I chose a table by the window. The cafeteria wasn’t very full—only a few families and a couple doctors—but I still felt more comfortable knowing that, if anything happened, there would be witnesses.
Ben waved as he walked in and slid into the seat across from me.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
I stared at him, suddenly unwilling to speak unless I absolutely had to.
“Well, okay, so . . .” He pulled a photograph out of his pocket and pushed it toward me across the table. “Do you know anything about this?”
I recognized Will Emory right away, even though he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old in the picture. He was tall like Ben, with the same dark eyes, and he was standing in front of a red sports car. Clinging to his arm, staring up at him with a smiling, lovestruck expression on her face was—I shot forward, bending over the picture.
“What the hell is this?” I asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“That’s my mother,” I said, pointing to the woman. I was almost breathless looking at her—the long blonde hair she used to braid into place, the smile that used to greet me when I came home from school.
“I know,” Ben said. “I didn’t really recognize her at first—it’s not that great of a picture—but then I noticed how much she looks like Persephone here.”
It was true—not just because of the length of her hair or the color of her eyes; it was her posture, too, her height, her frame—and as I stared at the picture, I ached for them both.
Ben flipped over the photo, pressing Mom’s beautiful beaming face against the table. “Look,” he said, pointing to the bottom corner, where someone had written a date inside of a heart.
Those bulky loops, the way the ink curved up at the end of each word—I recognized the handwriting from notes she used to leave on my pillow or in my lunchbox. “My mother wrote that,” I said. “But—what is this? She didn’t even know your dad.”
“Apparently she did.”
“Where did you find this?”
Ben nodded, as if he’d been expecting me to ask that question. “In my grandfather’s house. Well—no, I guess it’s mine now. Do you know where my dad lives? The big house on the hill?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s this guesthouse in the back that my grandfather lived in while I was growing up. He died when I was nineteen, and the house just sat empty for years after that. I moved in a while ago, and I’ve only recently had time to start going through some of the things that are stored there. I was actually looking for my grandfather’s stuff, but I found this box that had my dad’s name on it, and the picture was just loose in there with all these high school track and field trophies, yearbooks, graduation tassels, things like that. I don’t know if it was something my grandfather was storing for my dad, or if it was things my dad boxed up and kept there after the house became empty. Either way—there it was.”
“There it was,” I repeated, careful to keep my voice dry and even.
“And look,” Ben pressed on, pointing at the date on the bottom corner again. “This date—it’s about a year and a half before my parents got married.”
“So?”
“So . . . I don’t know. Do you think they dated—your mom and my dad? Before my parents were together? I mean, look at how she’s looking at him.”
He flipped the picture over again, and the warmth in my mom’s eyes brought a stinging feeling to my own. She had been like that once—open, loving, her laughter like a song. She would hum while doing the laundry. She would tend to her rhododendrons in the front yard, talking to the bees that buzzed around her as she worked.
“And this heart she drew around the date,” Ben said, turning the photo once more. “It just—it seems pretty obvious they were together once, right? And, if that’s true, well—my dad has a way of making women hate him.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Ben looked toward the window. “My parents have been divorced since I was eighteen,” he said. “And it happened pretty suddenly.” He paused, squinting at the trees in the distance outside. “I mean, I knew they fought—a lot—but one day I came home and my mom had all these suitcases packed. I asked her what was going on and she told me she was moving to Portugal.”
“Portugal?”
Ben nodded. “She has a cousin there that she was close with when they were kids. I’d never even met her at the time, but . . . anyway. She said I was eighteen now, and she’d stayed longer than she should have, but she’d wanted to make sure I wasn’t negatively influenced, or something like that. And so she just left. And anytime I’ve talked to her or visited her, if I so much as mention my dad, she goes crazy. She yells about how she doesn’t want to hear a word about him, how he’s a terrible human being, on and on and on like that, and I mean, she just hates him.”
He looked at the back of the photo again, tracing the heart with his fingertip. “And it’s not just her,” he continued. “Since they got divorced, my dad has dated all kinds of women, and they all end up hating him, too. Just last month, I was in the guesthouse and I heard one of them screaming at him at the top of her lungs. Then I heard a car screeching away. So I don’t know what he does to them exactly, but like I said, he has a way of driving women crazy.”
He rubbed at the ink where the date had been written on the photo, as if it hadn’t been dried and set for decades, as if his fingers were strong enough to erase any record of the past.
“Maybe he was abusive,” I said. “Left marks on them.”
Ben snapped his head up to look at me, and my heart clenched. His features hardened and his jaw tightened, the movement of the bone seeming to ripple through his scar.
“No,” he said, his voice resolute. “No, it wasn’t like that. He didn’t hurt them. Not physically, anyway.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked. Then, drawing in my breath, imagining each molecule of air as a tiny source of strength collecting inside me, I added, “Like father, like s—”
“Look,” Ben interrupted, his eyes like two dark marbles staring out at me. “I was just telling you that to try to explain how—well, I think it could be the same thing with your mom. If she dated my dad and ended up hating him, then it would make sense that she wouldn’t want Persephone to date me. Right?”
“That had nothing to do with you,” I said. “Persephone wasn’t allowed to date anyone.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes,” I said, but even as I sat there, my arms crossed, there was a part of me that wondered. All those years ago, when Mom came home to find Ben with Persephone, she kicked him out and began yelling. I’d always attributed that to Mom’s anger that her dating rule had been broken, but thinking of it now, it was as if she’d known for a fact that Ben would only hurt Persephone, as if she could see right through to the very core of him—and maybe what she saw was Will. A man who—what? Had driven her crazy? Had left her beaten and bruised as her daughter would be?
It was so difficult to fathom, even with the evidence gaping up at me. The only time I’d ever seen them interact was at Persephone’s wake. Beyond that, she’d never mentioned him. Then again, she’d never talked about any of the men she’d been with, not even the ones she went out with sporadically when Persephone and I were kids. On those occasions, she’d have Aunt Jill come over to watch us, be gone for several hours, and then return to tuck us in, the smell of garlic overpowering her flowery perfume. If I asked her anything about how the date had gone, she’d just smile, skim her fingers over my face, and kiss me on the forehead. She had a history of silence, I realized, even before Persephone had died. She’d had so many secrets stored inside her, it was a wonder I’d ever felt close to her at all.
“And the other thing,” Ben said, “is that . . .” He was speaking more slowly, and he was shifting around, the plastic chair creaking each time he moved. “Well, it has to do with the night Persephone died.”
My eyes widened before I had a chance to stop them. “Yeah?” I prompted.
“Well, we had this fight. It—she’d—okay. Let me start over.” He took a deep breath, rolling his shoulders back and forth as if preparing for a workout. “I dropped her off like I always did, but something was wrong. She couldn’t get back into her room.”
He paused to look at me, his black-hole eyes lingering on my face just long enough to suggest he knew what I’d done. I stared back at him, biting down on the inside of my cheek.
“So she came back to the car,” he said. “And she got in, explained what had happened, and told me to drive. So I did, and . . . I told her that I thought we should try to talk to her mom. I said if we were just upfront with her about our relationship and told her how much we meant to each other, then everything would be out in the open, and she wouldn’t have to keep sneaking in and out.”
He shook his head, closing his eyes for a second. “But she didn’t want to do that. She was like, ‘It’s a waste of time, my mom’s horrible, she’ll never listen.’ So I asked her why she wasn’t willing to fight for us, and things—escalated from there. I should have known they would. She was already pissed when she got in the car.” He slid the photograph in circles on the table, his eyes avoiding mine. “Eventually, she demanded I let her out. It was snowing, though, and she was a mile from her house. I told her no, and I was going to start heading back to her street, but then she just—went wild. She was kicking the dashboard, unbuckling her seat belt, yelling at me to stop the car. I’d—I’d never seen her like that, so I did what she said. I let her out.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down inside his neck as he swallowed. He scratched his shoulder, looked out the window, squinting at the sun as it emerged from behind a cloud, and then, for the briefest of moments, his eyes flicked back toward me. “And then I was pissed off, I guess,” he said. “So I drove away.” He stared at the table, his voice worn down to a whisper. “I fucking drove away.”
I didn’t know how long the tears had been in my eyes, but when he finished speaking, I felt them spill over my lashes and onto my cheeks. The girl he was describing was, without a doubt, Persephone—my Persephone—who could swoon over a white rose, but could just as easily scream at our mother and pummel pillows in our room. I could picture her raging against the inside of Ben’s car, slamming her fists against the window until he did what she demanded. She was like that, always needing to get her way. But where was that rage, that fight, whenever he hurt her? Why had she returned to him at all?
I swiped a hand across my cheek, wiping the tears onto my jeans. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
He flipped the photo back over so that the side with Mom and Will was facing up. He tapped her face three times. “Ever since I found this picture,” he said, “I just keep thinking how—if your mom had just come out with it, if she’d just been honest with Persephone about why she didn’t want her to see me, then maybe we could have talked through it. I could have told her that I wasn’t like my dad, and then—we wouldn’t have been fighting that night, and then—”
“So you’re saying this is all my mom’s fault?”
Just like that, my eyes were dry and my chest flared hot with anger. I dug my fingernails into my palms.
“No,” Ben said, shaking his head. “I’m just looking for some way to feel—less guilty, I guess. I think of Persephone every single day, you know.”
“Good! You should! You should never stop thinking about how you hurt her. You should be so filled with guilt that it’s impossible to get out of bed every day.”
I thought of Saturday mornings when I lived at Aunt Jill’s house, where I burrowed beneath the blankets, curled like a baby in a womb. I thought of mornings at RISD, where I’d make last-minute decisions to skip class, choosing instead to sleep until dinner. Even living with Lauren, there were days when she had to bang on my bedroom door to get me up for work. On those days, I wouldn’t even be asleep; I’d just be staring at the ceiling, holding the sheets to my chin, my heart beating so fast I thought she’d be able to hear it from the hallway.
Ben narrowed his eyes. “You still think I did it?” he asked. “Even after I just explained what happened?”
It was true I’d been drawn in by his story, seduced by the ways I recognized my sister in it, by the way his voice chipped like old paint as he told it. But this was Ben—the same guy who somehow convinced the police not to press any charges. It was strange how surprised he seemed that I didn’t believe him, but then again, he was used to getting away with what he’d done.
“I believe you about the fight,” I said. “But I know you didn’t just drop her off on the side of the street. Come on. It escalated, just like you said, and then . . .”
Even now, I couldn’t just say, You strangled her. I still had such a hard time grappling with that image—Persephone’s eyes going frantic, her hands clawing at the fingers on her neck. I couldn’t see the moment when she went limp as a rag doll in the car; I could only see her body thrown onto the snow, her throat already purpling.
“I have to go,” I told him, pushing back my chair. “I need to get back to my mom.”
As I stood up, Ben shook his head. “And so, what?” he said. “The fact that she was being stalked means nothing to you? You blame me, her boyfriend, over—fucking Tommy Dent?”
My hand froze over the strap of my purse. “What?”
I hadn’t heard the name Tommy Dent in a long time. He was a boy who’d lived a few houses down from us, and I knew very little about him, just that he was two years ahead of me in school and he was always getting into trouble for something—shoplifting, smoking weed in the woods, lighting rats on fire. Mom always told us to keep away from him, but she’d done so in a dismissive way—“Tommy Dent is a bad seed; steer clear of him”—which was nothing at all like the intense, fiery way she’d yelled at Persephone when she saw her with Ben.
“Sorry,” Ben said, “I didn’t mean to sound so—aggressive or whatever. I just don’t understand it. I mean, they questioned Tommy, too, you know. And he’s the one who was always stalking Persephone, so I just, I don’t understand why you’re so convinced it was me. I loved her, Sylvie.”
His eyes were wide as he stared up at me. I blinked, my lips parting, but for some reason, I couldn’t form the words I needed to say. Picking up my purse, I backed away, bumping into the chair as I did. “I have to go,” I reminded him.
“But—” He stood up, too, and I hated how I had to look up to meet his gaze. “You knew he was stalking her, right? That he was always watching her, always leaving her all these crazy little notes?”
“I have to go,” I repeated.
As I walked toward the exit, my legs felt weak and wobbly. Because I hadn’t known; she’d never told me. Persephone, who’d pointed out her bruises, who’d shown off the rose that had to be kept a secret from Mom, who’d made me agree to a pact as her one and only sister—Just keep the window open. Just a crack, okay?—had never told me that someone else was a threat to her, that someone else meant to do her harm.