Shouldn’t she forget all the rest, if that was true?
A notification popped up—she was being automatically logged out due to inactivity. She started to close the window with the call log displayed, then stopped. She navigated back one month, two. The number popped up on Nathan’s call logs, frequent calls and texts at odd hours. It culminated in a frantic series of calls over the course of three days that eventually petered out. There it was—the shape of an affair. During Nathan’s “audits” she’d never noticed. Nathan was always on the phone with someone; the number hadn’t meant more than any of the others.
That frantic burst of activity must have been when Addison broke things off. Had she gotten bored? Grown a conscience?
Emma had thought all this time that he had chosen her in the end. But it hadn’t been his choice. And if she were honest—if she were truly honest—maybe part of her had been disappointed by that. Part of her had hoped that he would leave, and she could stop spending every day afraid that he would discover all the reasons he should have left long ago.
If he had left, he would still be alive.
She paged back and back and back through the call logs, and realized the number had disappeared. She moved forward again. There—a few calls, here and there. And then several every day. Her eye tracked to the dates and her throat closed up.
The accident. It started the week after the accident.
She pulled up the email account he’d used. She still remembered the account name, the password—they were burned into her mind, but she had never again logged in. Now she combed back through it. The earliest emails came three weeks after a drunk driver slammed into the side of her car and pinned her in her seat. When she was at home, bedridden.
I don’t know how I would be managing this without you. It’s so hard, an email read. When can I see you again?
She let out a sound like a wounded animal. She backed out, back to the main inbox, and sitting there was an unread email she hadn’t bothered to glance at. Like all the others, it was from Addison. This one had been sent right around the time Emma was on her knees in the gravel outside the carriage house.
What we talked about last night, it said, and Emma couldn’t stop herself from clicking it.
You need to make sure the proceeds from the sale go into a joint account. That way they’re commingled and they become marital property, otherwise you might not have a claim to them in the proceedings. I’ll have the guy I mentioned call you about it. But do whatever you need to get the sisters to sign off already. I’m not waiting around forever.
The proceeds from the sale—she was talking about the house. About how to make sure Nathan had a claim on it if—when—they divorced.
That was why he’d stayed. Not her. Not the baby. The fucking money.
She felt like she was going to throw up. Or pass out. But she couldn’t. There was no time to collapse, to feel even a fraction of this betrayal. Nathan was dead, he was dead and it didn’t matter what he’d done, except that every one of his sins would be heaped upon her. Every bad thing he’d done would be a motive for killing him. She knew how this worked. She’d been here before. Every moment she spent on grief and confusion was a moment for the walls to close in around her.
The affair didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that Nathan had chosen Addison instead of her, that he had been manipulating her, pretending to want to stay, just to get the money. Because Emma hadn’t killed him, and Addison certainly hadn’t. No, this had nothing to do with Addison, and everything to do with Arden Hills. With Emma and her family.
But it was like a corroded nail stuck straight through her, the thought that Addison had been the last person he talked to.
Her eyes flicked over to the time stamps, and she paused, frowning. The log showed that the call had been nearly fifteen minutes long. Far longer than the one they’d witnessed—and later, too, though only by a few minutes. Long enough that she hadn’t noticed or looked beyond that first entry.
Idiot, she chided herself.
She looked at the next entry down. There—one minute, fifty-eight seconds, to a phone number with a local area code. This one, she didn’t recognize. She plugged it into her phone and hit the call button.
The call picked up almost immediately. “Hadley speaking.”
38
DAPHNE
Then
Daphne sits in the tree house with her sisters, knees knocking against knees, shoulders bumping shoulders. It’s a warm May night, and the earliest bloom of fireflies blink and bob outside. It could be any night like this, except that it is the last night like this they will ever have. In two months their parents will be dead. None of them know it yet, of course, but Daphne feels something in the air where it touches her skin, like a hum.