Page 54

Dinah

Joe doesn’t come back into my room. I wait, my body tensed and ready, a dozen explanations quick on my tongue, but the minutes tick by, and then it has been at least an hour with no sound at the door and no light in the room.

I don’t understand. We are a unit, a team. When I need him, he’s there. When we fight, we work through the problem until we find a solution.

We do not go to bed angry. We do not use childish techniques like the silent treatment.

My husband loves, above everything else, to work through and discuss feelings—to death, if necessary.

It’s one of the most frustrating things about him, my exhaustion heavy by the time an argument is finally resolved, but right now, I’ll take it.

I’ll take anything just to explain my carefully curated version of the “truth.”

He’ll be thinking over how Jessica got here, why I brought Reese Bishop to him, looking for places where this situation turned wrong. I need to be smart, to use this time to prepare to defend every lie I’ve told.

Thankfully, he didn’t ask a lot of questions when I brought the mother-daughter duo to his attention.

He needed a new patient, and I had the solution—a terminally ill woman with a daughter who could disappear without drawing too much attention.

Joe loves a challenge, and getting a loving daughter to admit to her mother’s murder was one he immediately embraced.

I promised him that it would be easy, and it was.

Reese had no security system at her home, a flimsy lock on her back window, no dog to alert when I lifted the sill and crawled in.

I let Joe in through the back door, and we went to Jessica’s room first. He soaked a rag in chloroform and pressed it over her mouth, easily holding her down when she jerked awake and began to struggle.

The struggle didn’t last long. Just a few seconds, and then Jessica was limp and he was carrying her out of the house and into the back of the minivan we had rented for the occasion. The white minivan, which was almost a carbon copy of Reese’s and parked beside hers in the driveway.

While Joe checked Jessica’s room for any sign of our visit, I entered Reese’s bathroom, where her medication had been lined up, ready for her to take in the morning.

I used a small needle to inject the barbiturate into two of the gel caps in the pile.

Then, to be safe, I opened the lid of the vanilla-hazelnut creamer in the fridge and emptied the rest of the syringe there.

She only needed to take one of the pills or fix a cup of coffee, and it would be done. Slow breathing and sleepiness, a loss of coordination, followed by death. She never woke up, never heard us, never even knew we were there.

I could have stayed until the morning, could have made sure that it happened, but truth be told, I didn’t need Reese to die. We had Jessica, and what I really needed was to keep the two women from each other.

I count to a thousand and scream his name.

Count again, and repeat. I count to ten thousand and back down, then spend a long time trying to do the math to figure out how much time has passed.

At least fifteen thousand seconds. That’s about four hours, best I can calculate, and it’s unlikely he’s talked to her for that long—which means he’s left me here.

I don’t know how to process that, and when I finally fall asleep, it’s on a pillow that reeks of a dead woman.