Initially, she hoped for a clean revenge plot on Bertram. She would use me to investigate him for fraud with his app. But along the way, I would unwittingly discover that he was a murderer—this theory fed by breadcrumbs that Annie would throw along the trail. I would feel like a brilliant investigator who found Bertram to be more dangerous than anyone suspected. He would serve life in prison, and I’d add him to my scrapbook and call it a job well done. Elodie would have absolved herself of her own petty crime and go back to her life, feeling quite pleased with herself.
And Annie would stay missing, presumed dead. The blood all over her apartment is more than anyone can lose and still walk away. The police are still wrapping their heads around that one, but my theory is that she’d beendrawing and then freezing a little bit of it at a time. Possibly for months, all to plan this out. It explains why she always looked so frail and gaunt when Elodie and I visited her, and the strange bruises on her face when we showed up unexpectedly.
Once she presented herself as the latest in a string of his dead girlfriends, she could reinvent herself as someone else and know that Bertram would be in a cage where he could never find love again. She would get letters to him, disguised as the words of a devoted fangirl, and trick him into loving her that way. Everyone would win.
Except Bertram. Lonely, heartsick Bertram whose story would never have been believed. Nobody in their right mind would pity someone who’s risen to such success. The murder trial would have been covered by every podcaster in the digital space, the comments section calling for his head on a stick.
But I showed up the morning of her staged murder and stirred the pot, so she went to her plan B: setting Bertram up for my murder too.
In the week I spend at Waylen’s side in the hospital, I have plenty of time to imagine how close things were to playing very differently. Rather than staying for an extended sleepover with Finnegan at Elodie’s house, Collette could be attending our funerals. Worse, she would have inherited the generational curse of being the girl whose parents died in a fire. She would have wondered if anything in the papers was really true.
But then, she’s a lot like me. I think she would have uncovered the truth eventually.
Seven days after the fire, Waylen is starting to emergefrom his honeymoon phase. As exhausted and in pain as he is, he’s loved having me to dote on him. We’ve spent most of the time in content silence, or talking about podcasts and books, and the vacation we’ll take when all of this is behind us. A nice cruise to the Riviera.
But now he wants to talk. A moment that I’ve been dreading, and yet I’m relieved that we’re finally here.
“Why didn’t you tell me about all of it?” he says. “The fire, and that you and your brother were blamed for it?”
Briefly, I feel like I’m a child again. A child with a long road ahead of me, and so many stories to tell.
He looks at me, and I know what he’s thinking, even if he doesn’t say the words:Tell me the truth, Margaux.
“I didn’t think you would believe me,” I say.
I’m sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, looking at the lone wire feeding an IV into his arm. “I thought you would leave me.”
“Sometimes I think that’s what you wanted me to do,” he says. “But I already told you that we’re stuck with each other. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
I’ve never understood his undying love for me. I’ve never understood why I feel the same way.
“You deserve to be loved,” he tells me. “I know you think it’s all about appearances, but I don’t care about our reputation in the neighborhood, or if you quit the PTA and all that stuff tomorrow. Hell, do you want me to sell the house? I’ll live with you in a barn in the country.”
I laugh, even though I suspect he really means it. “We’ll keep the house,” I say. “But maybe scale back on some of the other stuff.”
“What would your friend Elodie call it? A hard detox?Maybe we should do that.” He nudges my hand with his. He’s being cautious, trying not to push me away again.
I stay with him until he falls asleep again. Then I venture out and afford myself the luxury of hospital cafeteria coffee. That’s where Elodie finds me, beaming like she’s just won the gold medal at the detective Olympics.
The peeling “visitor” sticker on her cardigan tells me that she’s been here for a while. She must have been upstairs visiting my brother. She’s right. I didn’t give her enough credit. While I was trying to reconcile my instincts being at odds with the evidence, Elodie was leaning into leads of her own. That’s how she discovered that the abandoned mall was due to be turned into storage units, and that the developer had set up a security system.
Everything that happened before and during the fire was recorded, stored on a cloud somewhere for the police to review. I never want to see it. I’ve had enough fire to last me a lifetime.
“How you doing, kid?” she asks me, and casts a wayward glance at my paper coffee cup. “I wish you’d let me bring you a nice mocha or something. You deserve it after all you’ve been through.”
“I’m just happy to be alive,” I tell her.
But Elodie refuses to let the conversation turn grim. She is many things, among which, a merciless optimist. “Your brother—I mean Mr. X tells me that he’s planning to retire. He said he’s been trying to talk you into doing the same.”
I sigh. “If you’d asked me before this mission, I would have said there’s no way,” I tell her. “But now—Waylen would be happy. Collette probably would, too.”
Elodie reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine. Her hand lotion smells like lavender and cream. “What doyouwant?” she asks me.
“You know, I can’t remember the last time someone asked me that,” I reply. “After the fire, when I was a kid, I was told where to go, what to say, which questions to answer, which ones to stay quiet about. And when my brother started this business, I found it empowering. It made me feel like I was one step closer to evening things out in the world. But now I look back, and it’s like I was on a treadmill moving in place the whole time.”
Elodie nods sympathetically. “The world will always be a mess,” she says. “We can clean it up a little—and let’s face it, it can even be fun—but if the goal is to make the world perfect, we’ll always fall short.”
I smile. “Thank you,” I say. “You don’t know how freeing that is to hear.”
