Page 41 of Kill Your Darlings

end and stays there. Or else he lays on a float. Once, some cousin was over with her awful twin boys and they flipped him

off his float. He wasn’t even completely in the deep end—he was kind of at the midway point where the bottom of the pool starts

to slope—but he completely panicked. I asked him later, not that night, but a week or so later, if he liked to swim. He told

me he was good at it, but it wasn’t really his thing. Which I interpreted as: he can’t swim.”

“So I think you’re onto something. It’s kind of a perfect crime if you think about it. Cause of death would be drowning, and they’d test his blood and find out he was drunk.”

“Yeah, I just think everyone would know I’d done it. Everyone in his family anyway. I think they know how I feel about him,

and they definitely know how much money is involved.”

“But there’s a prenup, right?”

“Yeah, I can’t divorce him. Or, rather, I can divorce him, but I’d get nothing. But if he dies, as far as I know I’d get his

money. I mean, there’s no house or anything because his parents own that, but he came into a trust fund from his grandfather

when he turned twenty-one.”

“And how much is that?”

“Ten million dollars,” Wendy said. “Give or take.”

“Jesus.”

“Well, minus what he spent on the Porsche.”

“It’s still a lot of money.”

“It is.”

Thom was quiet for a moment. Wendy said, “Maybe we can change the subject.”

“Yes, let’s talk about what we would do if we had ten million dollars.”

It was dark when Wendy walked back from the hotel to Rachel’s apartment.

She walked along Massachusetts Avenue instead of Oxford Street, past bars and restaurants that were filling up.

The night had turned cold, but she didn’t mind.

She’d already decided that this was where she wanted to live.

Here in Cambridge with its old brick buildings and crisp fall weather.

Or anywhere in New England, really. Just not Texas.

Not with Bryce. And as much as she loved her mother, she had no interest in living in Wyoming.

She wanted to be near culture, surrounded by theaters and great restaurants and universities.

And she wanted to live near the ocean. This was despite, or maybe because of, the fact that she’d seen the ocean so few times in her life.

Her father had moved her mother and her brother and her at least fifteen times in the course of her childhood, all around the country in search of get-rich schemes, or maybe just in search of places where he could start over again, but most of those places were out west. The two years in New Hampshire were an outlier, her father lured there by some shady friend trying to develop condos on an old racecourse.

That was the first time she’d seen the ocean.

They’d parked in a sprawling gravel lot, just her and her mother, and walked on a boardwalk that took them over a dune.

The sight of the ocean, spread out in front of her in all its enormity, had filled her with a peculiar feeling of homecoming.

This was where I should be living, she remembered thinking.

It was summertime, but her mother and she had driven to the beach without suits or a beach blanket or even hats, since they owned none of those things.

But they sat on the sand and took their shoes off and watched the ocean roll in and roll out again.

Back at Rachel’s apartment Wendy let herself in with the spare key she’d been given. There was a note on the kitchen table

naming a bar within walking distance that said “Join us there!” She wasn’t particularly in the mood for Rachel’s manic energy

that night, but she was famished and went into Rachel’s room to change her outfit.

The next day she told Rachel and Josh that she was too hungover to go out for brunch but that they should go themselves. As

soon as they left, she got dressed herself and walked the now-familiar route across Cambridge to Thom’s hotel. She found him

outside on the sidewalk, wearing khakis and a plaid shirt, smoking a cigarette and shivering slightly. “Should we go get lunch

somewhere?” Wendy said.

“Let’s go back to my room first. I want to talk with you.” He seemed serious as he said it, his face tight, and as she followed

him up the uneven stairs to his second-floor room, she thought to herself that it was nice while it lasted.

But once they were alone in the room, the door shut, Thom took a deep breath and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s kill Bryce.”

“What?”

“Just hear me out, and I’ll understand if you want to turn around and never see me again, but I need to say this. I feel like

we’ve been given an opportunity, this chance for a really remarkable life. It’s not just the money, it’s the statement we’ll

be making about ourselves. It will bind us, in a way. Bind us more I mean. We’ve always been bonded. Since that trip to D.C.,

since we found out we have the same birthday, and I’m not saying we were meant to do this, but it feels that way to me. It

feels like we’re special. Let’s kill one horrible man and then we’ll spend the rest of our lives as millionaires atoning for

it.” He smiled even though his face was still tight.

Wendy could feel the breath moving in and out of her lungs. “You’re serious?”

“I think so.” Thom sat down on the edge of the bed and in the dim light he didn’t look any different from when she’d first

met him.

“You think so?”

“I haven’t slept all night. I just keep thinking about it.”

“I’ll just divorce him. It’ll be messy, but I’ll be free of him. We won’t be poor, exactly, you and I.”

“What about your mother?”

Wendy sat down next to Thom on the bed. “I do worry about her. But we’ll figure it out.”

“Last night when I was in and out of sleep, I kept having this strange half dream, that I knew that one day your husband would

do a terrible thing. Like he was a serial killer or a politician; he would start a war.”

“Like in The Dead Zone .”

“Yes, exactly. I think... and I know this is ridiculous... that we are somehow fated to do this. It’s an evil act, but

it’s for the greater good.”

“I don’t think Bryce is a serial killer and there is no way he would ever run for political office, but if I’m honest, I think he’s someone who makes the world a lesser place.

I thought I saw something else in him once, but it’s not really there.

I just pretended there was more to him so I could justify marrying him for his money. ”

“Do you want me to stop talking about this?” Thom said.

Wendy pretended to think, then said, “No, we can keep talking about it. It’s just hard not to see that we’re in some kind

of movie and we’re about to make a terrible decision and everyone knows it but us.”

“If we did this, we wouldn’t get caught. We wouldn’t turn against one another. We would make something remarkable of our lives.

We’d give half the money to charity.”

“Half?” Wendy said.

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“And we’re special. You know that, right? You feel it, too, don’t you?”

And Wendy, honestly and without hesitation, said, “I do.”