Page 124 of Old Money

“I was with someone else too,” he says. “In here. That’s where I was when it happened.”

I wait, confused. The sauna alibi? The one I know is bullshit?

“No, you weren’t,” I retort—then catch myself and try again, more carefully. “I know you weren’t with Alex, okay? I know what Alex said was—”

Patrick holds up a hand.

“I’m not talking about what Alex said, and—yeah, I think you’d better just leave him out of this.” He shoots me a look of simmering rage. “I’m not discussing Alex. Not with you. Not today.”

Patrick holds me in a hard look. I nod.

“So you were in here with another girl,” I state evenly.

“I was with Barbara.”

Barbara who?I think, blinking at him.There weren’t any Barbaras at school.

Patrick looks back, silent and neutral, waiting for me to puzzle it out. For me to realize he’s talking about my own aunt. Caitlin’s mother. My mother’s sister—myBarbara.

“You—” I stumble.

I see the clubhouse from above again, looking down at it like a dollhouse as another room lights up—the locker room this time. I see the figures in there—Barbara’s auburn hair and Patrick’s, dark and shaggy—but I can’t conjure the rest.

“You had an affair?” I hear myself say.

Patrick makes another noncommittal gesture with his head.

“It wasn’t an affair,” he counters quietly—that unmistakable mix of self-righteousness and shame. “We had sex a few times. It was stupid—nothing. Itwould’vebeen nothing if things hadn’t happened the way they did.”

A vague, protesting syllable bursts out of me, and hangs there—the rest of the words, whatever they were, forgotten. My train of thought is getting away from me, derailed by this new, unthinkable fact.

“I was a little shit back then, okay?” Patrick spits back, bridling. “Not a killer.”

I look at him, pulling my focus back into the room. At least now the phone call makes more sense—the mysterious twenty-two minutes. Whatever he said to her, it wasn’t a confession.

“Why did you lie to the cops then? If you had a real alibi?”

He leans back, smirking.

“Why didn’t I tell them I was fucking my girlfriend’s mom? You meanafteryou told them I killed her?”

He chuckles to himself. I wait it out.

“Yes,” I reply. “They’d have confirmed your story with Barbara. It would have been uncomfortable, but it would’ve made your life easier in the long run. God—it might’ve changed everything.”

They might have investigated properly. They might’ve found Jamie sooner. This might have been a private tragedy with an ending.

“Twenty years,” I murmur, my mind still reeling with what-ifs. “If you’d just—”

Patrick lunges forward.

“Do you hear yourself?” he barks, a drop of spittle arcing through the air. “I’d just watched them pull my dead girlfriend out of the pool. I was in shock—and there’s this kid screaming that I killed her.”

He jabs a hand at me, the other one gripping the edge of the sink.

“I was fucking delirious! I kept thinking it was a mistake and it wasn’t her, or that she wasn’t completely dead, and they just had to, you know, get her heart going again. I mean, for like a week, I’d be like, ‘Did they check? Are they sure?’ ” He shakes his head and exhales a shaky sigh. “So no, no, I wasn’t thinking about alibis. I wasn’t worried about convincing people that I wasn’t a murderer—because, again, Iwasn’t.”

He leans back and clamps his head by the temples with his thumb and middle finger.