“Move away. We don’t have to live here. We don’t even have to live in this state. I can teach tennis anywhere. You can sell real estate anywhere.” The idea has just come to me, as I am standing here with Millicent. “Pick a place.”
“You aren’t serious.”
“Why not?”
She moves away from me and starts to pace again. I can see her building lists in her mind, trying to figure out everything that needs to be done. “It’s the middle of the school year.”
“I know.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to pick.”
“We can figure it out together.”
She goes silent.
I repeat the obvious. “They’re going to look for the real killer.”
This was never a problem before. No bodies had been found, not until Lindsay. Up until then, no one even knew there was a killer. They weren’t looking for anyone.
Now they are. And they know it was someone pretending to be Owen.
“They’ll never know it was us,” she says.
“Never?”
Millicent shakes her head. “I don’t know how. We basically split everything up. I never touched the letters—”
“But wherever you kept Naomi—”
“You never even saw it. What about you? Did anyone see you with—”
“No. I never spoke to Naomi,” I say.
“Never?” Millicent is silent for a moment. “That’s good, then. No one saw you with her.”
“No.”
“And Lindsay?”
I shake my head. Lindsay and I spoke while hiking. “No one saw us.”
“Good.”
“Jenna,” I say. “I almost think we should move because of—”
“Let’s at least wait and make sure this is real. That it isn’t some kind of hoax.”
I smile. The irony is too thick not to. “Like Owen’s letters. A hoax.”
“Yes. Like that.”
The reminder on my phone beeps. My next client is in fifteen minutes. Either I leave or I cancel.
“Go,” she says. “There’s nothing we can do now except wait.”
“If it’s real—”
“We’ll discuss it again.”
I walk over and kiss her on the forehead.
She puts her hand on my cheek. “We’ll be fine.”
“We always are.”
“Yes.”
* * *
• • •
The kids have already heard the news. We had planned to tell them together that evening, at dinner, but they already knew. The Internet and their friends are faster than us.
If Rory cares, he does not show it. His hand is clasped around his phone, the lifeline to his girlfriend.
Jenna’s face is still as stone. Her eyes, normally so expressive, look right through us. She is not listening, not even here in the room with us. I do not know where she is. She does not speak until Millicent and I are done telling her what we have told her for weeks: You are safe.
I don’t think she believes us. I’m not even sure I believe us. Everything she thought was true is turning out to be wrong. Owen was never here. It was always someone else, and no one has any idea who.
I cannot blame her for shutting down. I want to do the same thing.
When we are done talking, Rory jumps up and heads for the stairs. Already texting.
Jenna keeps staring.
“Baby?” I say, reaching over to touch her hand. “You okay?”
She turns to me, her eyes focusing. “So it’s all a lie. The killer may not even be gone.”
“We don’t know that yet,” Millicent says.
“But maybe.”
I nod. “Maybe.”
A minute passed, then another.
“Okay,” she says, slipping her hand out from under mine. She stands up. “I’m going upstairs.”
“Are you feeling—”
“I’m fine.”
Millicent and I watch her go.
The rest of my evening is spent on the Internet, researching a new place for us to live. I flip between sites about weather, schools, cost of living, and the news.
It feels strange to not know what is coming next. Ever since I wrote that first letter to Josh, most of the news has not surprised me. I already knew what the letters would say and could guess how the pundits would analyze them. Not even Naomi’s body was a surprise. I didn’t know the details, but I knew it would be found.
The only thing that surprised me was the paper cuts.
Now, nothing is familiar, nothing is expected. I do not like it.
Fifty-two
I watch the story unfold on TV as if I am not involved. As if I’m just another spectator. And, because I have no power to change the course of this story, I hope. Every time I turn on the news, I hope Owen’s sister is a liar. But one night, I am outside on the back porch, watching the eleven o’clock broadcast, and this is not what Josh says.
He is in the studio tonight, wearing a jacket and tie, and his face looks like it was shaved minutes before the show started. Josh sounds like a serious reporter when he says that Jennifer Riley is coming back into the country. She wants to clear her brother’s name.
The urge to throw my phone, again, is stopped by a scraping sound on the side of the house. I get up and look.
Rory.
Only he would continue to sneak out after getting caught sneaking out.
Or rather, only he could continue to get away with sneaking out after he was caught sneaking out. I wonder how many times I’ve missed him.
He sees me just as his feet hit the ground. Rory was on his way out, not back in.
“Oh,” he says. “Hey.”
“Going out for a little night air?”
He shrugs, admitting nothing.
“Come sit down,” I say.
Instead of sitting on the porch, we go out farther into the yard. We have a picnic table with an umbrella on the far side, in between the big oak tree and the dismantled playset.
Rory says, “You don’t have a lot of room to talk about sneaking out.”
Days ago, when Owen was supposed to be gone forever, that comment might not have bothered me. I had been looking forward to talking with my son about his first girlfriend. Now, it just feels like a chore.
I point to one of the benches “Sit. Your. Ass. Down.”
He does.
“First,” I say, “you may have noticed your sister has been having a difficult time. And I am sure you, her only brother, do not want to make her feel worse?”
He shakes his head.
“Of course you don’t. So I know you won’t tell her this little theory of yours about how I’m cheating on your mother.”
“Theory?”
I stare at him.
He shakes his head again. “No. I’m not going to say anything.”
“And I know you are not about to compare me to you and the fact that you are sneaking out late at night. Because you are less than half my age. You are not even close to being an adult. You do not get to sneak out.”
He nods.
“What?” I say.
“No. I wasn’t going to compare us.”
“And I also know that if I ask you why you were sneaking out, you are not going to say it was to hang out with Daniel. Because that’s not what you’re doing, is it?”