Grace smiled and looked at her friend. “Thank you.”
Sidney watched the two friends embrace and sensed something strange from their body language. Maybe it was that Ellie stood so tall over Grace, who looked up into her friend’s eyes like a helpless child staring at a parent. Maybe it was the aura of regret that Sidney felt between them. An unspoken acknowledgment that suggested Grace, too, should be a successful surgeon. To look at the two friends now, once brought together by their similarities, it was impossible to notice much now besides the things that separated them, which today, Sidney knew, was much more than inches.
Dr. Ellie Reiser, in her designer blouse and perfect-fitting jeans, standing in her chic Manhattan apartment and offering the use of her summer home, was the picture of success. Grace, in her too-large clothing that sagged from her shoulders, skin and hair neglected for a decade, looking up at her old friend and without a dollar to her name, was the polar opposite.
“What am I missing?” Daniel came over to where Grace and Ellie were hugging.
Grace pulled Daniel in to create a three-person hug. After a moment, Grace’s parents joined the group that huddled around Marshall’s wheelchair. Sidney noticed Charlotte, standing off to the side. The stoic look of indifference never left her face as she slowly approached the group and leaned in with a light hand on her husband’s shoulder.
Grace broke out of the group and wiped her eyes.
“Gone for ten years, and there’s not much left when you get back.”
Ellie put her arm around Grace again. “Stop talking like that. You are loved by many people.”
Grace wiped her cheeks again with the backs of her hands, a quick swipe meant to erase the vulnerability she had known to suppress for the past ten years of incarceration. But here, with people who loved her, she allowed it for just a moment.
“Maybe that was true one day,” Grace said. “But today, these are the people left in my life. And I’m so happy to have you.”
Ten years of bottled-up emotions—fear and regret and anger—suddenly flooded from Grace Sebold as she sobbed. After an initial attempt at stifling it, she eventually gave in with no effort to disguise it. Ellie and Daniel hugged her again, and her parents rushed to comfort her. Charlotte patted her on the back. Marshall seemed lost to the circumstances, still studying the new chessboard in his lap.
Sidney took a quick glance to the corner of the room, where Derrick stood with his camera on his shoulder. She knew Grace’s homecoming would play well in one of the concluding episodes, and secure the audience’s sympathy for the girl America had once hated.
CHAPTER 42
Monday, July 17, 2017
JASON PULLED HIS CAR OFF THE HIGHWAY AND ONTO THE EXIT RAMP. He’d plugged the address Gus had given him into the GPS, which told him that his destination was on the left in one-point-three miles. A light drizzle fell and the lights of New York collected in a matrix of yellow and red starbursts on his windshield until his wipers swept them away and allowed the halos to begin forming anew. He squinted through the mist until the billboard sign, illuminated by two bright spotlights that also highlighted the falling rain, told him he had arrived at Red’s Self-Storage.
He pulled his compact Toyota Corolla onto the gravel lane, which led into the facility. There were endless rows of single-story storage sheds, with garage door openings in the front and large numbers on top of each unit. He wound down three lanes, avoiding potholes, until he found number 67. A yellow incandescent light glowed above every third unit. Gus’s number 67 was not one of the lucky ones. Jason angled his car so the headlights fell onto the closed garage door.
He climbed from the driver’s seat with an eerie feeling of isolation and bemusement as to what the hell he was doing in the Bronx during a rainstorm about to open the storage unit of one of his patients. He walked to the shed and held the paper so the headlights allowed him to read the code, which he punched into the keypad on the side of the building. He pressedenterand the garage door rattled open. The headlights tunneled through the rain and brightened the small ten-by-ten space. It was filled with storage boxes—the sort with hand slots on each side for easy carrying—and which were capped with cardboard tops. They looked to be meticulously organized; and, indeed, once Jason started searching, he realized the boxes were organized by year.
He checked the note Gus had given him again, and glanced from stack to stack until he saw boxes marked1999.There were four of them. Jason pulled the top off the first. File folders lined the inside of the box, packed tight with no room to spare. He pulled one loose and opened it. The top of the first page was stamped with a Wilmington Police Department seal. Jason riffled through the report, some portions typed neatly and others written in all-caps block letters of a man trying hard to make his thoughts legible. Jason leafed through a few pages and then glanced at the bottom of the report and saw the scribbled signature. The hurried scratch of the name was indecipherable, but typed underneath wasDetective Gustavo Morelli.
Jason stood bathed in the glow of the headlights as the rain came down harder now, pelting the metal roof of the storage facility.
“Damn, Gus,” he said aloud. “I thought you were retired.”
A few minutes later, he backed his car to the opening of the storage unit, opened the trunk, and loaded all four boxes from 1999.
CHAPTER 43
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
TRAVERSING THE HALLWAYS WAS AN ACCOMPLISHMENT, BUT STILL CARRIEDthe weight of embarrassment. The corridors were tackled only after a nurse set him up with his walker and got him started like a child bicycling for the first time without training wheels.Look at him go!Gus could almost hear the nurse yell that when she let go of the tennis-ball coated walker as he took off shuffling the linoleum runways. But he swallowed his pride and kept his ass moving.
Navigating the room, too, was becoming something he could handle. Thanks to Jason’s drill-sergeant-style physical-therapy sessions, Gus could manage his way into and out of bed all on his own. He had become proficient at attaching his prosthesis and was able to hobble around his room on crutches, no longer at the staff’s mercy when he needed to take a leak. It was a healthy milestone both for him and for the nurses he was driving to the brink of insanity.
Tonight he waited until the rehab prison was dark and quiet. Until the hallways outside his room were soft with night lighting. He knew he had two or three unfettered hoursnow that the overnight nurse had left his room. He no longer needed the hourly medicine checks, the repositioning, or the drainage of his tubes and catheters. His hard work had earned him three hours of freedom each night, and he planned to take advantage of them.
Slowly he shifted on the bed until his leg hung from the side and his stump floated in the air. He attached the prosthesis. He hadn’t quite conquered the proper technique, and the pain of the maneuver was shocking. When it passed, he eased off the bed, took hold of his walker, and hobbled to the closet. Inside were the four boxes Jason had brought from the storage unit the night before. It had taken all the patience he had left in him to wait until now, 3:00 a.m., to retrieve them.
It took twenty minutes to drag the boxes to the bedside chair but, finally, retired Detective Gustavo Morelli sat with his files stacked around him. For a moment, he felt like his old self. He opened the first box, plucked a folder from within, and spread the contents across the overbed table. The pain in his hip, from the last thirty minutes of effort, faded. He hadn’t felt this alive in years.
The files were marked 1999. It had been so long, he hadn’t been sure of the name. But over the Fourth of July weekend when he binge watched the Grace Sebold documentary on Jason’s iPad, it had come to him. Now the file of Henry Anderson was in front of him. He ran his index finger under the name:Henry Anderson.
The boy was eighteen years old when he died. Gus, who finished his career with the New York Police Department’s Detective Bureau, had been a senior detective out in the sticks of Wilmington, New York, back in 1999 and was called to investigate the boy’s death, which occurred on Whiteface Mountain. A few minutes of paging through the reports was all it took to transport Gus across the years. Thememories flooded back to him. Two hours into reviewing the file, the rising sun brought dawn through his hospital window and slanted a bright streak across his table. By then, Gus remembered vividly the boy named Henry Anderson, as if Gus were still working the case. As if it hadn’t been put to rest nearly twenty years before, but instead were alive and active and exhaling hot breaths of air that fogged the prism of his mind the way all his homicides used to do.
