Page 85 of The Wife Upstairs

I shake my head. “N-no. He’s at work, he…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bea says, and holds out her hands to me.

After so much time spent looking at her pictures, seeing her here, in front of me now, is almost too surreal to fathom, and maybe that’s why I find myself crossing the space, putting my hands in hers.

“We have to get out of here before he gets back,” she says, and I nod even as I say, “Tripp.”

She frowns at me, confused.

“What?”

I shake my head, the shock turning my thoughts to a kind of thick, heavy sludge. “I talked to him today. Just a few hours ago, and he said he was there that night, that Eddie was there that night. It was him, wasn’t it? Eddie killed Blanche. Oh my god.”

The words come out a moan, and Bea grabs my shoulders. She’s smaller than I thought she would be, somehow, but strong, especially for a woman who’s spent so much time locked away.

Jesus, locked away. Locked up here. By Eddie.

“Jane,” she says, and I think of Eddie telling her about me, telling her my name, and want to scream, but there’s another sound.

The closet door opening.

PART X

EDDIE

31

Something has to give.

That’s been the one thought spiraling through my mind for the past few weeks, and it was still there as I parked the car in the garage, turned it off, stared through the windshield.

Tripp charged with Blanche’s murder, Bea locked away upstairs, and Jane…

Fuck, Jane.

Sighing, I opened the car door and headed into the house. It’s late, and the weather is shit, and I should’ve come home earlier, but I was waiting out Jane, hoping she’d already gone to bed.

I wanted to talk to Bea.

Bea would know what to do here, how to fix this. Even though I snapped at her the last time for suggesting that the situation couldn’t stand, I also knew she’d be the only one to get us out of it.

Opening the front door, the house felt too quiet and a little too cold, especially after the heat of outside, but I didn’t mind.

And then I saw it.

It looked like a goddamn tornado had torn through. Like it had been ransacked.

Jane.

I didn’t even remember going up the stairs. Just that I was there at the closet, opening the door.

It actually took me a minute to realize what I was seeing. That the doors were open. That Jane was in there.

That she and Bea were standing there together.

It felt enough like a nightmare or some kind of stress-induced hallucination that I just stared at them for the longest time. Bea, her face pale, Jane, nearly gray, her eyes huge in her face.

And even as I looked at them, my brain was trying to whir into motion, trying to explain, to fix this.