After all the time and energy Kaitlyn has spent looking for Amanda, it doesn’t seem possible that she could have been right here all along. Her apartment is still untouched. Her Instagram is still inactive. Neither her landlord nor her boss at the cocktail club where she most recently worked has seen her since March, and now it’s July. And up until an hour ago, she never believed Amanda capable of such treachery.
But Kaitlyn saw Townsend’s face when she stepped out of the car—it seemed like he genuinely expected to see Amanda instead. There’s also the matter of that message he showed Kaitlyn, containing Amanda’s trademark of swear words censored withx’s. (“It’s considered not social media friendly to have obscenities in your captions,” she once explainedto Kaitlyn. “I have to keep my shit clean.”) That doesn’t necessarily mean her sister is guilty, of course. It just means that things look really, really bad for her right now.
She can’t stop thinking about what Townsend said, when he claimed Amanda was responsible for their parents’ deaths. They died in a car accident, and she knew this as a fact—she saw the pictures, surveyed the wreckage. How could Amanda possibly have been involved? Of course, Kaitlyn can’t exactly contact him to ask what he meant; Townsend has made it clear he wants nothing to do with her. Living with this accusation and not getting any answers, however, is not an option. Whether her sister is an innocent victim or a deeply troubled psychopath, Kaitlyn needs to know for sure. For what feels like the millionth time in the past few months, she thinks about just what she would do if given the chance to speak with Amanda for ten minutes and get her side of the story.
A memory comes to mind. She’s eleven, and Amanda is nine. She’s just returned from soccer practice when Amanda beckons her into their shared bedroom, her eyes wide with worry.
“Kate,” she whispers. “You need to help me. I’ve messed up.”
Taking her hand, Amanda leads Kaitlyn over to her bed and then points beneath it. “What’s under there?”
“Just look.”
“Is it bad?”
“You’ll see.”
When Kaitlyn gets onto her knees and lifts the bed skirt, the stench hits her first. Like a rotting body—or what she imagines a rotting body to smell like. Then she sees the brown paper bags—dozens of them, damp looking and carpeted with fuzzy, bruise-colored growths—and throws a hand over her mouth and nose.
“What have you done?” Kaitlyn asks, her voice muffled behind her fingers.
“I didn’t mean to,” Amanda says. “But no one brings lunch from home anymore.”
In a rush of tears, her sister explains how everyone in the third grade buys lunch from school, and she didn’t have the heart to tell their mother. Instead, she’d borrow a dollar and a quarter from the office to buy pizza and then bring her bagged lunch home, where she’d hide it beneath her bed. She always meant to throw them away, but as her collection grew, so did the task of destroying the evidence.
“It’s too big now,” Amanda tells her. “Mom and Dad are going to find out. They’re going to kill me.”
But Kaitlyn won’t allow that to happen. They wait until their parents go to bed before transferring the mess of moldy sandwiches into the trash bag Kaitlyn snagged from the kitchen earlier that night. Then they creep out to the woods behind their house, where they bury Amanda’s secret beneath a tree. Before they return inside, Kaitlyn asks Amanda to make a promise: Tell Mom no more bagged lunches.
“I will,” Amanda says, and Kaitlyn believes her. She helped her sister clean up her mess and did so without judgment; telling the truth is the least Amanda can do.
A loud pop shakes her out of her reverie. Then another. And another.
Gunfire,she thinks. But then she sees the explosion of color out her window. Fireworks. Of course. It’s the Fourth of July, and most people are celebrating. Then again, most people aren’t trying to decide whether their sister is missing or out of her fucking mind.
Kaitlyn grabs her keys and heads for the door. Though not actually gunfire, the noise outside has stirred a desire in her. She needs a pistol in her hand and a room full of people who don’t know the first thing about Amanda Reade. Kaitlyn will fit right in, since apparently, she doesn’t know her sister either. At least, not as well as she thought she did.
In the car, she fires off a question to her therapy chatbot on ShrinkGPT. “What should I do,” she asks, “when I feel like I’m losing control?”
“Identify controllable elements in your life,” the chatbot tells her in its resonant baritone—a voice she chose because it reminded her ofMorgan Freeman. “Make a list of stressors and determine which sources of stress can be reduced or even eliminated. I’ll set a timer and give you one minute to list those stressors out loud. Ready? Let’s begin.”
Fuck lists,she thinks. What she wants to know is whether Townsend actually did something to her sister. And if not? If Amanda is out there messing with him, not caring about the grief she’s putting her sister through? Then Kaitlyn might just kill Amanda herself.
Chapter Eighteen
Amanda
Opening up to others was something Amanda rarely did. Opening up to a man she was screwing was something sheneverdid. But just a few weeks into her relationship with Townsend, Amanda found she wanted this person to know her, really know her, both inside and out. A stupid mistake, of course. She’d gleaned enough experience with men to know that few—if any—were worthy of trust. Still, at the time, she felt sure: This man didn’t just have the means to offer her financial security; he would keep her secrets safe too.
It’s hard to say what made her trust Townsend, exactly. After all, this was a man who’d cheated, deceiving both his girlfriend and his paramour in the process. But something about the way he focused when she spoke, eyes never straying to his phone screen or some other more interesting distraction—it was new yet comforting. Good breeding had made him this way, yes, and maybe some good acting. Still, Amanda had never felt more interesting. She would have told Townsend anything, if only to bask in the glow of his attention for another minute.
That’s probably why she told him what she did, that night they drank too many prickly pear margaritas at De Nada Cantina. It was late January, about a month after Talia caught her and Townsend in bed together, and Amanda felt certain that she’d never been happier. Toodrunk to make it all the way back to Townsend’s condo, they decided to crash at Amanda’s East Austin apartment, where they had sex, smoked, and then had sex again. It was only then—only when Amanda’s guard was completely down—that she decided to tell Townsend the story. Such a stupid fucking mistake.
They had been on her mind a lot, her parents. The two-year anniversary of their death was in February, a few days before her sister’s birthday. And because she was feeling unsteady and sentimental and emboldened by the intensity of Townsend’s stare as they lay in bed together, she told him what happened the night her parents died. The night her parents were killed, more accurately.
At the time, Amanda didn’t have a car, because after her parents moved to East Austin postretirement, she didn’t need one; she could always borrow theirs. She tried to be respectful of it—cleaning up her take-out bags, filling the gas tank when it was low, replacing the windshield wiper fluid every once in a while—but sometimes, she was thoughtless. And that’s exactly what she was when she drove home drunk one night after partying with coworkers. It was less than a ten-minute drive. She’d driven drunk before; she thought she’d be fine. Even after she drove up onto that curb, the car miraculously looked okay—no scratches or dents, nothing to indicate what had happened. According to her outgoing calls, she’d apparently reached out to her sister at three a.m.—a foolish move—but as long as Kaitlyn didn’t tattle, Amanda thought their mom and dad would never be the wiser about her drunken joyride. And unfortunately, she was right.
Steering failure was the cause of her parents’ crash.
