“Just that Alex had said he lived in Palm Beach Gardens.” Victoria sighed. “I felt bad for Hazel. She was desperate for any scrap of information. My kindness got the better of me, I guess.”
I tried to keep my face even so Victoria couldn’t see the gears spinning in my mind. The last thing I needed was her interfering.
“Have you spoken to your brother about this at all?” Victoria asked suddenly, picking at her nail.
“Tommy?” I shook my head, even though I probably should have filled him in by now. He was the sibling who Hazel would have confided in. He lived here, knew the cast of characters Hazel was surrounded by.
Victoria’s eyes snapped up. “No.Will.”
Will?I was stunned, not understanding why she was asking and surprised to hear his name coming out of her mouth. With the Hopelys it was alwaysyour brotherorthe murderer. Jabs meant to dehumanize Will and hurt me further.
“A little … He knows Hazel was asking questions,” I said finally. “It seems they talked about it.”
“Yeah,” Victoria said darkly. “ThatI know.” I noticed that she was sitting very straight now, her body taut. She looked nervous. We had been friends for years, and I knew her tells. She was hiding something, but it looked like she was about to spill. I waited patiently, letting the silence do the work for me, a tactic I’d learned in all of my research forThe Smileys Next Door.
“Look, I’m only telling you this because you’re probably going to find out next time you talk to Will anyway and I am not going to have you making your own assumptions about it.” Victoria rolled her eyes. “And I hate that this is going to give you validation.”
I was getting impatient. Hazel was missing and every minute counted. “What is going on, Victoria? Spit it out.”
“I write to Will sometimes,” she said.
Of all the things I thought she could’ve said, that was not on the list. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.“Excuse me?”
“I write to him, like letters, and he writes back,” Victoria said, as if I didn’t understand what she had meant.
“Angry ones?” I asked, struggling to imagine Will being on the receiving end of anything other than her ire.
“Not exactly … We … catch up? We write back and forth most weeks,” Victoria said, looking at the floor.
I thought about how Victoria used to feel about Will. The doe-eyed, girlish looks she used to give him when Alex was alive. It was no secret that Victoria had a crush on him. Alex had bullied her endlessly for it. But I had thought that crush had shriveled up and died when he’d been convicted of murder.
“Are theyloveletters?” I was angry now. Angry that this was how I was finding out. Angry that after years of devoting my life to getting him out, and enduring vitriol from the Hopelys, my brother had never, not once, mentioned this. Victoria said nothing.
“I would’ve thought your crush on Will would’ve been hard to maintain while you were testifying against him, but maybe that attraction was stronger than we all thought.”
Victoria looked pissed off. “It’s not like that,” she said, though the color blooming in her cheeks suggested otherwise.
For a moment my brain pushed ahead, trying to imagine a world where it made sense that Victoria would be writing to Will. A man she’d always had a crush on, but a man who’d been with her sister. Was Victoria actually obsessed with him? Obsessed enough that she considered killing her sister to be with him? And then it backfired when he’d been arrested instead? No. I stopped that line of thinking. That was crazy.
“That’s a little suspicious, Victoria. You get that, right?”
“Suspicious how?” she hissed, seeing the look on my face. “Oh my god. Are you going to accusemeof killing Alex now?”
Color rose to my face, showing my embarrassment that she had followed my line of thinking.
“You’re insufferable,” Victoria snapped. “I didn’t kill my sister, Rose. I can’t believe I even have to say that.” She shook her head sadly. “I write to Will because I feel bad, okay? I feel bad about everything that happened during the trial. We weren’t all as honest as we should have been.”
I scoffed loudly, and her eyes darkened again. “The truth is the prosecutors pressured us to make it sound like Alex was some virginal flower corrupted by your brother, but we all knew that wasn’t the case. We just knew that it would ensure Will was arrested. And we were so young and still grieving. We wanted to get Alex justice …” She swallowed. “I read the book, and while I think the whole thing wasdisgusting, I started to sympathize with Will. We’ve even talked about how much the book negatively affected him too.”
That felt like a kick to the chest. Will had told her he didn’t like the book? All of this information felt like it was going to make my brain explode. But I swallowed the anger I felt. This wasn’t the time.
“So, what?” I said, trying to make sense of it all. “You think he’s innocent now?”
“I don’t know!” Victoria replied. “I have doubts now, I guess? In his letters, Will sounds like he used to be. Like the boy I cared about back then. Not like a murderer. But then my mother and sisters are still convinced he did it. I basically never see Cass or Sam anymore because they can’t help but bring it up. I can only stand to live with my mom because she never talks about any of this. Except for how much she hates you, of course.”
I ignored the barb about her mother and pondered the rest. It explained why I hadn’t found any recent pictures of Victoria with Cassandra or Sam.
“As much as it kills me to ask you, of all people, for a favor, I need you to keep this to yourself,” Victoria said, noticing the look of apprehension on my face. She added, “It would kill my mother to know that I’m in touch with him. She’s gone through enough.”
