Page 130 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“Is that why you didn’t want me around Margot?” I asked. “Because I was asking questions about Jake, and you were scared she would give me answers? You didn’t want me to know the truth?”

“What exactly did Margot tell you?”

“She told me everything,” I lied.

“It was an accident,” my father said. “We all thought he was dead. He wasn’t breathing.”

I turned my head and stared out the glass at the snow dusting the road and the countryside. I couldn’t risk my father’s seeing the shock that I felt registering on my face. What was an accident exactly?

“Everyone was looking to me, to tell them what to do, to fix it. We were scared. We were just kids,” my father said. “And then Margot, Margot came up with this idea. To make it look like Jake had—had killed himself. To throw his body over the Ledge and just make it look like a suicide. To forge a note about the exam he had stolen and leave it in his dorm room.”

“So you did it?” I asked. “You threw him into the water?”

“Is that what she told you?” my father asked. He looked at me and then away.

I didn’t say anything.

“He was too heavy for Margot to lift him by herself,” my father said. “She needed someone to help her. She kept saying it was the right thing, that it was the only way to save ourselves, that he was dead anyway, and so why did we have to throw our futures away with him?

“I told her I would take him. I’d drive him to the hospital in Falls Church, and I’d leave his body where somebody would find him right away. But she said that was too risky. That there’d be too many questions. That it could lead back to us. She said we needed to make it so that nobody would come looking for us, for answers. And so Matthew York, he helped her do it. It wasn’t until later that we found out that he wasn’t dead when we threw him in.”

It took me a moment to realize what my father was saying. He and his friends had killed Jake Griffin.

“I was weak,” my father said, finally looking at me. “In the worst possible way, I was weak. I was too weak to help Margot do it, and I was too weak to try and stop her.”

I don’t know what made me do it, but I reached over and covered my father’s hand with my own.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’ve never told anyone that before,” he said.

“Not even Mom?” I asked.

My father looked like I had sucker-punched him. I felt him pull away from me, and I drew back my hand. “Your mother?” he asked.

Now was the time. I could bring up the case file, the photographs, the suitcases. I could ask him for the truth.

“Did she know about Jake?” I asked instead. “Did she know what really happened to him?”

There was a long pause.

“Yes,” my father said finally. “But I wasn’t the one to tell her. She found out that last summer that she was with us. She came across some old photographs while developing film. She interrogated Margot about it, and Margot told her everything.”

That was why my father was so adamant that I stay away from Margot—because she had told my mother the truth about Jake, and he hadn’t wanted her to tell me, too.

“Your mother hired an investigator,” my father said. “She was trying to find evidence, build a case. I didn’t know until after she was gone. I thought . . . I thought she was having an affair. When she disappeared, I went to his house to confront him. I thought maybe, maybe they had run off together. That’s when he told me the true nature of their relationship. When my PI discovered the bank tapes—the money missing from the safety-deposit boxes—I knew she’d run off, and why. She’d discovered what I’d done, what I was. She couldn’t stand to be with me anymore. And she wanted to hurt me, in the most irrevocable way she could.”

I sat there for a moment, in stunned silence. But she hadn’t just left him. She had left me, too. And Seraphina. And Claire. And Grandma and Grandpa Fairchild, and Uncle Hank. Why would she leave all of us behind, without a word, without a thought, without a backward glance?

“Claire said—” I started. I took a deep breath. I didn’t know exactly how to say this. “Claire told me you and Mom got in a fight the week before she left. That Mom got hurt.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father clench his fists.

“We were arguing and your mother fell,” my father said. “I didn’t touch her. I would never . . . I would never hurt her.”

Is that true? I couldn’t help but ask myself. Could my mother have been scared of my father? Could that fear have kept her silent and hidden all these years? I couldn’t help but think of my mother’s last words to my father: Get your hands off me.

We sat in silence for a while, and then my father asked, “What made you ask about your mother?”