Liz shakes her head and gives it to me straight. “No, not if you don’t want to continue a relationship with them, but I would maybe be a little nicer about it. His parents are pretty chill people. His dad, at least.”
“I don’t know,” I say as a tear escapes. I dash it away and give Iona some gentle pats down her back. I don’t know how I feel about the Delinskys. I can’t look at them the same way. I don’t know them well enough to fight for something with them and I don’t like the way Pattie and the girls are making me feel, like we’re all in the same boat. We’re not. I’m in a completely different marina. I need time to heal. I need time and space to be angry and I need time and space to beat myself up for missing Josh. For missing him so fucking much.
My chest hurts so bad. I stand and hand over Iona. “Take your adorable-ass baby.”
“She is pretty damn cute, isn’t she?” Liz says, her eyes filled with love.
“I stopped myself from looking her up again.”
Liz’s expression sobers. She knows who I’m talking about. The other ghost in the room that Pattie and the rest of Josh’s family seemed hell bent on ignoring. That night, after we put Josh in the ground, after Vaughn Coleman appeared out of nowhere, I finally looked her up. Corrine Johnson. I was shocked I hadn’t done it already.
I’d already asked the detectives to to fill me in on every detail. Put on my A.D.A. hat and grilled them right back after they’d found Ryan Morgan’s emails. Looked into Ryan Morgan's background and learned he’d been in and out of foster care until his aunt took him and his younger brother in. Saw proof that he’d found Corrine’s private photos on some 4chan-style message board and decided she was the one for him. I wanted to know what had happened and, in that process, I started to fixate on Corrine Johnson.
What was it about her that my husband-to-be and a stalker found so interesting? It’s fucked up. I know. She didn’t deserve this. But she didn’t deserve my happiness either. She’s a lawyer too. Or she was. Family law. I try not to laugh at that idea. I find her Instagram. I fixate on her face. She’s pretty. Black as well and thick too, like me. That bothers me. Josh has a type, which he’d never mentioned. Not that it should have mattered, but it did matter, because he lied and cheated and all of that got him killed. I think of Vaughn and then try not to think about Vaughn. I haven’t reached out to him. I don’t know what to say.
“What are you looking for?” Liz asks. “Why go digging her life up?”
“I don’t know. A reason? My brain wants to make sense of it,” I say, leaving out the part where I have fake conversations with Corrine where I ask her why. Where I ask her about Vaughn and Christopher. Then I ask her why again. I think about my life, my career. How I’d started researching how to freeze my eggs ’cause I can’t leave it to just Liz to carry on the Lewis name and our spectacular racks. And then the moment happened. The moment where I met a cute white boy with this great apartment uptown who apparently didn’t think I was enough.
“I think you should talk to someone,” Liz says. She’s found a great therapist online. I know she’d help me find one too.
“I know, but I’m not ready. I need to be honest with someone and I’m not there yet.”
“Just promise me you’ll keep talking to me.”
“I will. I should get going.” The days are getting longer again, but I don’t want to rush back to the city after dark. I still hate driving. I kiss my sister and her baby goodbye. Tell her to send my love to Silas and Palila. I climb up into my big-body Tahoe. I need to see the road, so I refuse to drive anything small. Before I pull out of the farm, I dig Vaughn Coleman’s card out of my wallet and I text him.
Three
Vaughn
I’d offered to drive down to New York and then I’d offered to at least meet Brooklyn Lewis in New Haven or Hartford, but she insisted on coming to me. A little over a month has passed since that day in the cemetery. I knew I’d overstepped. Actually I’d polevaulted over a wall of none-of-my-business, but for some stupid reason I’d thought Brooklyn would reach out to me within a few days. I knew she had questions and I was eager to know what answers she might have for me and Shaw. But nothing. Not a word. Not for a month. Then last Sunday evening, a New York area code lit up my phone. She was forward and direct. She wanted to know if we could talk that following weekend. She preferred to speak in person.
I was just about to leave Shaw’s place in Barnstable when her text popped up on my phone. It only took a few minutes for us to figure out the details. And now we are riding up to the tenth floor of the Sheraton Downtown Boston.
I’d extended the offer for us to meet wherever was most convenient for her. She’d suggested her hotel room.
“I think we need to speak in private, but I’d feel more comfortable if you came to me,” she’d said. “You seem chill, but not chill enough for me to go to a stranger’s apartment.” There was no reason to argue.
I look across the glass-and-steel elevator as it stops on the fifth floor. The woman beside me smiles like she notices the tension between Shaw and me when the four of us all climb into the tiny space together. She and the man with her take their rolling bags, heading off to their rooms. The doors slide shut and we’re rising again. I glance over at Shaw. He’s pissed. He’s doing everything to avoid eye contact with me. He’s been like this since he arrived at my place a few hours ago and decided blasting the Celtics game was preferable to telling me how the rest of his week had gone. I get that he wants me to leave this alone, but I still want answers. And I know deep down he wants them too.
“Say it before we get up there,” I urge.
“Fine.” He looks up at me, his tongue rolling over his molars. “This is a bad idea.”
“You mentioned that.”
“Yeah, but I just wanna go on record, so you know and I know that this is a bad idea. When this blows up in our faces and the detectives show up again and tell us to stop tampering with witnesses or some shit—”
“She’s not a witness. And they said the case is closed.” The detectives interviewed me and Shaw, but soon after they dropped it. I honestly had no clue who Ryan Morgan was and no idea why he would stalk Corrine or mention me in his stalking and the detectives couldn’t find any clear reason either. It turned out Corrine had never even seen Ryan Morgan’s emails. The day he decided to take her from us, the hundreds of messages he’d sent were gathering digital dust in the spam box of an old email Corrine had linked to her barely used Facebook account.
Talking to Brooklyn Lewis about it after the fact wouldn’t land any of us in hot water with the police. Unless she’d hired Ryan Morgan, which was extremely unlikely. Talking to her wouldn’t impact a case the cops had already moved on from. For them it’s over. For us...
We stop at the twelfth floor and the doors open. Shaw doesn’t move to exit the elevator. He’s still looking at the floor. I put my hand out to stop the doors from closing.
“You wanna leave?” I ask.
Shaw is quiet for a moment, but as his expression softens the slightest bit, I know his answer.
