Page 31

I drive like the intruder I am, like someone who has just done something very wrong.

I don’t slow down until I’ve made it onto the properly paved road, and even then I go down to about five miles above the speed limit because the last thing I want is to get pulled over.

My lungs still burn. I cough and can’t stop coughing from all the dust I swallowed while I was running.

I desperately need water and pull into the first gas station I see.

My wallet is drowning in junk at the bottom of my tote bag, and I fumble around for it. I haven’t looked at my phone or responded to Olivia since I was in the house, and when I tap it, I see it’s dead, and of course I haven’t brought a charger.

My fingers brush the photographs next, and I pull them out to examine them.

At first, I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking at but I recoil anyway.

It takes a few moments for my mind to make sense of the two pictures together and once I do I know without a doubt they were meant for me to find.

There’s a reason they were in that particular book, my book.

I can’t believe she still has this book. But my inscription to her is right there.

I hope you love this adventure as much as I do. Love you like a sister. Lizzie

It’s a copy of West with the Night, which was one of my favorite books as a teenager.

I happened on it at the library in high school.

I loved it so much I never returned it and this is my copy from the Bucks County Free Library.

The stamp is still right there in the back.

I adored the biography of the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west because I loved the idea of a woman breaking all the rules of society and learning to fly a plane.

I devoured Beryl Markham’s sense of adventure and the freedom she gained as a pilot.

I wanted to be her, and I knew Bex would feel the same way.

I gave it to Bex on her twenty-first birthday.

She finished it in one night and tried to give it back to me but I made her keep it because I loved that she loved it.

That seemed to prove something about our friendship to me, that I had chosen her wisely.

Here it is now, and these horrible pictures were tucked inside of it.

Bex has always loved instant cameras. She liked the privacy of them, the fact that no one else would ever see the image if you didn’t want them to. I wonder now if anyone has ever seen these photographs besides Bex and me.

Like most Polaroids these have a date in the lower right corner.

The clearer of the two pictures, and obviously the more recent one, was taken a week before Grayson Sommers was murdered.

It’s a close-up of Bex’s face, throat, and shoulder.

Her left eye is heavily bruised and nearly swollen shut—the same eye Bex had heavily covered with makeup when I saw her.

The bruises on her neck look like an actual handprint.

Someone hurt her badly soon before her husband was murdered and she wanted me to know it.

The other picture is painfully similar to the first. It’s also of Bex.

Her face. Her beautiful face, bruised and battered.

But she’s different in this picture. It’s the Bex that I knew.

The one who just appeared in my dream. Younger.

Not a trace of wrinkles or Botox or the battle scars of motherhood.

There’s something different about her eyes.

I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s there.

She looks so scared in this picture whereas in the other one she is simply resigned.

There’s blood matted in her hair. It was brassier then, or at least it looks that way in the faded photo.

Goddamn that man. Because I have to assume it was Gray who did it.

I look at the date last, though I know it’s old.

September 9. Fourteen years ago. There’s something about that particular date that tugs at my brain.

It’s not her birthday, but it is a week before mine.

And the year. It’s the year before I met Peter, which means this was taken the week I went to San Francisco, the week that Bex ghosted me.

This is the reason.

This is the terrible reason.

I don’t realize that I’m crying until a drop lands on the picture. I quickly wipe it away, but it still stains the delicate film.

Why didn’t she tell me? I was right there.

I was knocking on her door. I was running around the city looking for her.

I was calling and texting her nonstop and the whole time I thought she’d ditched me, that she hated me, that she had blown me off for her new fancy boyfriend. But none of that was true.

Was she even the one who wrote that nasty email to me? Or was it Gray? It certainly didn’t sound a bit like her but I’d been so pissed I accepted it at face value.

She kept this from me for a reason. Probably the same reason my mother hid it from all her friends for my entire childhood.

My dad didn’t flare up (as Mom called it) that often, but when he did it was bad, and she sent us up to our room and bore the brunt of it.

Afterward he was apologetic and helpful around the house in a way he never was otherwise.

He took us to the zoo and the mall. We got to order anything we wanted from the movie theater concession stand and we returned home on a sugar high with bloated bellies.

When Dad died the year before I left for college my mom was transformed.

My quiet, fearful mother became a social butterfly.

She took up swimming, met a nice woman named Roberta at the YMCA, and the two of them eventually moved in together and got very into river cruising.

Robbie had money from a teacher’s pension and a beach house.

The first half of my mom’s life became a footnote and she didn’t want to talk about it.

We’re closer than ever now. She watches my kids once a week and they love sleeping over with her and Robbie, but we don’t mention Dad and we never talk about the bruises.

I know it was shame that kept Bex from telling me then, but she is telling me now. She wants me to know, but what does she want me to do with the information?

She can’t want me to publish these. If she kept this secret for this long, she can’t want me to expose it like this. The abuse contributes to a motive for Bex killing Gray, especially if Gray was the one who hurt her. It also could be a plea for self-defense.

“I need more than this, Bex,” I whisper.

The other book. It’s only then that I remember there were two.

There’s no dust jacket on the other one, so I flip to the title page.

Grace Beyond the Diamond . Oh god. It’s an autobiography by Marsden Greer!

And this book is also heavily highlighted and underlined, almost like she was researching him.

There are exclamation marks in the margins and on one page someone, probably Bex, has very clearly scrawled the words son of a bitch.

The underlined portions are mostly physical details about Marsden.

Strangely, the fact that he had asthma as a kid.

Another paragraph where he mentions he was slightly deaf in one ear until the fifth grade.

A line about how his mother thought he was left-handed, but he switched preferences suddenly in kindergarten.

What the hell does it mean? Is she accusing Marsden of something? Could he have been the one who hurt her? The one who murdered Gray?

I pick up my phone. It’s still dead. I need a charger. This gas station is also a small grocery store. I buy one of those ridiculously long hot-pink phone chargers they always seem to have in places like this, a large coffee, and a bag of Twizzlers.

I sip my coffee and gnaw on the red ropes while the phone charges in my idling car. I thumb through the pages of West with the Night, remembering all the reasons this book broke open my fifteen-year-old brain the first time I read it.

There are passages that I highlighted with my old yellow pen.

Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead. It had followed the constant pattern of discard and growth that all lives follow.

I could never tell where inspiration begins and impulse leaves off. I suppose the answer is in the outcome. If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.

These were things I thought were profound back then, and to be honest, they still feel that way now. But there are sentences that are underlined with faint blue ink too and I know that wasn’t me. They were from Bex. One of them stops me hard.

The only disadvantage in surviving a dangerous experience lies in the fact that your story of it tends to be anticlimactic. You can never carry on right through the point where whatever it is that threatens your life actually takes it—and get anybody to believe you. The world is full of sceptics.

And then I see this:

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.

Now I know what Bex’s silence meant. And I know it’s up to me to find a way to break it.