He looks at me, startled, like he forgot I’ve been here for hours. “I can’t sleep.” His voice is congested, even though he hasn’t been crying.
“Let’s lie down, then,” I say. I smooth my palm over his short curls. “You can’t help her unless you take care of yourself.”
I stand and pull him to his feet before he can argue. I lead him to the bed and make him lie down. I tug the muddy sneakers from his feet and then sit on the edge beside him. The second I touch his face, he falls apart. All those hours of keeping the dark thoughts at bay have finally burst through his defenses. He sees the things that I began to fear last night. Sadie tortured. Sadie dead. Sadie irrecoverably changed even if we get her back.
He curls up, his long legs drawn, his big hands grasping at my shirt. He buries his face against my stomach and lets out a howl that lances through me.
I gather him to me and I cradle his head in my lap. I listen as he murmurs the wordsI promised herover and over again. The night he went to the coroner’s office to identify his wife, they offered him the option of doing it through a closed-circuit television, but he refused. He wanted to go to her. When they peeled back the sheet, by then her skin must have turned waxy and begun to discolor, but he still would have seen the beautiful thing in his wedding photos. Now he tells me that he cupped her cheek. She was so cold. He promised that he would still treat Sadie like a daughter. He would do everything he could.
“You still are,” I tell him, rubbing circles along the muscles of his back. “You are doing everything.”
“Jade,” he murmurs. That name I’ve used to make him love me. That lie I’ve given him. He calls for that girl, and I wish that I could be her. I wish that I could stay here in this little town, in this house he’s restored, in this bed where we’ve given ourselves to each other. I wish I could give him decades of breakfasts in bed, and hikes throughthe Arizona mountains, wild kisses in the rain. My hands in his when we’re old and spent.
I wish I could give him this baby. I wish I could tell him that it’s there, right beside his head.
Be strong,I tell myself. But I’m not. His pain threatens to undo me. Edison is meant to be a flash of headlights on a dark road speeding by. A moment’s fancy. I am not meant to love him more than my sisters.
I press my lips together, afraid of what I will say if I open my mouth again.
My sisters are everything to me. They would dive into a riptide to save me from drowning. They would kneel on the tracks to free my trapped foot with a train hurtling toward us. They live for me and they would die for me, and we made a promise to one another. No lasting loves, only the shared pain of killing our men before they can change us.
After a while, Edison’s sobs turn to quiet breathing. He’s fallen asleep.
One at a time, I uncurl his fingers that are still grasping my shirt, and once I’m free, I kneel beside him so that our faces are level.
“I’m sorry, love,” I whisper, and I kiss his slackened lips. “I can’t choose you.”
28
While Edison sleeps, I pace the length of the house. The dusty clock ticks on in the kitchen, and desert insects sing as the rain subsides.
I hold the burner phone in both hands, cradling it and looking for any reason not to send the text I’ve typed out for my sisters:What did you do?
Sadie is gone, in this quiet town that was safe before we got here.
I wait until the sun begins to rise before I delete what I’ve typed and simply ask for one of my sisters to pick me up so I can come home and shower. I’ll have an opportunity to observe them this way. I’ll be able to tell if they’ve slept and if anything has changed. My sisters are cunning, but they make mistakes. They’re sloppy. That’s why they need me.
Sure thing, sister dearest, is the reply. I can tell it was sent by Moody. I can practically hear the playful glee in the words.
Iris pulls into the driveway fifteen minutes later. “Good morning, sunshine,” she says as I climb into the passenger seat. “How’s your Prince Charming holding up?”
There are bags under her eyes. Her hair is drawn into a ponytail, and I can see that she’s slicked it down with water. She’s covering up the small fringes of hair that frame her face when she’s been sweating from doing something labor-intensive. The pale blue nail polish on her left index finger is chipped, and it looks like she’s tried to scrape her nail beds clean with a thumbtack.
There’s a long strip of gauze running from her wrist to her elbow, pinned down with medical tape. The blood has seeped through and stained it brown. And even before Iris says a word, I know that she’s behind whatever happened to Sadie. I know that Sadie used the box cutter I gave her to fight back, and that she lost.
Iris notices me watching her. The green in her eyes shifts, and I see what her victims see the moment before she goes in for the kill. Her sweetness disappears quick when something sets her off.
“A child goes missing in a small town, she’s not out somewhere catching butterflies,” I say. My sister and I circle each other in the bloody water like sharks in the womb. “There hasn’t been a single murder or missing person for years in this town, and we show up and there are two.”
“Three,” Iris corrects. “You’re forgetting the stunt your friend pulled.”
I don’t let on how much it hurts to be reminded of Dara. Iris is testing me to see how I’ll react, and this outrages me anew. The time to grieve Dara is over; my sisters gave me two days. Two days of letting me cry and blame everything under the sun—them, myself, even Dara. And if it hurts, it’s my own fault for loving her when I knew I couldn’t keep her.
I don’t take the bait. Iris, the queen of clean breaks, would be disappointed that I’ve been so messy with my heart since we’ve come here. Even now, she drives at exactly the speed limit, hands at ten and two, unaffected by all that we’ve done. “What did you do?” I ask. “Edison’s stepdaughter wasn’t part of the plan.”
“No?” Iris’s tone is dulcet. “Then I’m sure she’ll turn up.”
“It was you,” I say. I didn’t want to believe it. Last night, I turned this entire town upside down looking for that little girl. I held Edison as he cried. I waited, hoping that she would mysteriously appear like bits of glittering sea glass. I even hoped that, if the worst had happened, there was another serial killer roaming the streets. Anything but this.
