Page 28 of The Missing Half

Chapter Twenty-seven

For a moment, all I can do is stare at Sandy. Her confession is so unexpected, I think I must have misunderstood it.

“W-what do you mean?” I finally say, looking from her to Brad. I assumed he would be the only one who could answer my questions, but he looks almost as confused as I am, gaping at his wife with panicked anticipation.

“Can I see that?” Sandy says.

At first, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Then she nods at my hand, and I look down to see the receipt I’d been waving in Brad’s face. I’d forgotten I was holding it. Without thinking, I pass it to her. As she studies the handwritten address on the back, I suddenly realize that I’ve given her the one piece of evidence that places my sister here on the night of her disappearance, something Sandy would no doubt want torn to shreds. Just as I’m about to snatch it back though, she hands it to me.

“Like I said, I’m the one who saw Kasey that night. That handwriting is mine.”

My body stills as a lifetime of affection curdles to anger inside me.

“Sandy,” Brad says. In sharp contrast to earlier, he now looks like a chastened schoolboy who’s been caught doing something bad. The apron he’s wearing is a ridiculous sunny yellow. Loathing for him wafts off my skin like heat. “I don’t think you—”

“No,” Sandy says. “Nic’s found out enough. It’s clear from that little spectacle outside that we’d be better off if we tell her the truth rather than let her run with her assumptions.”

“But I don’t even—”

“Oh, goddammit, Brad. Stop pretending like you don’t know what’s going on here. I understand that you have no idea what I’m about to say, but you know exactly what we’re talking about.”

Brad’s mouth snaps shut.

“W-wait,” I stammer. “I don’t understand. Sandy, why did you see Kasey that night? What was she doing here?”

“I’ll tell you. But first, you need to understand what happened before that.” She heaves a deep sigh. “I’m going to sit.”

There’s a smattering of sagging, mismatching furniture in the living room, pieces they cobbled together from garage sales. Sandy sits in the corner of a faded maroon couch and I perch myself on the edge of an old blue armchair, too keyed up to relax. Brad follows us over but remains standing, as if at any moment, he might turn and run.

“It was the middle of summer,” Sandy says, “that year, 2012. I was running some errands on Grape Road. I’d gotten an iced coffee and the caffeine was going to my head, but I couldn’t get myself to stop drinking it with it just sitting there in the cupholder beside me, so I decided to throw it out. There were no trashcans around, so I pulled into this back alley with a bunch of dumpsters, and I saw a car.”

Brad lets out a sputtering little groan, but neither Sandy nor I look over at him.

“I recognized it immediately,” she continues. “It was Kasey’s car, the one the two of you shared. I realized I must’ve been behind the record store where she worked, but I didn’t understand why her car was there. It was obvious you couldn’t park in the alley, and the car looked empty, so I started walking over to take a look.”

I know what’s coming because I’ve heard it before. Lauren told us the same story.

“When I got closer,” Sandy says, “I realized it wasn’t empty after all. There were two people in the back seat. Having sex. I was mortified. I assumed one of the people was Kasey, and I obviously didn’t want her to see me, so I turned to leave. That’s when I saw it—Brad’s car. It was parked in the lot on the opposite side of the alley, in a spot so far from everything else. And I just knew.”

“Sandy—” Brad’s voice is a croak.

“Please,” she says. “Just…let me get through this. I was devastated. Obviously. But more than that I was furious. With every passing minute, I realized yet another way the two of them had destroyed my life. Kasey was nineteen. I didn’t know when they’d started sleeping together, but, God, if it got out, you know people would assume the worst. And maybe they’d be right. I know if it were my daughter, I’d probably want the guy in jail.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Brad says. “It started that summer. You have to believe me.”

I may hate him, but I do believe he’s telling the truth. That’s what Lauren said as well.

Sandy angles her face toward her husband but doesn’t look him in the eye. “Even so, you were old enough to be her father. Can you imagine how fast this town would have turned on us if it had gotten out? The boys would’ve been ostracized, and people would’ve eaten me alive. ‘The wife.’?” She says it like it’s a slur. “Isn’t it somehow always her fault? She knows her husband’s secret and keeps it for him. Or she lets herself go, doesn’t keep him satisfied, and he has no choice but to look somewhere else.”

In my periphery, I see Brad give an involuntary twitch, the old wooden floorboards creaking beneath his feet.

“Maybe I could’ve dealt with all of that,” Sandy continues, looking at me, “but your parents—they were our best friends. If it got out, we’d lose them too. I did nothing wrong, and yet everything I loved in my life was on the line.”

“I’m so sorry, Sandy,” Brad says. “I had no idea you knew.”

Sandy lets out a disdainful laugh. “Of course you didn’t. Because I was a well-behaved, middle-aged, stay-at-home mom. I was invisible. Even to my own husband.”

“Invisible? No, I—”

She lifts a hand, cutting him off. “Oh, please. I can’t remember exactly when it started, but I woke up one morning, and suddenly you only seemed to notice me when the dishes went unwashed or dinner wasn’t on the table on time. Nobody thinks housewives have lives or stories or feelings, let alone secrets.”

Empathy blooms in my chest, but it quickly hardens. Sandy knew Kasey was having an illicit affair right before she went missing, and she said nothing to the police. “What did you do?” I say. “When you found out about them?”

I see her register the coldness in my voice, see it stiffen her shoulders, and I realize this is the end of us. The end of dinners at their place, the end of Sandy’s long hugs and homemade brownies. Too much has happened, and we will never find our way back.

“I knew I had to keep it quiet,” she says, “make it go away. And I didn’t think confronting Brad was the way to do that. Even if I told him to stop, I wasn’t sure he would. But I had a feeling Kasey might not be as infatuated with him as he was with her. I thought she might listen to reason. So the next week, I went to the record store and asked to talk to Kasey outside. It was obvious she knew exactly why I was there. And the look on her face…well, it was also obvious she’d forced herself to forget about me, convinced herself the affair was a victimless crime. Like I said—invisible. But, confronted with the wife of the man she was sleeping with, she started crying almost instantly.”

McLean’s story of Kasey in the parking lot finally clicks. I’d been so distracted by the affair, I’d nearly forgotten about it. “Hang on,” I say. “Kasey was nineteen. Brad was more than twice her age. He was the one who was married, he was the one who cheated on you, and she’s the one you blame?”

“I blamed both of them, Nic. He might have been the only one cheating, but Kasey wasn’t some innocent victim.”

It’s obvious though, from Brad’s shock at all of this, that the only person to ever be held accountable for what happened between the two of them was my sister.

“But,” Sandy continues, “she clearly didn’t understand the magnitude of what she was doing. Didn’t understand how many people she would hurt if it got out. I told her to break things off with him. She didn’t need to tell him why, just that it was over.”

Brad is quiet, but I can feel the horror radiating off him like a smell.

“What’d she say?” I ask.

“She said she would. I believed her.”

“When was this?”

“End of July? Beginning of August?”

Right around the time Kasey started acting off. “But I don’t understand. If she ended things with him, what was she doing here the night she went missing?”

“I’m getting there,” Sandy says. “Over the next few weeks, I kept an eye on them both. I went back to the alley behind the record store almost every day, but as far as I could tell, Brad was staying at Funland and Kasey at the shop. It seemed they’d stopped seeing each other.”

“We did,” Brad says. “That was the end of it. I swear.”

She ignores him. “But then one day Kasey came over to the house.”

“What?” he says. “Why?”

“Brad,” Sandy snaps. “I’m reliving the worst few weeks of my liferight now. And if I have to sit here and explain how my husband risked everything we built together because of his utter stupidity and a pair of perky breasts, the least you can do is not interrupt me.”

He opens and closes his mouth like a fish.

“Kasey came over to our house one day,” she says again. “When I opened the door and found her standing there, I could tell she was terrified.”

That memory resurfaces: Be careful tonight, okay? Kasey told me just a few weeks before she disappeared, her eyes electric with fear. Don’t go anywhere alone. So, I hadn’t rewritten history after all. “Why was she scared?” I say. “Did she tell you?”

Sandy cocks her head, giving me an odd look. “She didn’t need to tell me. It was obvious. She was scared about what she was there todo.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it required quite the set of balls. Your sister told me if I wanted her to leave Brad alone, I was going to have to pay.” Sandy gives me a bitter smirk. “Ten thousand dollars.”