“I know. I know it’s hard to process—”
“Do you understand what you’re saying?” she asks, cutting me off. “Isabelle, listen to what you’re saying. Listen to how it sounds.”
I feel a familiar twist in my stomach, that same stabbing pain that flared up every time Ben or my mother or Detective Dozier looked at me the way Valerie is looking at me right now: with suspicion, distrust. Fear.
“I know how it sounds,” I say. “But Valerie, he’s dangerous.”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No,thisis dangerous, Isabelle. You spinning these insane theories is dangerous. You’re going to hurt someone again.”
I feel a catch in my throat, because I can’t deny that. She’s right. I have hurt someone before. I have already lost myself in the quest to find answers, abandoning reason and logic in an effort to find someone to blame.
But this time isn’t like that. This time, it feelsright.
“I was just trying to hear you out, give you a chance, but you need professional help,” she continues. “Real, serious help, Isabelle. And I can’t do that for you. Given our personal ties, it wouldn’t be right. I wish I could, but I can’t.”
Valerie stands up, a silent cue that it’s time for me to leave.
“Ben warned me about this,” she says, almost like an afterthought. “You’re exactly like he said you were.”
“And how did he say I was?” I whisper, my heart pounding in my chest.
“Deeply troubled,” she says at last. “Practically unhinged.”
I squeeze my fingers, feeling the stinging cut in my palm, and finally allow myself to process what I’ve become over these last twelve months: not even human, really, but a nocturnal animal. A shell of a thing crawling through life with hazy eyes and a mind hinging on madness, like I’m one small stumble away from losing it completely. I’ve tried not to spend too much time worrying about how it must look from the outside, but now I let myself see it all through Ben’s eyes: that collage in my dining room and the way I sit there for hours, staring. Imagining. Thinking through scenarios and convincing myself they could be real.
Lying awake in the dark or wandering around the neighborhood at night; running around blind, looking for someone,anyone, to take away my blame.
“Look, Isabelle. I’m sorry,” Valerie says at last, sighing. “I really am. But you are looking for answers in places where they just don’t exist.”
I pick at my nails, eyes cast down to the floor. I’ve heard that so many times. Suddenly, I think of my father, creating that story about Margaret’s death because it was just easier for everyone to accept. I wonder if that’s what Waylon did, too. If he simply created a story he needed to believe: that Allison never would have done it. That she never would have taken her own life. Maybe he’s been spending the last eight years trying to prove it, dedicating his own life to learning about death because the truth of his own sister’s is too painful to accept.
Maybe he’s just looking for someone to be responsible, the way I am, too. Maybe we’re both so desperate for answers, we’re willing to believe anything.
“I won’t tell Ben you came here,” Valerie says. “He would be heartbroken if he found out you were thinking about him like this.”
I nod my head gently, too ashamed to meet her gaze. Then I stand up and take one more glance around the room, ready to apologize and step back outside, when something in the corner catches my eye.
It’s that wall of pictures. I realize now, standing closer, they’re almost entirely of Ben.
I walk toward the wall, away from the door, and scan them all hanging there, one by one. I see Valerie and Ben sitting in the grass downtown, Spanish moss draped behind them like a stage curtain being whipped back. There’s another of them in the stands of a concert, colorful lights dancing across a stage in the distance, and one more of them lying on the beach, their sunglasses reflecting a phone held high in the sky.
“Isabelle,” Valerie says, trying to nudge me along. I can hear her walking closer, sidling up behind me. “I don’t think it’ll help for you to look at those.”
But I don’t turn around. I can’t turn around. I’m too focused on Ben and the varying shades of stubble on his cheeks; on Valerie’s subtle highlights slowly growing out, a finger of dark roots pinching at her scalp. Visible signs of the passage of time that shouldn’t be possible for a relationship this new.
“You didn’t meet at that grief counseling group.”
It seems so obvious to me now, I hate myself for not seeing it sooner. After all, we had a story, too. Ben and I. But it wasn’t real. It was something he had concocted; something he had created to paint himself in the most flattering light. Our relationship had started long before we announced it to the world, and I remember that first night together after the memorial now, the two of us tangled between the sheets of my childhood bed. The sickness that settled in my stomach after he stood up and walked away, like I knew I had just consumed something that was bound to hurt me.
“You know we can’t tell anybody about this. Not yet.”
I twist around now and look at Valerie, standing right behind me, eyes wide and afraid. He really did do to me what we did to Allison.
Ben and Valerie were together long before we were apart.
“How long?” I ask, taking a step closer. “How long have you been together?”
Valerie shakes her head, a little quiver in her lip, and takes a step backward, putting some distance between us.