Page 144 of Good Girls Lie

The detective and the chaplain share a look.

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”

Jude steps into the foyer, her eyes wild. “Ellen? I’ve just received a text. The school is burning.”

EPILOGUE

New York City

Eleven Years Later

88

THE FLIGHT

She doesn’t recognize me.

This is a good thing, though I am momentarily outraged. After what she did to me, it’s insulting to see her eyes pass over me as if I’m just another person getting ready to step on the plane. She should be looking at me with horror, with shame and regret. With love. With happiness.

I am her sister, after all.

But her eyes light upon me and slide away, a small, polite,I’ve already forgotten you existsmile playing on her lips. All she sees is another privileged woman, sipping champagne in the first-class lounge before the doors to the flight open. If she had any idea what I’ve been through, she wouldn’t act so smug.

She makes this flight from New York to London regularly. She has business to attend to all over Europe, the UK, the Americas. She’s chosen an odd branch of maritime law that governs shipping and import/export issues, works for a company that distributes wine throughout the world.

After what she did, I can’t believe they let her into law school, much less Harvard, but she convinced them she was the victim, that she’d been terrorized, that she was only doing what I forced her to so she wouldn’t die herself. She didn’t serve time. She was allowed to keep her visa. She inherited the bloody money, bought her way into Harvard, and has, by all accounts, lived a blameless life since.

God, she is such a superb actress. She always was a tremendous liar.

I haven’t spoken to her in person since that fateful day. She surrounded herself with people so it would be impossible to get her alone. Of course, she assumed I was dead. They all assumed I was dead. But I knew the tunnels better than they. I scuttled out while the fire raged, down the mountain, away, away, away.

She’s older. I mean, we all are, but I’ve aged a bit more than she. Granted, I’ve spent more time in the sun and she has a monthly appointment at the La Mer spa, dropping thousands at a time on treatments, but eleven years isn’t much time.

Still, she looks good. Fit. Healthy. A few barely perceptible lines on her forehead, the blond hair carefully highlighted now instead of natural. Still tall and elegantly proportioned.

Today is her thirtieth birthday.

She didn’t use her special day as an excuse to get out of the scheduled trip—she’s too responsible for that. She doesn’t mind spending the day alone. Though her wife protested, she wants the time to herself. To think. To reflect. A nice overnight flight to London, pampered by the flight attendants on British Airways. Life could be worse.

Life can always be worse.

This plane is set up with four seats across–one by each window, two in the center. She prefers to sit in the center seat, 2C, so I’ve chosen the one next to her as if we’re traveling together. The seats become beds, our legs angling away at a 30-degree angle, leaving our heads only a foot apart. It is fitting, really, when you think about how much time we spent plotting and planning.

I listen to her every word. I know her every move. She thinks she’s protected, but she’s not. She never was.

The pills were meant for me. I mean, this is no way to live, skulking about, lurking, spying on my lost sister, watching her lead the life I should have had. Some call it stalking, but when it’s information gathering, I think spying suffices.

I collected them assiduously the entire time I was watching over Piper as she lay dying, poor girl, before they realized the meds weren’t working and switched her to the Fentanyl that robbed her of the last bits of her sanity, then the slow drip of morphine that eventually killed her. Took her a few years to finally give it up.

A pill for you, a pill for me. Though I’ve never taken one, never indulged. It would have been so much easier if I had. They are strong, so strong they made Piper see dancing unicorns and butterflies—a better thing to see, I suppose, than the dark edges of a cloak and the reflection of your own wasted face in the scythe.

The police moved in and out of her room in the rehab facility for weeks, the crow-eyed woman and the bear of a man, thinking she would remember how the fire started, what she saw that day, but her memory was seared away like the last of her flesh. They thought they could solve three mysteries at once if they understood her garbled words—Becca, Camille, the fire. They assumed I turned to ash like the rest of the school.

They were wrong.

I should have just killed the poor girl, put her out of her pain. But I wanted to keep my sister close, somehow, so I became Piper’s titular caretaker. The BFF from school who wouldn’t leave her side. Where was her real BFF? After a single, brief visit at the beginning, Vanessa never came again. Which made it easy to pose as her.

Was I doing penance? Perhaps.