Margot inhales. “No. No I didn’t. I needed time.”
The footprints. Those little crescents of ink. “But you came back?”
“Yes,” Margot says. “I… yes. I’m here now.”
For the first time Blair is able to put words to this feeling she has. Her mother did something terrible. Everyone on the internet is saying how evil she is, how cruel. She is angry at her mother, but there’s something bigger than the anger, something taken away from her.
“I don’t feel like I’m allowed to love her anymore.”
Margot unbuckles her seatbelt, leans over, wraps Blair in a hug that smells like orange juice and toaster waffles. But that only makes Blair cry harder. Being touched. The smells of the ordinary breakfast Margot fed Blair’s cousins at her house this morning before coming over. “Listen to me. She’s your mother. You are always allowed to love her. No matter what anyone says.”
“But she’s… It’s so awful.”
“I know we are all still sorting out the facts here, and trying to understand what happened all those years ago. But I think… I think the thing is, it is something that she did, but also something that happened to her. A tragedy she made, and one that she’s a victim of. Does that make sense? I don’t think anyone feels more pain over this than she does. She’s not a monster. She was practically a kid herself.”
Blair nods, looks into her lap. That’s not what people on the forums say.I don’t care how old you are, you know the meaning of human life. Unless you’re just sick. Unless you’re broken.
When she getshome from school Blair climbs the stairs—slowly, slowly—and makes her way down the hall to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother was released today after her bond hearing, is able to be home with them until the trial. She knocks on the door but doesn’t get an answer. When she creaks the door open, the room is dark, and she makes out the shape of her mother in the bed. Blair tiptoes over, lifts the covers and settles in, the way she used to as a little girl still in the grip of a bad dream. Her leg brushes against something hard: her mother’s GPS ankle monitor.
She doesn’t know if her mother is awake or not. “It’s my fault,” Blair whispers. “It’s all my fault.” Her mother has deep purple circles under her eyes. She looks older and smaller than she did just a few days before.
Iris’s hand finds Blair’s wrist, circles it. Warm and firmer than Blair could have thought.
“No,” Iris says.
“I just wanted to know her. Know who she was.”
“Know who?”
“The girl from the pictures.” She doesn’t want to go any further, to talk about the day she watched Iris moving the cairns. Not now, that it all makes such terrible, horrifying sense.
Iris pushes up onto an elbow. “The film. You have it?”
“I developed it. I’m sorry. I… I was worried. It scared me. Because I couldn’t explain it.”
“But you have the pictures?” Iris’s voice sounds different. Unused. Or maybe this is what she really sounds like. Blair doesn’t know what’s true anymore.
“I can bring them to you?”
Iris waits a long time to respond. “Yes. Can you?”
Blair slips out of the room and takes the packet of pictures from the desk drawer where she’s been hiding them. When she comes back into her parents’ room, Iris inhales like she’s been hit. She sits up against the pillows, pats the space next to her to indicate Blair do the same. The first photo is the one of the two girls. One in the mirror, Iris holding the camera behind.
Iris runs a tender finger along the edge of the photograph. “This is Sabrina. Until I had you, I loved her more than anyone else in the world.”
Late that night,when the house is dark and silent, Blair drives back to the cairns in the woods. Her neighbors have left their Christmas lights up and they cast an uncanny glow on the street as she slips in to the car.
The construction site is quiet in the dark, all the machinery gone still. This time, she’s come prepared with a trowel, the same one her mother used from their garden, and digs until she finds the metal box. She lifts the letter out, walks to the river’s edge. She tears the letter into so many small pieces before dropping them into the water. She stands over them until every last pale dot of her mother’s confession has disappeared.
CALLIE
Annabelle’s mug shot makes Callie wince. A woman curled into herself. Lips pressed together. Eyes narrowed, glazed over with fear. This is not the woman who bent over the senior citizens and their knitting, or who presided over the PTA bake sale. Quotes from neighbors vary:She’s a good woman, I can’t believe this, toI always knew there was something off about her. Commenters on the articles, the forums, are more ruthless.How could someone do this? I’ve been trying to conceive for five years with no luck. It makes me SICK that someone like this gets to have children. Life is not fair. The only fair thing is if she’s given a lethal injection!!! UGLY BITCH, UGLY INSIDE AND OUT!!!
Adrian makes her stop reading when she spirals this way. He can tell by the look on her face when she’s been lost to the articles, the Reddit pages, the TikTok videos for too long. The internet thrives on the ugly, the lurid, the least-nuanced understanding of any given situation. She knows that, and yet. She needs to measure it, needs to know exactly how cruel the world will be, a kind of penance for what she did.
Frank stops intothe office the day after the arrest.
He claps his hands. “Look at you, cracking the impossible case. Good work, Hauser. I knew you’d do well here.”
