Page 58 of She Didn’t See It Coming

Derek slips back into the house quietly. It’s already dark, and there aren’t any lights on. He wonders where his wife is.

He’s about to walk down the hall to the kitchen when he hears her voice behind him.

“Hello.”

He whips around. “You startled me,” he says.

He sees her now, curled up on the sofa. Her laptop is closed on the coffee table in front of her.

“What are you doing, sitting here in the dark?” He reaches over and turns on a table lamp.

He’s a little unnerved. She’s so calm, watching him with her big green eyes.

He sits down in an armchair near her. “Are you ever going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What you’re so worried about.” He sighs wearily. “Alice, I’m a cybersecurity expert. I started out as a hacker. I can usually find things. I’ve just spent the entire afternoon looking into you.”

“And what did you find?”

She sounds more apprehensive than angry, he thinks. “Nothing.” He waits.

Finally, she says, “I killed a man.” She’s looking away from him, into the dark. “That’s what I’ve been keeping from you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know.” She takes a deep breath and begins. “I was sixteen years old. I was walking home from school, and a man grabbed me and covered my mouth and dragged me into a nearby ravine. He was disgusting. Panting and slobbery and horrible. He expected me to be afraid.”

She looks at him then. “I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t become paralyzed with fear. I certainly wasn’t what he was expecting. He was trying to pull off my clothes, and I grabbed a rock and hit him over the head with it. That stopped him. Then I realized he was dead.”

“Okay,” he says calmly, waiting for her to continue.

“I was just going to pretend it hadn’t happened, but someone saw me coming out of the ravine, someone I knew, who recognized me. So I made a big scene—call the police, hysterical tears, the whole nine yards.”

“Then what happened?”

“I was arrested. My parents were horrified, thinking I’d be charged with murder. But the police realized that it was so clearly self-defense that they decided not to charge me.”

“Where was this?” he asks.

“Connecticut. I was a minor, so my name was kept out of the press.”

Derek isn’t sure he’s following. “So what are you worried about?”

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” his wife points out.

“But no one’s going to come after you now.”

“Salter already thinks I might have killed Bryden. I don’t want her digging around.”

“Even if she finds out, what can she do? You were never charged—it was self-defense! And she can’t make this information public now if you were a minor at the time.”

She shrugs. “Who knows what she’ll do?”

“Alice, she’s not like us,” Derek says. “She follows the rules. You have nothing to worry about.”

But he can tell that she’s still keeping something back.

He wants her to tell him everything, so he makes a confession of his own.

“Alice, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.

” She looks at him, tensing. “Relax,” he says.

He pauses a moment and then says, “I’ve developed a bit of a side hustle. ”

“A side hustle,” she repeats.

“It’s not exactly legal.”

“I’m listening.”

“I have a very small number of clients, not on the books, who pay extremely well for my special computer skills.” He pauses. “Actually, the less detail you know the better.”

“Okay.”

She seems to accept that. She trusts him. “How would you like to be filthy rich?” he asks.

“You know I’d like to be filthy rich,” she says with a smile. She adds thoughtfully, “You don’t want anyone to find out about this.”

“Obviously.”

“Like Detective Fucking Salter.”

They lock eyes. “Especially her.”

···

Alice can’t sleep. She glances over at Derek, who is out cold. He doesn’t overthink things. She wonders how much longer he would have held out on her about his cybercrime side gig if things hadn’t reached a crisis—all because of Bryden Frost.

She’d spent all afternoon online, trying to find Susan Cleeve, her former best friend from Connecticut.

Because Susan might be a problem. Most people have a profile on social media somewhere.

Alice doesn’t, but she’s not most people—she deliberately stays off social media.

She thought she’d be able to find Susan, who is much more conventional, but hadn’t been able to track her down.

She might have married and changed her name though.

Now, she’s hoping that Susan is dead. Maybe she’s moved abroad somewhere. Alice thinks Derek would be able to find her or find out what happened to her. But she doesn’t want to ask him.

She remembers that day in the ravine as if it were yesterday.

And things didn’t happen the way she said they had.