“So it’s true?”
He nods, eyes on the floor. “I’m sorry, Cleo,” he says. “I am really sorry.”
“Holy shit.” My face feels hot as I grip the counter. I could have sworn that I’d already accepted the reality—my dad and Janine. But all these years, all this time?
“It was a mistake, obviously.” My dad looks up at me, and I see that while he wants me not to be angry, he doesn’t actually feel bad. There’s something so flat about his expression. Calculating.
“What if Janine had something to do with what happened to Mom?” I ask.
“She didn’t,” he says. “I know that she didn’t.”
“But George saw somebody that night—I think it might have been Janine.”
My dad shakes his head.
“Why, Dad? Because you think she’s so great?”
“Because I know she didn’t. Shewasactually mad at your mom, though,” he says. “I’m telling you that because I don’t want you to think I’m hiding anything anymore. Angry or not, it wasn’t Janine, though. I know it wasn’t.”
“She was jealous, that’s why she was angry?”
“No, your mom had Kyle’s phone. Because he had pictures of you on there, I guess. She took it to protect you.” Kyle showing up at my dorm, some cop going after him—that all makes a little more sense now. “Well, apparently, there are also pictures of Annie on there … So Janine wanted the phone. Your mom said no. They argued … And then Janine left.”
“And then Mom just happened to end up …”End up what?I still can’t bring myself to think dead is a possibility. Even though I know, at this point, it’s the most likely one. “So you think it’s a coincidence that Janine, who you were cheating with, was mad at yourwifeand now your wife … Are you fuckingkiddingme?”
“It wasn’t Janine, Cleo.”
“I get that having sex with Janine has made you delusional, apparently, but—”
“I was with her,” he says, cutting me off. “I waswithJanine, across the street, when something happened to your mom here.”
“You were at the airport,” I say stupidly. But my hands have tightened into fists.His lost time. There was lost time.
He shakes his head. “I was across the street,” he says, looking me in the eye, and now it’s with … self-righteousness? “I landed at four-thirty and went to Janine’s. I got there around five-thirty, right after Janine left your mom. There wouldn’t have been enough time for Janine to do what you’re suggesting. To do something to your mom and then, you know … move her.”
“Wait, was Annie there …”
“She came home at one point,” he says. “She’s known about us. You know how Janine and Annie are—more like friends than mother and daughter.”
“How long has it been going on?” My voice is icy as I glare at him.
“Cleo,” he says, with a shake of his head. “Come on, you—”
“How long?”
He’s quiet again. “Years,” he says. “Since you were little.”
And I think of the beach that day, my dad not being there to make sure I didn’t drown—not because he was off somewhere. But because he was off with Janine.
I might be sick, right there on the island. “Can you please go?” I manage. “I just—I need to be alone.”
For a moment it looks like he’s about to argue. But then he stares up at the ceiling, like an answer is written there.
“I’m sorry, Cleo,” he says again as he gets up to leave. “I really am.”
This time I know what I’m looking for as I search my mom’s bedroom—Kyle’s burner. It’s small, a flip phone. It’s possible that I missed it tucked somewhere, that the police did, if my mom was hiding it on purpose. I look again under her bed and in the drawers. Nothing.
But when I open the closet, my eyes snag on the top shelf. The small collection of fancy handbags—the only luxury I ever saw her allow herself. Maybe that’s why I was obsessed with playing with them when I was little, because they seemed like a window into some secret frivolous side to her. I grab a stool and reach for the blue box-shaped bag that I’d always loved the most because it looked like an adorable little suitcase. I used to carry it around the house when I was seven or eight, pretending that I was “going on a trip.”
