“Really? What’s that?”
“I’m going up to Seaside to see a friend. I might be gone a few days. It has to do with Molly.”
Amanda left the edges of her toast on the plate, as usual. Curious, Larry decided to ask her about it.
“How come you do that?” he asked, pointing.
“I just don’t like edges, that’s all.” Her cheeks burned with embarrassment, but she held steady. It’s not a crime, she told herself.
“Really?” Larry looked curious. “Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always been this way. If something has a corner or edge, I can’t finish it. It’s not just food. At work, I set up all my tasks in a circle. That way I’m not at the end of a grid, with a corner left, because then I’d have to leave that task.”
He was watching her, his face friendly. He looked intrigued.
“How interesting,” he said. There was no judgment in his face.
“No one has ever been able to explain it to me. I used to get into terrible trouble at school. You should have seen it at recess when they made us play four square.”
He laughed, and Amanda relaxed.
“You know, I always wanted a daughter like you,” he said.
It had just slipped out.
“I mean, a child,” he said, quickly. “Marjorie and I talked about it. What kind of interesting things would they do? How would they makeus laugh? She used to say having children would be like a magical trip you take to a destination that will be revealed to you, step by step, over time. She said it would be like going to a museum where the paintings changed every day, and you got to interact with the artist. Marjorie loved kids. She wanted them so bad.”
“You didn’t have any?” she asked.
“We tried. None of them made it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He could tell she meant it.
“It’s been my greatest regret. Not the fact that it didn’t happen. That’s life. It was how I handled it. Or more like how I didn’t handle it. I was a cop. That’s what I told myself. I said, Larry, you put things away. You handle crises. I acted like Marjorie’s pain was some goddamn case I could close.” He shook his head, his eyes sober. “That’s not how it works.”
“You never thought of adopting? Kids like me?”
“By the time we gave up on having babies, it felt too late. The last one was stillborn, and Marjorie was never the same after that. Of course, I wasn’t expecting her to be. But she needed me to help her out of the wilderness, and I was just not there.”
Larry got up with his plate. Amanda wondered if she should hug him and decided not to. He didn’t seem like a hugger.
When he came back for her plate, she had arranged all the toast ends to make a shape. “Here,” she said.
It was a smile.
Larry laughed. It was a good laugh.
“See? I told you,” he said. “Like every day is a surprise.”
The man watched from outside the cabin as Larry and Amanda did the dishes, then turned off the kitchen light. It was toobad Amanda had not gone back to the hotel. He didn’t want to have to try to kill them together.
One at a time was easier. That was what Martha had said.
He had planned to kill Amanda that night he’d chased her. But she had gotten away, and he’d felt like breaking down her hotel room door might attract attention. Then she and Larry had left town, and he’d had Reggie to take care of.
Now they were back, and Martha had said it had to be done right away. It was already almost too late.
