Fran comes first. Wild hair. Sleepy eyes. She sits at the table and moans. This is the start, I think. In another year, I’ll have two girls to rouse from their sleep and no little bodies trying to sneak into our bed before the day pulls us away from one another.
“Hello, my sweet,” I say, kissing her on the head.
I bring cereal and milk and a banana to the table.
“Are you working in that other place today?” she asks me.
“New Jersey?”
“Yeah.”
“Will you be late?”
“Nope. Right on time.”
She nods. “Good. Because last time you were late, Daddy cooked dinner, and he made us eat broccoli.”
“What! That’s horrible.”
Amy is here now and joins the conversation. “It’s child abuse,” she says.
They are both at the table, and I sit with them for this moment—this wonderful, average moment—and feel grateful.
When the bus leaves, I drive to the station and meet Rowan. We gather our things, get in our SUV, stop for coffee. Then we drive to Newark.
We’ve been working there with a local narcotics team, trying to gather evidence on this man called Diesel, whose real name is Drew Garrison. Rowan told them about the connection to thepresumed-deaddrug dealer, Billy Brannicks, and said it came from a transient he’d talked to under the bridge. It was one of many lies he would tell to weave our story together.
When he held me in my kitchen that day that feels like a lifetime ago, he listened while I made my confession.
I started from the moment I began working on my own, in secret, to find Brett Emory. The phone he left in my living room and all of the messages he sent to it. The video of Mitch and Briana. The photos of our team at the Ridgeway, me asleep on my sofa, the cafeteria at my girls’ school. I’d saved everything.
He stopped when he saw the screenshot of the night Brett followed him to his apartment. “Motherfucker...”
I didn’t stop there. I told him about thebreak-inand the photo of Billy Brannicks and my visit to the Lucas family. How I’d hidden a camera at the Ridgeway Shopping Center and then found the car and zeroed in on the Getaway Inn.
He listened, holding back the urge to yell and scream because I had made myself bait, walking past the hotel until I found his truck and then keeping my back turned, allowing him to take me.
I needed it to end, I explained. This was what he wanted, and he wasn’t going to stop until he had it, until he had me in a way that made him feel like he was in control.
I described the last scene in the Kill Room. My gun in Brett Emory’s hand, aimed at Brannicks.
He pulled the trigger.
When I got to the last part, where I thought I could kill him, I got stuck on the words.
I couldn’t do it. I hesitated.
Rowan already knew the rest because the body had been found, the red jacket hanging on the back of the door. Brett Emory’s red jacket.
“He was going to kill you,” Rowan said. “You had no choice. Just like Clay Lucas in that store.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said.
We stayed there for a long time, in my kitchen. I cried until there was nothing left inside me. I cried for Clay Lucas and his family. For Vera Pratt and Laurel Hayes and the actuary named Georgina. I even cried for Brett Emory, whose life had been set off course when he was a child, never righting itself.
Something lifted then. It’s hard to describe even now, a year later. I think it was the loneliness I had described to Dr. Landyn, the loneliness from not being known by the people I love.
Rowan told me that night in my house that he had his own scars. That they don’t ever leave but you learn to live with them. The next stage of recovery.Acceptance.
