Page 41 of She Didn’t See It Coming

Donna watches her daughter Lizzie throughout supper. They’re eating a bucket of takeout fried chicken, the three of them, in Lizzie’s apartment. Donna hasn’t mentioned anything about her visit to Paige earlier today.

There is no thought of going over to Sam’s anymore.

Donna has made it clear to Jim and Lizzie that she thinks that Sam may have killed her older daughter.

She can tell Jim is struggling to process this too.

But not Lizzie. Lizzie seems stubborn in her refusal to even consider the possibility that Bryden may have been murdered by her own husband, even though he is the most obvious suspect. And he’s hired himself an attorney.

Donna tries to make allowances for Lizzie.

It’s hard to stomach, after all. Maybe she just can’t face it.

She’s always liked Sam, looked up to him.

She’s in denial. She’s so innocent, really.

She’s never been married; perhaps she idealizes the marital state.

Donna doesn’t know. She likes to think that if Lizzie does, it’s because she’s been witness to the happy and stable marriage of her parents.

Donna had always thought that bringing up her daughters in a happy home would protect them from the kind of tragedy that seems to have befallen Bryden.

How wrong she was. If Sam killed her…How could Bryden have chosen so badly?

Did growing up in a happy home backfire?

Was she too na?ve about how things might be, too trusting?

Maybe girls from dysfunctional homes are wiser, choose better?

Fare better? And maybe Bryden felt she couldn’t tell her mother about the problems in her marriage because she didn’t feel she’d lived up to her parents’ example. Donna doesn’t know. She’ll never know.

Thinking about all this makes Donna profoundly depressed. Maybe Bryden had reasons for finding comfort with someone else. But maybe that other man was the one who killed her. Oh, her poor, sweet Bryden.

Donna slides a look at Lizzie. She seems different tonight, somehow, humming with an unusual energy, her earlier exhaustion gone.

She has an almost feverish brightness in her eyes.

What was she doing in her room earlier? She’d had her door closed when she and Jim got back from the funeral homes.

Donna had wanted to allow Lizzie some downtime after everything she has done lately, so she left her undisturbed all afternoon and went about getting supper herself.

She’d thought Lizzie was napping, but now she wonders if she was on the computer.

Does Lizzie have a secret boyfriend online that she hasn’t told them about?

Donna hopes not. She doesn’t like how everyone seems to meet their partners online these days, with Tinder and all sorts of ridiculous apps.

That’s no way to meet a life partner. But it seems as if that’s all people ever do anymore.

No wonder her younger daughter is still single.

Now Lizzie asks, as she helps herself to more coleslaw, “How did the funeral home visits go?”

Donna says, “I think we found a suitable one,” but she’s dispirited and doesn’t say anything more.

Her husband glances at her in concern and says, “We think we’ll go with the Montgomery one—it seemed nice. They can arrange a small, private ceremony for next Wednesday.”

“Is that what Sam wants?” Lizzie asks.

That lands like a lead balloon. Donna says, “I don’t know. I suppose you can ask him, but that’s what we’re doing. We’re her parents.”

Neither of them had ever considered burying their daughter before.

You don’t think about your child dying before you.

She and Jim haven’t even gone about making funeral arrangements for themselves yet.

Donna feels another surge of grief. It’s like waves, crashing up against the shore, some waves bigger and stronger than others, but relentless.

Or like contractions, during childbirth—you think some of them will kill you. It’s like that. This might kill her.

But Lizzie already seems to have lost interest in the funeral arrangements.

There’s that odd look in her eye again, an unusual excitement.

Maybe she’s secretly in love. Or maybe her daughter is taking drugs.

Her stomach suddenly seems to fall out at the bottom.

Dear God, she can’t deal with that too. Not now.

Should she ask her? But she can’t. She can’t, right now, ask her surviving daughter if she’s abusing drugs.

But her mind races headlong. Lizzie’s a nurse, maybe it’s easy for her to get them.

Donna knows that drug abuse is rampant among all walks of life these days.

It’s a scourge. People trying to escape their pain—physical, emotional, spiritual.

It’s an epidemic. She couldn’t survive if her only remaining daughter became victim to that.

She tells herself she has to stop catastrophizing like this, imagining the worst. She thought the worst had already happened, but she still has one daughter to lose. Donna takes a breath and asks, “Lizzie, are you managing all right?”

Lizzie looks back at her. “Yes. Why wouldn’t I be?”

It’s a strange thing to say, Donna thinks, glancing at her husband. He seems to think so too.

···

Derek lets himself into the house. He can smell something good cooking. Alice is an excellent cook. But it usually means she’s upset. He makes his way uneasily in the direction of the kitchen.

“Hi,” he says, as if he’s a perfectly normal man, speaking to his perfectly normal wife, at the end of a perfectly normal day.

“How was your day?” Alice asks, holding out a wooden spoon with something hot and fragrant on it. He sips tentatively, so that he doesn’t burn his tongue. “Delicious,” he says truthfully. “Beef bourguignon.”

And now he knows something is up. He’s the one in the doghouse, so why is she making his favorite meal? He proceeds carefully. “It was okay,” he says. He wants to reassure her. “Alice, those detectives have nothing, no evidence, so there’s nothing to be worried about. Besides, I didn’t kill her.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she agrees, as if she’s merely humoring him, and she’s willing to let bygones be bygones.

What a pair they make, he thinks. He was so lucky to find her. They were so lucky to find each other. They were made for each other.

“But it’s unpleasant, the attention,” she complains. “The news suggesting that you were her lover, that you might have killed her. People talking about it.”

“Yes,” he agrees, “it’s unpleasant.” It had been awkward at the office today, having to reassure his staff that it was all bullshit, that he didn’t even know the murdered woman except from their car accident. More awkward still, talking to clients. This will be bad for business.

“Do you think it will all blow over?” his wife asks him.

“I think so. We can rise above it. Her husband probably killed her, like you said.”

“Well, I hope they convict him, whether he did it or not.”

And that’s Alice in a nutshell, Derek thinks. She’s always on his side, no matter what he’s done.

“And then there’s my mother,” she says.

“But is there really anything to worry about?” Derek asks, coming up to her and massaging her shoulders.

“As long as we stick to our story, there really isn’t anything they can do.

There’s no evidence there either.” It was almost four years ago.

Everything belonging to her mother—the truck, the house, every trace of her life, had been sold off or given away.

He says, “Even if they were able to track down the truck, there’s no way to connect that tiny dent to something that happened years ago. They could never prove it.”

“I suppose,” she says, stirring the pot.

···

It’s Friday night, and Jayne goes home relatively early, for the middle of a murder investigation. Michael is coming over. They’ll order in, he’ll bring a bottle of wine. She’s only a call away if there are any developments.

She’s really looking forward to spending some downtime with Michael. She feels she’s hardly seen him since this all kicked off three days ago with Bryden Frost’s disappearance. She remembers Tuesday—it was their anniversary.

Now Michael rubs her feet on the sofa while they wait for their Thai food to arrive.

She watches him and remembers that she needs to have that drink with Ginny.

About how to do it all—give a family the love and attention they deserve while you’re in the trenches every day seeing terrible things as a homicide detective.

An image of Bryden’s body squeezed into the suitcase comes unbidden to her mind’s eye.

She doesn’t, as a rule, discuss her cases with Michael. But sometimes it’s as if he can sense she’s not fully there with him, that her mind is thinking about work.

Michael reaches over and tops up her wineglass from the bottle sitting beside them on the coffee table. “What are you thinking?” he asks her.

Jayne answers thoughtfully. “You know, it’s never like they say it is, at the beginning.

At first, everyone said that the Frosts were perfectly happy.

No problems. Neither of them would ever cheat.

The perfect little family. And then you start to look beneath the surface, and it all starts to come out—all the ugliness.

” She thinks of the affair, the abuse, the murder.

“People are complicated,” Michael says. “They give in to all sorts of unconscious impulses and desires that mess up their lives. I see it too, as a psychologist.”

“I know you do.”

“We’re not so far removed from animals, you know, not as far as we think.

We lived like animals for much longer than we’ve been wearing clothes and living in cities.

But the animal is still there, underneath the clothes.

” He has a sip of wine. “Whoever killed this woman, Bryden, they stepped outside the bounds of civilized society for a moment. And that’s a tragedy.

For her, for her family, even for the perpetrator.

” He sighs and stops rubbing her feet for a moment and looks at her.

“But what’s even more concerning is when it’s not just the individual who steps outside the norms of civilized society, who breaks the unwritten rules we somehow all agreed to be bound by when we decided to live as civilized beings. ”

“I know,” she agrees, reflecting on everything frightening that’s going on in the world these days. “It’s scary.”

“Yes. When millions of people believe fantasy over fact, choose emotion over reason, society can break down pretty quickly. It happens all the time.”

Jayne looks back at him, more doubtful than ever. What hope is there for any of them? Does it even make any sense to bring another child into this world?

He leans in and kisses her. “But we can always choose to be good,” he says.

And she loves him for it. She will carry his words with her tomorrow when she goes back to work.