“Margot, what the hell?” she asks, her eyes flicking back and forth between my face and her room. Her keys are stuffed in my back pocket and I try to angle my body away from her, attempting to hide them. “What were you doing in my room?”
“Just grabbing my book,” I say, holding up Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s pure dumb luck that I spotted it sitting there, right on top, so easily within my reach. “I need it for another class this semester. I wanted to get it before I forgot.”
“And the door?” she asks, gesturing back to it.
“I lock it sometimes,” I say, sagging my shoulders, acting ashamed. “I told you I don’t like leaving it open. I didn’t think you’d be back for a while.”
I stare at Lucy’s expression, maddeningly neutral like a lenticular image, her very essence changing depending on which way I look at it. It’s amazing how quickly she can morph in my mind from beautiful to menacing to something else entirely, the tiniest twitch of the eye or suggestive smile threatening to reveal something I’ve never seen in her before.
“Okay,” she says at last, posture loosening, though she doesn’t sound convinced. “Yeah, okay.”
She walks past me and into her bedroom, my breath held as she disappears inside. Quietly, I walk over to the wall hook and replace her keys, biting my cheek. Waiting for her to notice something out of place and come storming back out, demanding the truth. Instead, she reappears calmly with the bag slung over her shoulder and I wonder, for a single second, if this was another test. If she left her purse on purpose, maybe. If she somehow knew I would do exactly this.
“I’ll be taking these,” she adds, elbowing me as she walks past. I watch as she grabs her keys from the hook on the wall and shakes them in front of me, dangling like a carrot. “In case you decide to lock me out again.”
She walks back onto the porch and closes the door before I can respond, my head spinning as she skips down the steps. Then, once she’s gone again, I walk into my bedroom and toss the book on my bed before opening my laptop and beginning to type.
CHAPTER 58
According to Google Maps, Fairfield, North Carolina, is a two-hour drive from my house in the Outer Banks. It has a population of 226 and I can’t help but think about what Lucy told me that night on the roof, how she would go entire years without meeting a new person.
She wasn’t lying about that, at least. Fairfield is small, claustrophobically so, her entire town easily fitting into Kappa Nu during a particularly large party.
I grab my phone and navigate to the picture of Lucy’s ID again, zooming in first on her face. I look next at the book on my bed, little dots of sweat smeared from my fingers. The illustration on the cover showing the face of one person with two entirely different auras: good and evil, foreign and familiar. Some murky combination of right and wrong. I wonder, for the very first time, if the Lucy I’ve come to know is simply a mirage like this, an optical illusion. My own subconscious snapping its fingers and creating the very thing it thought I needed. If I merely imagined all her similarities to Eliza, those subtle little signs that they were the same, because, deep down, that’s what I wanted: another shot, a second chance.
Eliza reincarnated, the sudden and startling appearance of Lucy in my life allowing me to simply forget what happened and replace her entirely.
I zoom out of the picture so I can see her address again, typing it in and watching it load. The screen zeroes in on a little red pin plotted firmly in the middle of nowhere and I switch to satellite view, a single house materializing amid what seems to be acres of untouched land. I take in the algae-green roof, the dirty white siding. The haphazard shutters and rusted red pickup parked in the grass. I can’t help but feel a sting of something in my chest when I see it all, something I can’t quite name, because right now, taking in this house I can only assume to be Lucy’s, it’s impossible not to think about the ways we grew up, so glaringly different: me in my waterfront mansion with wraparound porches, oyster tabby driveway, and luxury cars. The nearby beaches and long, winding docks that we used to run down barefoot, so untethered and free.
I switch out of Google Maps and navigate to the county website next, over to the tax department, and finally, property records. Then I type in her address again, fingers drumming against the keys while it loads. I’ve always wondered why tax records are made public like this—why any curious stranger should be able to simply search an address and learn everything there is to know about its owner—but right now, I’m just grateful for the opportunity to finally find some answers. After a few seconds, a single link pops up on the screen and I click it, holding my breath until the result appears—but once it does, confusion pummels me, the name glaring back looking strange and out of place.