Mr. Hopely, I thought.That’s what’s going on.
But what I said was “We can’t find Alex. They’re all out looking for her.”
My family sprang into action at my words, throwing shoes on over bare feet and heading for the back door. But still, all I could think as we headed outside wasMr. Hopely attacked me.
Within ten minutes, we had found Alex’s body. Victoria spotted her first. Her scream led the rest of us to her.
I couldn’t move, the horrific sight twisting and solidifying into my brain. The girl I had known my entire life was now stiff and unmoving. Her eyes were open, and her clothes were practically torn from her body. No longer a girl, but a corpse left in the woods.
I watched both my family and the Hopelys grieve. Will broke down in my mother’s arms. Alex’s sisters were numb with pain. I heard her father’s guttural sobs.
Alex was dead and Mr. Hopely was her grieving father. I couldn’t say anything about what he’d done.
Within a week, at the Hopelys’ insistence, the police had zeroed in on Will. If I had said anything then about what Gary had done to me, it would have looked like retaliation. Who would have believed me?
30
The book had been a stroke of genius. I was a year away from graduating Dartmouth and still reeling from Will’s first failed appeal. I’d always been a good writer and Dartmouth’s BFA had made me an even better one. I wanted to get Will out of jail, and in order to do that, I knew I’d need to drum up interest in his case. I realized that a novel was the way to go. I could craft something that would make people pay attention. A tell-all would have been great, but if it was nonfiction, I would have had to tread lightly. If I wrote a fictionalized version of our story, however, I could say whatever I wanted. You can’t sue someone for fiction—or at least not easily. I knew Gary would never let his family take it to court. He’d never risk me telling the world what he was doing the night that his daughter died.
I pored over the details of the case. Every time I sat down in front of my computer, the words spilled out of me, the blank page becoming my safe space. The only problem with the book came at its climax. I knew Will hadn’t killed Alex, but I didn’t know who had. None of my research had led to any outstanding suspects.
I couldn’t write the novel without naming a killer. That’s the reason people bought mysteries, for the big reveal. And what good is saying someone was innocent if you don’t know who else to blame? No one likes an unsolved case, so I made an executive decision.
Gary would kill his daughter. The more years that passed, the more the assault began to eat me from the inside out. I had refused to tell anyone about it, but it had completely changed the way I perceived men and sex. Everything that followed—my slutty high school years, Bradley—was his fault. And hedeserved to be punished for it. In print. Whether readers believed me or not, it would make Gary a villain. A suspect. After all, his alibi was no better than Will’s—he was asleep, a fact corroborated by Mrs. Hopely alone.
And it was just like the police said: Families lie.
I knew he would understand. The moment he found out how he was characterized, he would know why I’d done it. He had molested me, and this was my revenge.
The night the news broke, I was back at my loft after fucking some guy in Alphabet City, a little drunk and very unsatisfied. I was standing in the kitchen balancing on my uncomfortable heels and hate scrolling through Facebook when I saw the headline from thePalm Beach Post: “Gary Hopely, father of murder victim Alexandria Hopely, dead by suicide at age 57.”
Even before the hateful messages started rolling in from the Hopely sisters, even before Mrs. Hopely was interviewed by ABC about the impact of my book, I knew I was the reason.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and my pen had killed Gary Hopely.
I opened the champagne my editor gave me when I made theNew York Timesbestseller list, and drank the entire bottle in one go. It was the first time I felt real joy since before Will was arrested. Justice had been served, at least in this instance. I waited for the guilt to hit me, but it never did.
31
The dining room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Uncomfortable silence filled the air as I finished telling them all what happened the night Alex was killed. No one interrupted me. No one asked a single question. Tommy’s face was white. My father was crying. When I looked at my mother, her bottom lip was trembling.
“I made Gary the murderer for a reason,” I finished evenly. “He got to live free for eleven years while Will rotted away in prison. I’m glad he killed himself.”
My mother’s face contorted into something unreadable. I reached for the wine bottle and took a swig straight from it. I pushed my chair back from the table and bent down to pick up my copy ofThe Smileys Next Doorfrom where it still lay on the floor.
“Rose.” My mom reached a hand out toward me. I stormed past her to my bedroom.
No one followed me.
I didn’t go to bed.
I meant to, but instead I stomped around my room, slightly drunk and radiating with anger. I couldn’t go back out there. To look at the faces of my family members right now would be unbearable.
They might feel bad. Bad that they never asked me about what happened that night, or looked closely enough at my behavior following Alex’s death. It had been so easy to say that Will’s arrest and his alleged murder of Alex were responsible for the monster I became in my teen years. That was easier than investigating the truth.
Maybe they wouldn’t believe me. I could see it happening. What was one more lie when they already believed that I’d written over a hundred thousand words of them?
Now, as an adult, the weight of what had happened that night came slamming down on me. I felt furious at all the men who had ever taken advantage of me. First Gary, Bradley, and then even Will, who allowed my pursuit of his innocence to continue even when he himself wasn’t trying to help. These men who had come into my life and taken what they wanted with no regard for what it would do to me.
