearly a year. I haven’t taken Maggie on a single college visit or seen Garrett’s new apartment in Somerville.
I keep digging through the desk. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, but there has to be something that will give me answers. I reach into the very back of the bottom drawer, and beyond the edge my hand touches an object—a book of some sort—that feels instantly familiar in its supple leather exterior and frayed edges. I yank it out from where it’s lodged behind the desk, my heart dropping into my lap when I see what it is—my navy blue Moleskine, the one I’ve been missing since the winter.
And then I remember, that weekend I was here in February. It had been a bad day, too cold to go outside, and Heather was on my case about money and moving forward with the Big Plan. I knew I’d fallen in love with Skye—there was no turning that ship around—but it was a feeling that crushed me as much as it buoyed me. I’d quarantined myself in the office to let my thoughts spill out into the Moleskine while Heather made chili downstairs. When Heather and Maggie barged in, telling me the meal was ready, I shoved the Moleskine behind the desk before Heather could catch a glimpse of it.
After weeks of searching—mostly through Skye’s apartment—I’d concluded that I must’ve left it on the subway or that it had fallen out of my briefcase on the street. But how had I not realized? This is where my Moleskine has been all this time, shoved between the back of the desk and the wall in New Haven.
I can’t remember exactly what I wrote at the time, only that my entries were often lengthy and sprawling and emotional.
I open the Moleskine, its leather spine creaking softly. The first entry I’ve written is from nearly seventeen months earlier, before I met Skye.
May 24, 2018
I know Heather and I aren’t in a good place, but I don’t know if I can go through with the Big Plan. I blame myself for where we’ve ended up—well, I also blame fucking Herb Wooley, but that’s beside the point. If I go through with this, I could get in big trouble. Again.
It’s my fault that Heather’s dreams got crushed. I accepted that a while back. I failed her, and I’ve done my best to make peace with it. Sometimes I do the whole what-if thing and wonder what would’ve happened if I’d let Heather go years ago, before we were married, back when I had the chance to let her truly be free of me. I was an addict then, and even though I vowed to get sober, I was always only one slipup away from destroying the future she banked on. I knew that then, and I know it now. She may have done so willingly, but I let her board a train that was heading straight for a brick wall.
But the thing about life is, you can’t know how you’ll feel about something in retrospect when it’s happening in the moment. I remember exactly how I felt about Heather Price back then, and I know I wouldn’t have done anything differently. She was my Bones. I couldn’t have fathomed loving anyone more. When a girl you love that much chooses you, you choose her back. You just do.
It was so much more than her looks. Heather has always been a knockout, but the real kicker was, she had this drive in her that mesmerized me. Everyone else our age in Langs Valley was complacent; indifferent to the future that awaited them. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t have wanted what Heather did; they simply weren’t aware of the possibilities that stretched beyond our shitty little town. But somehow Heather knew what else existed, and she’d had that dreamy sheen in her emerald eyes since we were kids. And when a girl like Heather Price plants a seed in your mind and in your heart that life could be so, so much bigger, when she grabs your arm and wants to take you with her, you go. God, you go.
Here’s another what-if that always gets me—what would’ve happened if Heather hadn’t started babysitting for Libby Fontaine and Peter Starling the fall of our junior year. Heather already had it in her, of course, but Libby was the one who gave her that extra push, that inexplicable drive to become someone else. Libby made Heather greedy, I think. I wonder if it weren’t for Libby, would Heather have settled for less? Would what I offered have been enough?
But it’s complicated, see, because if Libby hadn’t entered the picture, Gus wouldn’t have died. And if Gus hadn’t died, Heather and I wouldn’t have been sealed together by her pain. I truly can’t make sense of any of it. Sometimes I push my mind to a place where I admit that maybe, from a purely objective standpoint, Heather and I shouldn’t have gotten married. We were young, too young. But my mind won’t push any further than that because then I think of the kids, and considering a life without Garrett and Hope and Maggie in it makes the least sense of all.