Of course she killed Savvy! Instead of leaving her abusive husband she hit him right back! Who does that?
If I lie, I leave Julia out to dry. I should care about that. Woman solidarity and all that.
But there’s no reason people won’t believe her. Julia is not me. She’s still likable. Still a good victim.
My options are shitty, but I know what I’m going to do.
No one expects the truth from me anyway.
* * *
“He did have a temper when he drank, but my experience with Matt was not exactly the same as Julia’s.” I say the words like I practiced them. I already said them to Ben, in a long interview this afternoon. Both he and Paige looked at me like they thought I was full of shit.
My mom, however, looks relieved. She’s standing in the kitchen, leaning on one crutch. Dad is behind her, a spatula in his hand like he’s going to threaten someone with it. Grandma sits at the table. They’ve all been waiting for me to get home. I spent the entire day avoiding them.
“What does that mean, not exactly the same?” Grandma squints.
“Like I said. He had a temper. He threw some glasses at the wall, stomped around a lot.”
“But he didn’t hit you?” Dad asks nervously.
“Of course he didn’t hit her!” Mom exclaims. “She lived five miles down the road then. We would have known.”
I lift an eyebrow. I’d planned to be a little more straightforward in my denial, but Mom is making this difficult. My sense of self-preservation is really battling it out with my desire to prove my mother wrong.
“I don’t think that anyone knows what’s going on inside someone else’s marriage,” I say. “No matter how close they live.”
Everyone freezes.
Dad still has the spatula poised in front of him like a weapon. He has a familiar look in his eyes, one I used to see often as a kid. Like he’s afraid I’m about to say something that he’ll have to deal with, and it’s the absolutely last thing in the world that he wants to do right now.
“But I will not be making any tearful podcast confessions, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I quickly add.
Mom lets out a breath, like that was exactly what she was worried about. Dad sets the spatula on the counter, blessedly free from having to do battle for me today.
“We’re worried about you!” Grandma says.
“Well, I’m happily single now, so it doesn’t really matter anyway.” I smile. “What’s for dinner?”
“Gnocchi!” Mom says, overly chipper, and points to Dad, who is now struggling to open the package.
Grandma throws her hands up in the air. “What the fuck? Are we going to talk about the fact that it was probably Matt who killed Savvy?”
Dad spills the gnocchi all over the floor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
LUCY
Matt: I’m outside. Can you come down?
The text pops up on my phone after ten o’clock. The house is quiet, Mom and Dad already asleep.
I climb out of bed and creep across the room to the window to see Matt’s car parked in front of the house. A dark figure leans against it.
I should probably ignore the text, pretend to be asleep. But I still desperately want to confront him, and I didn’t get a chance to in the middle of the replacement-wife drama.
I text back, I’ll be down in a minute, pull on a pair of shorts, tie my hair up, and head downstairs. I slip on a pair of flip-flops and walk out into the humid air.
He straightens when he sees me coming, sliding his hands out of his pockets. Behind him, the streetlight shines on the pavement, providing enough light to see him clearly. The knuckles on his right hand are bruised, and I wonder whether it’s from a face or a wall.
“I met your wife,” I say.
“I know, she told me.”
“Seems nice.” I lift an eyebrow. “Nicer than me.”
His jaw works, and he looks past me at nothing. I hope she told him over the phone, and not in person, because I can feel the fury coming off him in waves.
“You ignored my texts,” I say.
He pinches the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “Things are so fucked up.”
“You just noticed?”
He laughs, shortly at first, and then again, a bigger laugh that makes a smile linger on his face. “God, I miss you.”
“Poison would be less messy, but also less satisfying, in my opinion,” Savvy whispers.
“Yes, your wife did make it sound that way on the podcast.” I lean against the car next to him.
“She was always too nice for me.”