“What happened, Jessa?” I ask. “What happened after I left you in our bedroom? We talked and everything was fine, and then you were gone.”
“I got a message,” she says, looking around for her phone.
I pull it out of the bedside drawer and hand it to her. She opens a conversation thread from an unknown number. There are only two messages there.
The first is a video that I recognize instantly.
The second is a disappearing picture that timed out days ago.
“What picture were you sent?”
“You, lying over Marina’s dead body.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t me.”
“Clearly. But it sure as hell looked a lot like you. I’ve spent enough time staring at you to know what you look like. Even from behind.”
She doesn’t realize what she’s saying as she’s saying it. The moment she does, however, her cheeks flush and she tries to avoid my eyes.
“We’ll circle back to that later,” I tell her with a smirk. “What else stood out to you about the picture?”
“I only saw it for ten seconds before it deleted itself,” she explains, her eyebrows knotting together as she tries to remember details. “All I saw was a lot of blonde hair and your back to the camera.”
“So it could have been anyone. A hired actor and actress. Marina playing pretend.”
“There was blood.” As soon as the words come out of her mouth, she flushes again, this time with embarrassment. “Right. Stupid me. That’s easy enough to fake.” She sighs. “I’m in way over my head here, Anton.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
Her eyes go wide with alarm. “Do I have to get used to this?”
I give her a small smile. “I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you don’t have to. How’s that?”
She looks up at me, and for the first time, the shadows in her eyes seem to lift. “Okay.”
I can’t really enjoy the moment, though. Not when I’m staring at a tape that was never meant to be seen by anyone other than myself and my closest confidantes. How it happened, I have no fucking clue.
But it’s a moot point now. The video is out.
All that matters is what happens next.
“That really happened, didn’t it?” Jessa asks, tipping her head towards the phone. Towards the video.
I wish I could lie, but I can’t. Not to her, not now. “Yes.”
“I might have blamed you for what happened in that video,” she says. “But now, I know Marina. I get it.” Jessa smiles, but it slips away quickly. “She was so damn convincing. Everything about her. We had such an easy friendship.”
“She conned you into giving her your trust.”
Jessa nods. “And she knew just how to do it.”
“How?”
She gives me a guilty half-smile. “She told me about her abusive ex. It was how we first bonded.”
I roll my eyes. “The woman does like to be dramatic.”
“I feel stupid,” Jessa admits in a quiet voice. “Now that I think about it, everything she told me was her version of the truth. Abusive partner. A miscarriage. Running away. It was all there. She just… got me.”