“Oh good, she’ll appreciate that.” He reaches for the knife, turning on the water to rinse it off.
“Did Matt tell you I killed her?”
He turns off the water. When he looks up at me, it’s not in surprise. Matt clearly already told him this conversation was coming.
“Yes.”
“When?”
He wipes off the knife with a towel, for longer than necessary. An excuse not to look at me. “He came over that night.”
I take in a breath as it clicks into place. “That’s where he went. After he came home.” I frown. “Does Nina know as well? Why was she at my house that night?”
“No. Apparently she was drunk and had planned to cause a scene so you’d know they were together. Just bad timing. He sent her away.”
“And then he came over to the house and told you both I killed Savvy.”
“Just me. I told your mom a couple days later. She…” He trails off, putting the knife aside and then bracing both hands against the counter. “She wanted to come clean right away. Said that even if it wasn’t self-defense, you’d get a light sentence. But Matt and I disagreed. You genuinely didn’t seem to remember anything, and we both thought we should just wait. I figured your memory would come back in a few days, and then you could tell us exactly what happened and we’d go from there.”
“And when it didn’t come back?”
He looks away, uncomfortable. “I figured you either just wanted to move on or you really had blocked it out. The trauma of that…” He sighs. “I can’t blame you, I guess.”
“You guess.”
“I would have preferred to face it head-on. I regret not going to the police. Matt said that your memory started to come back when Ben pushed you to remember. I chastised your mother for pushing you. I thought you needed space to do the right thing. She was right, of course.”
“You believed him, then? Matt.”
Dad looks up, startled. “Should I not have? I didn’t know then that … Well, I didn’t have the full story. But I didn’t have any reason not to believe him.”
“He was drunk. He didn’t actually see me do it. There could have been someone else there, it could have been—” My voice has gone too high, hysterical, and I stop abruptly. I know how it sounds.
“He didn’t mention anyone else being there,” Dad says gently. “He said … Well, he explained what he saw, and what you said to him.”
“He could have killed her.”
“Do you think he did?” He’s humoring me.
I see Matt’s hysterical face in front of me. I’ve already tried to convince myself a hundred times that he could have been panicking because he just killed Savvy, but it seems unlikely. I know him too well. I know what he’s like when he’s just gone too far, caused more pain than he intended. He goes calm. Fix the problem. Be nice. Convince her that it’s partially her fault.
He wouldn’t have been hysterical about killing Savvy, even drunk. He wouldn’t have had that look on his face.
“No,” I say. “But you weren’t there. You just had Matt, telling you that I killed someone. You thought I was capable of that?”
“I didn’t want to. But sometimes you have to do the best with the information you have. That’s the information I had. And Matt wanted to protect you. I saw that right away.” He gives me a sad look. “We both did.”
“And Mom wanted to hand me over to the cops.”
“She was also just trying to do what was best.”
“It wasn’t a criticism.”
He looks startled. I might have done the same thing, if I were in Mom’s place. Just get the truth out there and let the chips fall where they may.
Or maybe I wouldn’t have done the same thing. I didn’t immediately run to Ben or the cops when the memory of Matt resurfaced.
I booked a flight home to Los Angeles.
* * *
I eat a quiet, awkward dinner with Grandma. I can’t tell her the truth, the only family member who believed in me. She believed in me so strongly she turned over all our secrets to a smug podcaster.
“Ben says something happened,” she says, once she’s deep into her second gin and tonic. The television is on, muted, but I keep getting distracted by a woman on the screen with very long red fingernails. She taps them against her chin, over and over. She could take someone’s eye out with those fingernails.
I gather up the remains of my burger and walk to the trash can. “Nothing happened. I told him that.”