Page 151 of Tear Me Apart

“I’ve fed her, and changed her. She’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be fine. I promise. I’m here for you. I’m here for her. I will make sure she is safe in Zack’s arms before I go home.”

“Okay.”

But Vivian’s hand will not raise the cup. The baby squeaks again, higher pitched this time. Vivian feels her breasts begin to leak in reply.

“I should feed her again.”

“That will taste ten times worse if it gets cold. I’ll get her a bottle as soon as you’re gone.”

Liesel’s eyes are strangely bright. Vivian puts the sheen down to unshed tears.

She starts to raise the cup, and Liesel smiles encouragingly.

“That’s it. It will all be over soon.”

The baby lets out a low howl. She sounds so confused, as if she knows what’s happening, and is begging Vivian to stop, to be with her, even if it’s only for a few weeks. Fear starts, and with it, regret.

Oh, God. I can’t do this. I can’t.

Vivian puts the cup down. “I have to—”

The knife catches her in the neck. Her head jerks to the side. She feels the warm spill of blood begin. She tries to talk, but words won’t come. Liesel fills the empty space between them. Her eyes are still bright, and there’s something in them Vivian hasn’t seen since the first day they met, and Liesel threatened to kill her.

“I knew you were going to freak out and bail on the plan. Would you just die already?”

Vivian sees the flash of silver this time, but she can’t move, it comes too quickly. The knife plunges into her stomach. It hurts. Dear God, it hurts. It burns. The pain is incredible.

Vivian collapses onto the kitchen floor. Panic fills her. What has Liesel done? This isn’t what they agreed on.

“Help.” Her breath won’t come, something is wrong, so wrong. “Me,” Vivian manages to get the second word out, starts to move. Liesel places a foot on her chest, between the two wounds.

Now Vivian can’t rise. She can’t do anything. She feels soaking wet and cold, so cold. The edges around her are blackening. The baby is crying lustily, and Vivian can’t do anything to help her because she’s dying. What a mistake she’s made.

And the last thing she hears before the world goes black is the singsong voice of her best friend in the entire world, her only true friend, as she says, “Thanks for the baby. I’ll take good care of her.”

92

DENVER WOMEN’S

CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

CURRENT DAY

“...So Vivian asked me to make sure it was clear someone attacked her. I didn’t like doing it, Zack. It broke my heart. I refused. She wanted to die by the blade—it was something she said to me a few times. It meant something to her, I’m not sure what. But there was no way I was going to stab her. I’d brought a bottle of painkillers, and I begged her, pleaded, that it would be so much easier to just drink something with them crushed up, and she’d go to sleep. She insisted the insurance company could rule that a suicide instead, that it had to be absolutely clear it was murder. She’d done all the research.” She shuddered. “I still couldn’t do it. I couldn’t. And she knew that. She pulled the knife across her own throat.”

Lauren is crying now.

“She started to bleed, and went down, but she wasn’t dying. She hadn’t cut deep enough, she was just drowning. There was nothing I could do. She kept pointing at her stomach, slapping it, so I jammed the knife in. It was over quickly after that.”

She wipes her eyes, pulls herself together.

“You have no idea how hard it was, Zack. I hated to do it. I hated every minute. She begged me to take Mindy, to make sure she was safe and cared for. She was afraid that without her at the helm, you’d give the baby up. You didn’t even know her, she was practically a stranger. She told me how distant you were those last few months. That you had been fighting. She was worried you might not want the baby after all of that. She begged me, begged me, to save the baby. To protect Mindy.”

This last bit is enough to shake Zack from his horrified stupor. He’s been listening in disbelief to Lauren talk. Her words make an obscene kind of sense. There had been a major insurance payout. Vivian had increased the policies on their life insurance as soon as she’d gotten pregnant, that he knew. What he didn’t know was how much she’d increased them, nor that she’d gone back when she was seven months pregnant and doubled hers. When she died, he got a payout of almost half a million dollars.

It was information he hadn’t shared with anyone. He’d put the money in a high yield interest-accruing bank account for Violet, should she ever be found. Statements came, but he never opened them. He assumed it was worth quite a bit now.

It all makes a sick kind of sense. Why Vivian wouldn’t tell him about her severe depression. Why there were no records of her seeing a psychiatrist. Why no one knew she’d been suffering.