The gun didn't waver.
Rob started talking.
It came out in pieces at first. Broken sentences that didn't quite connect. He'd only wanted to help. He'd been looking out for Ethan's future. Ethan had so much potential, and this girl, this girl, who was nobody and nothing, was going to ruin everything. Didn't Ethan see that? Couldn't he understand?
Kelly pressed closer to the cold metal of the Suburban's fender as Rob told his story, trying to get Ethan to see it had all been for his own good. If anything, Ethan should be grateful.
Everything had narrowed to the circle of white light and the sound of her brother's voice cracking apart.
"I met her at the bus stop,” Rob said. The words came faster now, tumbling over each other like they'd been dammed up fora decade and the wall had finally given way. “I offered her a ride to the mall, and she accepted. I thought if I could just talk to her. Make her see reason. She was seventeen. She didn't know what she was doing. Neither of you did."
His voice pitched higher. Tighter.
"I told her that the pregnancy was a mistake. That she needed to take care of it. That you had a future, a real future, and she was going to destroy it. I told her she could get an abortion or give the baby up for adoption, and everybody could move on. I could help her. I knew a doctor. Nobody had to know.”
Kelly's hand found her mouth, and a sob caught in her throat. More tears burned the back of her eyes, and she had to blink several times to keep her vision from blurring too much.
"She kept crying and saying that you two loved each other." Rob was looking away from Ethan now, his eyes wide and glassy, his face contorted into something she had never seen on him before. Something broken. And scared. “I kept trying to tell her that it didn't matter. You were kids, and it wouldn't last. I told her that you'd end up hating each other and that you'd end up resenting her for ruining your future."
His voice cracked on the word "future," and he sucked in a breath that sounded strangled and dull.
"She got angry with me. She tried to jump out of the car, but I grabbed her arm. She fought me, calling me names." Rob's hands lowered from their raised position and came together in front of his chest, fingers twisting around each other as if they had their own memory of what they'd done. "I don't know what came over me, but I needed her to shut up. I couldn’t take the sound of her voice anymore. She needed to be quiet and listen to what I was saying. I don’t know what happened. But my hands were around her neck, and then she was finally quiet."
The parking lot tilted, and she had to grab onto the vehicle next to her to keep her balance. The world simply could not stay level under the weight of what she was hearing.
“She was finally quiet.” His words had dropped to something barely above a whisper, but in the stillness of the parking lot, they carried with terrible clarity. "She just wouldn't be quiet. I couldn't take it."
Kelly's body began to shake. Not the controlled trembling from earlier under the willow tree. This was something else entirely. This was her bones trying to leave her body. This was every cell she had rejecting what her ears had just received because the information was too large, too wrong, too impossible to fit inside a human being without breaking something.
Her brother.Her brother had killed Lori.
Rob.
Who criticized her career choices, her life, her boyfriends, her clothes, her taste in books, movies, and music. Who told her she was making bad decisions. Who held himself up as the model of maturity and responsibility. Who looked at everyone around him and found them wanting. Who had stood at his own wedding and given a speech about the importance of family and integrity and doing the right thing even when it was hard.
Rob had strangled a seventeen-year-old girl because she wouldn't stop crying about the boy she loved.
Because he couldn’t stand to hear another voice other than his own.
Tears spilled down Kelly's cheeks. She didn't wipe them. She couldn't move her hands. One was pressed against the SUV, and the other was sealed over her mouth, holding in a sound that wanted to come out. A scream? A sob? None of those sounds were primal and painful enough for when the story they've beentold about their own life turns out to be wrong in every way that matters.
All those years. All those family dinners where Rob had lectured and pontificated and judged. All those moments when her parents had held Rob up as the standard she failed to meet. The successful one. The responsible one. The one who had his life together.
And underneath all of it, underneath the suits and the spreadsheets and the unsolicited opinions, was this.
A dead girl in a ditch by a cornfield.
Lori. So young and so full of love and life.
A secret kept for over a decade by the man who sat at the Bateman family table and told everyone else how to live.
The irony would have been funny if it weren't the worst thing Kelly had ever experienced.
From her position behind the Suburban, she could see Ethan's face in the floodlight. He was crying. The gun was still up, still pointed, but his face had collapsed into something unrecognizable. The calm and composed candidate for town mayor was gone. What remained was the boy from the porch swing. The boy who had loved a girl and lost her and spent almost eleven years not knowing why.
Now he knew.
Kelly pressed her forehead against the cold metal of the car and closed her eyes. Sirens were building in the distance, faint but growing. Had someone seen what was going on and called the police?
