“Your father knew about this?”
“Mom, calm down,” Eloise said. “I have a plan. You don’t get to control my life. Or my choices. Or like, yeah, any of that.”
Sybil wanted to scream that if she could just, like, calm down, then she would.About everything.But she couldn’t. She hadn’t been calm for forty-six years. How exactly was she expected to act calm now? Did Eloise think that pointing out that Sybil couldn’t control her own children at this stage actuallycalmed her downat all?
Before she could say any of this—threaten Eloise with withholding her college tuition or guilt her over lost potential—Betty slipped out the back door and glanced around. Then she held her phone to her ear and disappeared around the side of the house.
“One second,” Sybil said as she stood. “And, Eloise, we’re not done with this conversation.”
“I mean, we are, but okay. You’re not in charge of me anymore.”
Sybil huffed and trailed the rim of the pool toward where Betty had gone. She didn’t want to be a snoop, but there was something so furtive in Betty’s body language that Sybil told herself that she was just…curious. If Betty was weathering a crisis that Sybil could help with, well. She slowed and tiptoed as she got closer.
“Levi, hey, it’s me. I’m know I’m not supposed to use this number, that I’m breaking a rule, but I haven’t heard back in a while. Did you get my message a few weeks ago? I don’t even…I don’t even know where you are.”
Sybil could see Betty in the half-light of the side lantern. She was pacing and chewing on a fingernail, and she looked so young but also so hardened. It wasn’t fair, Sybil thought, that both parents had died before Betty had a chance to rely on them as a young adult.
“I had my first Thanksgiving tonight. At my friend Sybil’s. I guess I was wondering if you had Thanksgiving too,” Betty was saying. “If you get this, please call. Anytime. I don’t sleep, so even if it’s late your time. I’ll pick it up. I just…”
Sybil stepped on one of Pluto’s squeaky toys, and Betty paused. Sybil panicked and raced toward the twins, arriving at the back of the pool just in time to sink into a chair and see Julian pop his head out of the back door. He scanned the yardslowly, cocking his head like Pluto when he was really trying to decipher what Sybil was saying.
When he heard whatever he was listening for, he straightened out, then headed toward the side of the house where Betty had absconded to. Sybil watched him in the muted patio lights stand exactly where she had just moments ago, clearly eavesdropping. Why would Julian eavesdrop on Betty? Maybe Sybil had been pointing her suspicions at the wrong person. Maybe Betty was just Betty; maybe Julian was the one hiding something.
She could almost hear the narrator’s voiceover leading into the commercial break.
Julian turned around quickly and scurried back inside, and not a moment later, Betty emerged. She took a deep breath and stared up toward the black November sky. Then she composed herself and dipped back into Sybil’s house, while Sybil tried to convince herself that she wasn’t witnessing her friends trying to prevent their secrets from spilling over.
29
Night Eleven
Julian
December 3rd
The apartment wasso quiet without Simone. The filter from the fish tank bubbled, somewhere from atop a cabinet Felix meowed, and the rest of it was a silent dead void. She promised to return for Christmas, and in exchange, Julian promised to leave his old work alone.
“Dad, you quit for a reason,” she had said as she was zipping up her suitcase.
Yes, he had. Because after thirty years, the stress of the job literally seized his heart. But four years later, he was finding that the boredom of ordinary life was its own sort of death. Was he meant to run his late wife’s candy store for the next decade until he retired to a condo near Simone in Chicago?
“Stop worrying about me,” he had said, and hugged her too tightly by the front door. “It’s my job to worry aboutyou.”
“But if I don’t,” she said, “who will?”
“Sybil and Zeke and Betty.”
“So you’re telling me there’s a reason to worry?”
Julian had laughed, a distraction, and ushered her down to a taxi.
Now it was midnight again, and he was doing the exact thing that he’d promised Simone he wouldn’t. He closed out of one tab, then another, pushed his shoulders back in his chair and stretched. He was missing something, his gut told him that much. But what it was, he had no idea. He needed to start over at the beginning.
He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a file that he’d taken with him when he retired.
He didn’t even need to look at the pictures taken from the fire; they were embedded into his brain. He ran his fingers over the glossy shots, going inch by inch in case there was some detail that he misremembered or never initially saw. The fire department had been well over thirty minutes away, and the sprinklers in the building never activated. When he and Richard, his partner, asked around, it turned out the sprinklers had been broken for two years—everyone in the senior ministry knew about it—but no one bothered to fix them.We thought we were protected here, he remembered a parishioner, in a head covering and a long dress despite the heat of the summer, saying.We thought God would protect us here.The man she was standing with looked toward her, his eyes glazed, his mind filled with nonsense, Julian thought, and the man said,Maybe he did, maybe this was just God’s way of showing us a different path.
He and Richard were in the anti-corruption unit, so they were called in when something went awry with a case they’d been watching from afar. And they had been watching Pastor Aaron from afar. The air that night had been still so thick with ash residue that it nearly choked Julian, and later Richard suggested maybe whatever they were inhaling had led to Julian’s heart attack. Like an Erin Brockovich situation, he had said. Itwas a naïve thought, no different from what that woman’s husband had said. Julian’s heart had been giving out for years, since Robin died.
