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Dinah

I didn’t plan to help her. I planned to help him hunt her down, but somewhere in between me sneaking into her room to stage her suicide and me walking into our home and hearing her beg my husband for mercy, I grew a conscience.

Maybe it’s because when I originally decided to kill her, it was a necessary sacrifice for my marriage—a union I had believed was ironclad and perfect.

Happy marriages don’t end with the wife in a box, begging her husband for mercy. If he could flip on me so easily, I could return the favor and be a good mother for one brief moment in time.

I’ll confess, I hit him harder than was necessary.

Let’s call it me letting off some steam and paying him back for putting me in a cell.

It felt good, crashing that bronze frog onto his head.

And finally, some use out of the lawn ornament, which had been a birthday present from Sal, a present picked out by his then girlfriend, a finance major with an addiction to online shopping with his credit card.

Honestly, I didn’t even need to hit Joe.

I had a syringe ready—the same sort he had used on me the night before.

But like I said, emotions were running hot and I wanted to tip the power scales back in my favor.

So I hit him hard, then carefully injected him with some of the pento.

Just enough to give him a nice little snooze but to make sure he wakes up in time for our departure.

We’ve discussed our exit plan before and thoroughly prepared for it, because that’s what we love to do. My mother once said that our dream date night would just involve a mile-long piece of paper and a pen. She was right, which is why I don’t have to wonder what I should do right now.

I know all the steps. What I don’t know is how my husband will react when he wakes up, because what I just did—letting a patient out of the clinic—is a situation we’ve never planned for.

It’s an unthinkable crime, one worse than me trying to kill one, but not even in the ballpark of me having a secret daughter.

If he can forgive me for the latter, then the former won’t matter.

I think.

Eventually, he will forgive me for hiding Jessica’s existence from him. He’ll forgive me for the secret of my lost virginity and any lies I’ve told him about that. He’ll get over that I didn’t come to him for help when Reese reached out and told me she was going to tell Jessica all about me.

Reese is the reason this all crashed down. She should have just kept her word, but instead she emailed me, two decades after she took my baby, and requested a lunch. The email was cryptic and short, with an air of urgency that couldn’t be ignored.

I ignored it.

Two days later, a second email.

A day later, a call to the station, one they forwarded to my cell.

So I replied to her email and agreed to meet her for lunch. And there, across the white linen tablecloth at Fogarty’s, she told me she was going to tell Jessica that I was her real mom. It was not a request for permission; it was a dictation of her plans.

I told her that that was absolutely not okay and against the contract we had agreed to, back when she was a barren woman who was eternally grateful for a child.

She said that she didn’t care, that she was dying and didn’t want to leave her daughter without a mother.

I sat there, in my blue linen suit, a glass of Diet Coke sweating on the tablecloth, and silently panicked.

When the waitress asked for our lunch orders, I requested the check for our drinks.

I paid for Reese’s tea and went to the restroom, where I had a mini anxiety attack inside one of the stalls.

On my way out, I saw Reese getting into her sedan, and I almost followed her home.

I had this wild, impulsive decision to take her right then and deliver her to Joe, but that would have been ridiculous.

Reese would have told him everything, and wouldn’t have needed any mind tricks or manipulation to do it.

Instead, I waited, and with each day that passed, the chances doubled that she had told Jessica. Each strange number calling my phone filled me with dread. A mosquito-control sprayer knocked on our door one Saturday afternoon and almost gave me a heart attack.

I couldn’t live like that. My plan wasn’t perfect, I didn’t have the time to make it so. Everything was so tight with this one. I had to introduce the idea to Joe and get him to act on it quickly, all before Reese opened her big mouth.

I bought myself a little bit of time. I called Reese and set a second lunch date. Asked her to not tell Jessica until we had a chance to talk. That bought me the ten days I needed, which was the tightest turnaround Joe and I had ever implemented.

I open the closet door, drag over a chair, and stand on it, reaching in for the first of the two suitcases.

They are small, just big enough for toiletries and two changes of clothing.

We don’t need much. At the house in Costa Rica, there are closets stocked full of clothes, fresh linens on the bed, shampoos in the shower, and toothbrushes in their holder.

Everything we will need to get started, with Joe’s offshore accounts there to fund any and every expense that comes up.

Best of all, a country with no extradition—an important quality, given that Freddie and Natalie will likely figure out all our crimes in short order.

All the details I’ve hidden over the years and the last few days.

Things like the coroner’s observation that Reese Bishop had never birthed a child.

Freddie would love that detail. He’d cackle over all this.

And Joe won’t leave me—not right now, with everything in such a precarious state. He might think that he’ll leave me later, once we have some distance from all this, but he won’t. He’ll remember all the things that make us special, and his anger will fade and he’ll fall back in love with me.

He will. He has to. I’ll take a broken version of us over a life without him.

I walk from the bedroom and toward the half bath, stepping over one of his arms, which is sticking out into the hall.

Pausing over him, I pat down his pockets, finding both of our phones and pocketing them.

Continuing past him, I open the junk drawer in the kitchen and grab the key fob to the garage.

Standing at the window above the sink, I lean forward and click the button to open the large double door.

The movement starts immediately, and I watch as the wide panels lift to reveal the pair of four-wheelers, array of mountain bikes, and then the silver grille of the twenty-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser.

Our getaway vehicle.