Not just that, but I believe Bertram is telling the truth about his ex-lover, Annie, being the one to wreak havoc in his life. Maybe Annie killed Skylar. Or was that Waylen, too? I can’t work it out. Too many pieces are missing.
And here before me is Bertram, the man I’ve been trying to put in jail, offering me redemption. Telling me he’ll believe whatever I say.
“I was twelve,” is what comes out.The truth, Margaux. Of all the things you blurted out, you had to tell him the truth.But why not? If I’m expecting him to confess his sins, then confessing mine is the least I can do, besides which, I’m desperate. For the first time, I’m not sure if I can trust my own husband. Elodie is being watched by the police. I don’t know if Collette is safe. I can’t afford to hold on to my secrets anymore. They’ve caught up with me. “My parents both died of smoke inhalation before they could get out. They never even made it to the door. The firefighters found me out on the lawn sitting under the sprinklers.”
Maybe in its own way, telling the truth is still being deceptive. Nobody in my life knows this story—not my daughter, not my husband, not any of the Westport Elementary parents who are forever trying to out-perfect each other’s lives. I’ve hidden the little girl I once was from everyone. I’ve tried to kill her, exorcise her, erase her with tapping and past-life-regression therapies. But the best I’ve been able to do is lock her away in a tornado shelter underground, where I’m the only one who ever hears her muffled screaming to be let out.
“I refused to talk for weeks,” I say. “Or maybe it was months. It was a sticky summer night when the fire happened. We kept the sprinklers on a timer because the grass kept dying in the heat. And I remember it was snowing when I went to the therapist’s office for the first time.”
I had been paraded through the offices of many child psychologists by that point, each one some brightly painted version of the one before it. Finally, I was sent to someone who didn’t specialize in children at all, but in PTSD, trauma, and something to do with inmates—my grandmother found that last one especially important to repeat.“She deals with prisoners, for God’s sake. Surely she can handle a little girl.”
“She was the first one who didn’t try to get me to speak,” I say. The therapist’s office was on the third floor of a larger office building. I had to pass a bunch of smiling faces when I went in. Were their lives really as safe and pretty as they seemed, or were they liars like me? “She gave me a journal. Told me to write anything I wanted, she said, but it had to be the truth. So, I wrote about the things I missed. The way the beach towels all smelled like chlorine in the summer no matter how much we washed them. The ugly pink ruffled curtain on the window above the kitchen sink, and how I went through the wreckage later and saw that it had somehow survived the fire.”
Bertram is so quiet that I might think he’d up and walked away if I couldn’t still feel him reaching out and touching my hand.
I can’t even hear him breathe.
“Therapists love when their patients open up like that. She called it a breakthrough, told me I was excellent at communicating. I just sat there and stared at her like I was in a coma, and since I wouldn’t speak, she flipped through the pages and read my words back to me. She did this for weeks, and it made me so—mad. Hearing her speak my words in her voice, speak my memories like she owned them.”
Because I wouldn’t speak, all the previous child psychologists treated me like I couldn’t understand them. They talked to my grandparents like I wasn’t in the room. All of them said some version of the same thing: That I wasdisassociating; that I willed myself not to remember what happened; that any memories I did have were playing on a screen in my mind, and that screen was slowly dimming down.
I remember listening to their assessment and wishing such a thing were true. But there was no screen then, and there is no screen now. I remember it like it happened this morning. All of it. It’s been more than two decades. I’ve stuffed my life full of beautiful memories in that time. I had a romance novel love affair and met my husband. I have the house and the life and the family I’ve always wanted. This is who I am now. Margaux the adult, not the troubled little girl.
But I can’t disassociate. It’s always there. It’s always the truth of who I am.
“Then what happened?” His voice is the soft coo of a lover. I can’t make myself look away.
“One day, I couldn’t take it anymore,” I tell him. “I took the journal out of her hands and I ripped the pages apart, everything I’d written in the weeks since she’d given it to me. I started screaming as I did it. That was the first sound I’d made since the fire, and it was awful. It felt like it would never stop.”
For a second, I can see the flakes of paper and remember the feeling of being caught up in a snow globe, a claustrophobic prison. I feel the rawness again in my throat as I think of all the screaming. I had always been calm as a child. Quiet. Eager to please. I’d stayed quiet even through my grief because I thought it was what was expected of me. I thought it was the only way to make others happy.But in that moment, I realized there was no one left to make happy, and that it had never truly mattered. Everything I knew was gone. My family wasn’t coming back.
“I screamed because I realized I couldn’t just put it behind me,” I say. “They wouldn’t stop asking me about the fire until I told them everything I knew.”
He doesn’t look at me with pity, and I’m thankful for that much. “So, what happened?” he asks, his voice low. “What caused the fire?”
Even if I can still remember being a little girl, I’m not one anymore. And I’m prepared for his question.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I was asleep when it started.”
The lie slips out like a flat note in an otherwise perfect aria. I’ve lost my ability to lie, and Bertram knows it. Worse, he knows he’s the cause.
I avert my gaze, starting to tremble, like when Collette was five and we asked her who’d spilled flour all over the kitchen.
I expect Bertram to scold me for going back on our little agreement to be honest with each other. He’d be justified in storming out and leaving me to sort this mess myself. After all,I’mthe one who’s wanted for murder. For the second time in my life.
But I can’t speak the truth of that night. Having conjured it up, I suddenly can’t speak at all. The air is stale and stifling, and I think I hear the piercing wail of the smoke alarm. Bertram is trying to talk to me, but I can’t hear his voice over the sound, though I suspect it’s an imaginary sound.
He puts his arms around me, and I’m only vaguelyaware of him hauling me to my feet, saying words I still can’t understand. It’s almost as though he’s leading me out of a fire.
For a second, I feel safe. And then, in the next instant, we hear the police sirens right in front of the house.
Twenty-Two
I believe that Bertram is innocent. My instincts have never failed me in the past, and I’ve spent this entire case ignoring them. No more of that. His innocence is the only thing that makes sense. He didn’t kill Erin—he doesn’t even know she’s dead. He didn’t steal her app. So, why did she frame him? Is she just a jealous kid sister who wants her piece of the pie?
And because he’s innocent, he has no reason to hide from the police. It’s aiding and abetting to protect me. As the sirens wail, accompanied by the red and blue flashing lights around the edges of the curtains, I know that it’s over.
I’m already mapping it out in my head. He’ll go to the door, shove the bookshelf out of the way, and let them in. But moving the bookshelf will buy me some time to get downstairs and hide.
