EMMA WAKES FROM a deep sleep. Someone’s touching her, touching her shoulder.
At first she thinks it’s Ben, then remembers.
It’s not Ben.
A man is standing over her bed. Her heart begins to pound, and she begins to pray.
Let the baby be okay, let Iris be all right and they can do anything they want to her. She doesn’t care what happens to her, just let the baby be unharmed.
Emma knows this is where it’s been leading, for whatever crazy reason Ben and Lindsay have done what they did—playing those mind games, writing the fake journal, locking her in the room. Are they planning to kill her and take Iris? Just let the baby be okay.
She smells wood chips and pine and soap.
It’s JD.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says.
She’s more grateful than she will ever be able to tell him. Tears stream down her face.
He’s come to save her. This is where it’s all been leading. But neither of them knew it, exactly. Emma just knew that she liked him. She’d thought about him a lot.
Iris is crying again.
She rolls over to nurse the baby and Iris quiets down.
“Where are they?” JD whispers.
In the dim rays of moonlight shining in the window, she sees that he’s carrying a gun.
“It’s not loaded,” he says. “I just thought we might need something extra.”
“Extra?”
“Like maybe this is something we can’t just talk through.”
“With…?”
“Ben and Lindsay?”
Emma flinches. His putting them in one sentence like that makes it all the more real.
As if on cue, someone knocks on the door.
“Why are they knocking?” asks JD. “If they had any brains, they’d just lock it again until they figure out who unlocked it.”
“What should I do?” Emma whispers.
“Say ‘come in,’ ” says JD. “Turn on the light, okay?”
Emma reaches over Iris for the lamp.
JD points his gun at the door.
Lindsay walks in, sees the gun.
“Is he fucking with you?” she says. “Is this asshole…?”
“Wrong,” says JD.
“How did you get in here?”
JD holds up the key and smiles. “You always did think you’re so smart and everyone else is stupid.”
He raises the gun. Emma believed him when he said it wasn’t loaded. She still believes him. But what if…?
“Wait,” says Lindsay. “I mean it. Wait.”
“I’m waiting,” says JD. “No, you wait. I’ve got a better idea. Let’s go find Ben.”
“He’s right down the hall,” says Lindsay.
Emma remembers Ben imitating Lindsay, at the start. Was he lying then, too? She recalls the sight of Lindsay winding her arms around Ben’s neck at the rehearsal studio.
“Excellent,” says JD. “Let’s go find him.”
“Wait here,” he tells Emma.
A few minutes later Ben appears. JD’s following him. He isn’t pointing his gun at anyone. He just has it, is all.
Ben looks disheveled, half-asleep, and so terrified that, for a moment, Emma’s heart goes out to him. Too bad. No one’s going to hurt him. And she’s pretty sure that he and Lindsay were going to hurt her. They’ve hurt her already.
Her sympathy lasts less than a heartbeat. Who is this person? Her husband? She doesn’t even know him. Maybe she never knew him. Who could he be, to have done the things he’s done to her, to want whatever he wanted to do?
Emma starts crying and can’t stop. The last thing she wants is to cry in front of them. To give them the satisfaction. She should be holding her head high. But tears are sheeting down her face. She wraps the baby’s blanket tighter around her and holds Iris close.
JD puts his arm around her shoulders. Emma leans against him.
“I knew it,” Ben hisses. “Slut.”
“Knew what?” JD points the gun at him.
“Nothing,” Ben says.
Coward, thinks Emma. How could Ben imply that there is something between her and JD after what he and Lindsay did? An affair with the hot contractor would have been nothing compared to that.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” says JD. “You guys are going to switch rooms with Emma. And you’re going to give me all the keys. And I’m going to lock you in here. Emma’s going to take the baby, and we’ll go to one of the other rooms, and by tomorrow morning we’ll have decided what to do with you.”
JD pushes Ben just slightly as he herds him to the far edge of the room, far away from the door. Emma almost objects but doesn’t.
“I need to take a piss,” says Ben.
“Use this bedpan you’ve so kindly left for Emma. Or you can just piss out the window,” says JD. “If you jump out, you’ll die in the snow. But I assume you know that. You knew that Emma wasn’t going to jump with the baby.”
“We didn’t want her to jump,” says Ben.
“You didn’t want her to?” JD’s imitation of Ben is dead accurate and wicked.
Who’s the actor now?
Ben is beyond shame. How could Emma have had his baby? Oh, poor Iris. This isn’t what Emma wanted for her. But this isn’t anything Emma could have predicted or even imagined.
“You’re going to be sorry, Ben.” Emma hardly recognizes her own voice. She’s so angry she’s hissing. “I don’t know how or when, but you’re going to realize what you’ve done. You’re going to pay. You’re going to suffer, really suffer. And I’ll be cheering every step of the way.”
“Go stand next to him,” JD tells Lindsay. “And give me your phones. Both of you.”
Ben and Lindsay huddle together. Their bodies know each other. Emma can’t look. She checks on Iris, then glances up to see a long look pass between Lindsay and Ben.
She’s seen that look before.
In the movies. The moment before the lovers decide to make a run for it.
Which is exactly what Ben and Lindsay do. Lindsay grabs Ben’s hand and they rush out the door. Emma hears their footsteps on the stairs, then the front door slams.
She and JD listen silently.
A car starts up.
“They’re taking the Volvo,” says JD. “Should I go after them?”
“Why would you?” says Emma.
Why would he?
That’s when they hear the crash.
It’s the sound Emma has been dreading and expecting since the first day they drove up here.
FIRST THE COPS come, then the ambulance. JD tells Emma to stay inside with Iris, it’s too cold for them to be out. It’s snowing too hard now for Emma to see. But JD, dressed for the weather and minus the gun, keeps coming back in to update her.
He knows one of the EMT guys from high school. The guy said it didn’t look good. The crash victims (or so the guy put it) seem unlikely to recover.
“I’m sorry,” says JD. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” says Emma. “You saved me.”
JD’s reluctant to leave, but Emma wants to be alone with Iris. He says he’ll call Beth and Ted and tell them the news.
“Poor Ted,” JD says. “Poor Beth.”
Emma lies awake most of the night, trying to understand what’s happened. The most she can come up with is that Ben and Lindsay were trying to make her think she was going crazy, to make her act unstable, and then claim possession of the baby.
The baby and the house.
What were they planning to do about Beth? Emma’s sure that Lindsay must have had a plan.
Lindsay had a plan for everything. Too bad her plans didn’t work out.
In time, Emma knows, she will grieve for Ben. Who knows if baby Iris will remind her of him? But she’ll try to see in the baby the things she loved about her husband before Lindsay—and the house—took him away.
JD COMES BACK the next day, and the day after that.
Checking on Iris and Emma, he says.
The second night he stays for dinner.
The third night he stays. The pleasure of being in bed with him is almost overwhelming. They talk all night. Emma should be exhausted, but she’s never felt so awake.
JD tells her what happened to him in the house, all those years ago, and how the memory only came back to him when he heard Iris crying. Emma tells him as much as she can remember, beginning with their coming to look at the house. When she tells him about the journal, he goes tense.
He says, “Beth asked me to put it up there. And then she asked me to get it back. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you…”
“Is there anything else you didn’t tell me?”
JD doesn’t have to think.
“Sally wasn’t Lindsay’s stepmother. She was a friend of Lindsay’s mother.”
“Why did Lindsay bring her in?”
“I don’t know. I think she wanted a stepmom. And… okay, there’s one more thing.”
Emma whispers, “One more thing?”
“I didn’t tell you how much I thought about you,” says JD. “I thought about you day and night.”
“Me too,” Emma says. “About you.”
JD says, “Sometimes bad luck has good luck hidden inside it.”
EMMA INHERITS THE house and Ben’s money.
Ted retires. The real estate business is shuttered. No one investigates Sally’s death. She’d had a stroke.
Emma doesn’t like to pass the historical society, so she has no idea if they get someone to take Beth’s place. Beth is gone too. Just gone. Moved back to the city, according to town gossip.
Every so often Emma and JD and Iris and later, Sam and Max, the sons Emma and JD have together, drive past Lindsay and Beth’s house. It’s stayed empty. Sometimes she and JD talk about the first dinner they had in that house. So many things were going on. They’d had no idea.
The only thing they knew was that they liked each other.
After a while, on her own, Iris calls JD “daddy.” He loves it, and then he makes it true. He adopts her.
Emma loves their life here, more than she ever thought possible that first day she and Ben drove up the driveway. The problem was, she was coming here with the wrong person.
When the house is finished, it’s featured in not one but two magazines, and after that JD has nonstop work. For a while Emma stays home with the kids but eventually she finds a job in a local public school, not unlike the job she had in the city before she got pregnant with Iris. Her children attend the school, though she’s not their teacher. She sees them in the hallways.
Sometimes at night Emma lies awake, imagining that she can hear the ghosts of the people who lived here when it was Dr. Fogel’s clinic. None of them scare her now that she’s lying beside JD.
She tries not to picture the three hermits, the one thing she and JD never mention again.
Sometimes she thinks she can feel the spirit of the woman who left the journal in the attic, until she remembers that the woman wasn’t real. Lindsay made her up. Maybe Lindsay was onto something. Maybe she was channeling something—something larger than herself.
Even when she was lying.
Because if that woman didn’t live here, didn’t hope and die here, stranded, then another woman did, or maybe someone just like her.
Emma snuggles close to JD. The house is quiet. Her children are sleeping peacefully, and she too drifts into a peaceful dreamless sleep.