Somehow, living in Providence, I’d found myself in a place of ease. Strange, now, to think of it, now that I was so far from that world, sucked instead back into the one I’d thought I’d peeled off of me like a sunburn. It had only been a few weeks since my last shift at Steve’s, but already, I could barely remember how to load the ink into the gun. I could remember wiping beads of blood from flesh, but when I pictured those moments, wearing those blue latex gloves, it was someone else’s hand I saw.
I texted with Lauren on Sunday, trying to get back to that place. Mom and I were barely speaking. After spitting and sobbing more words to each other on Thursday than we had in sixteen years, we’d spent most of the next few days in the living room—together, watching TV, but silent. Now, while Mom flipped through channels, I huddled up with my phone on the couch, texting Lauren about Wolf Bro, the nickname we’d given to one of her clients. He was a guy in his midthirties who always boasted about the women he’d “beasted” over the weekend, and he’d been scheduled to come back that week for session three of his wolf tattoo.
“Ugh,” Lauren wrote. “Wolf Bro now wants a full moon done over his entire right pec, because—exact quote—‘a true wolf needs something to howl at.’ ”
“Genius,” I replied.
“I know, right? Because how else will the chicks at the gym know what an animal he is in the sheets?”
“Haha.”
“I swear, it took everything I had not to scream at him that no self-respecting woman would ever fuck a guy with a wolf tattoo.”
“Haha,” I typed again, but I didn’t even smile.
I tried to be engaged in the conversation. I tried to picture us in our apartment, handing a bag of Doritos back and forth as we laughed about Wolf Bro. I even saw us swiping orange crumbs onto the floor and joking that Claude, our fictional French housekeeper, would vacuum them up later. But every time I went to type a response to Lauren, to embed myself deeper into the comfort of that fantasy, I found myself nearly writing what was really on my mind instead, all the unanswered questions I’d collected over the last week: What had Tommy Dent wanted with Persephone’s things, and what had happened to them after all this time?
And why had he told the police to talk to the mo—
“So how’s it going with your mom?” Lauren texted, and I was grateful to be yanked away from the skipping record of those questions. “Is it weird between you guys?”
“Yeah,” I responded quickly. “It’s really weird.”
“Is she acting like you’re her personal bartender instead of her nurse?”
“No, she’s actually sober. Apparently it hurts when she drinks now, because . . . cancer.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” Lauren replied. “So then have you guys talked about it? How she drank herself into oblivion for half your life?”
“There’s nothing to talk about really,” I said. “I already know why she did it.”
“So?? That doesn’t make it right! Yes, she lost a daughter, and that’s really tragic, but so many parents have lost children, and they don’t just shut down forever. They mourn, of course, but they eventually move on. It was so selfish that she didn’t find a way to do that—for YOUR sake at least!”
Even through text, Lauren’s tone was sharp and unforgiving, same as it always was when she talked about Mom. I knew she spoke that way out of fierce loyalty to me, but as I read her message again, I couldn’t help but feel that it was a little unfair. And that wasn’t Lauren’s fault. It was mine.
“It was hard for her to move on,” I wrote. “She never got any closure.”
“Don’t make excuses for her,” Lauren replied. “No one ever gets closure when they lose someone they love.”
“Yeah . . . but it was the way she lost her . . .”
I felt my heart thumping then. It was picking up speed as I snuck closer to the truth—truth I’d hidden since the beginning of our friendship, truth I’d painted over as if it were a bruise.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t awful,” Lauren said. “A car accident is so unexpected. But it doesn’t give her a free pass out of living.”
“It wasn’t a car accident.”
I’d typed it so quickly that I barely realized what I was doing. But now I had said it. I’d scratched off the paint of that lie. I could almost see it under my fingernails as I gripped the phone in my hand.
Taking a deep breath, I typed out the rest. “She was murdered. And they never solved the case.”
The second I pressed Send, I felt dizzy, and I leaned my head against the back of the couch to steady myself. When I looked at my phone a few moments later, the space where Lauren’s response would be was empty. There wasn’t even a typing icon, and I stared at the screen until one finally appeared.
“What??” she wrote after a minute.
“I’m so sorry I lied to you,” I rushed forward. “I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it before. The lie was so much easier. I know that sounds stupid, but . . . ugh. I’m so sorry.”
“Murdered how?” she replied, much faster this time.
“Strangled.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop by twenty degrees. I imagined I could look up at the ceiling and see snow beginning to fall.
“Holy shit,” Lauren said.
“Yeah . . .”
“And they don’t know who did it?”
I brought my fingers to my lips and breathed against them, trying to warm myself. But soon, I shivered anyway, and my hands began to shake.
“Nope,” I responded.
“Wow,” Lauren said. “This is . . . I don’t even know. That’s a really huge thing to never tell me.”
I didn’t respond. Instead, I kept my eyes on the phone, where the typing icon flashed and disappeared, flashed and disappeared, over and over again. I slouched down on the couch, huddling deeper into myself as I waited for her to hit Send, and I tucked my icy hands into the sleeves of my sweatshirt.
“But I GUESS I can understand why you never talked about it,” Lauren finally wrote, and I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “That’s some heavy shit for a toddler to go through.”
For a moment, I blinked at her text in confusion. Then I recalled the rest of the lie I’d told her, the paint that still remained. And right away, I knew I could fix that. I could tell her I’d been fourteen years old when I lost Persephone—old enough to know and love her, old enough to be baffled by her, too.
“Do you want me to call you right now?” Lauren asked. “I have so many questions but it seems weird to talk about it over text. I don’t want to overwhelm you or anything, but I’m just over here like OMG where did it happen, where were YOU when it happened, etc. etc.”
I remembered Persephone hissing at me through the window that night. I remembered holding the blanket tighter over my head, ignoring her so hard that she walked away. And then I remembered what I’d always known; paint is stubborn. It clings instead of chips, and even after more than a decade, it has to be scraped and scraped and scraped. But right then, my hands were stiff with cold, and my entire body was trembling.
“I’m so sorry,” I managed to type, “but I have to help my mom with something. Can we talk about this later? Tomorrow maybe?”
“Uhhh sure . . .” she replied after a moment, and I looked over at Mom, asleep in her chair.
• • •
The next morning, Mom brought Wuthering Heights to chemo. I watched her as she read, trying to distract myself from my conversations with Lauren—both the one I’d stumbled through the night before, and the one I still needed to have. Each of them filled me with a light-headed anxiety that made the words in Mom’s book seem to blur.
Clearing my throat, I forced my eyes to focus, and I saw that the corners of several pages were folded down. It seemed so unlike her—flagging a passage with the intention of returning to it later—and for a moment, I had to resist the urge to rip the book from her hands, comb through those pages, and see what had moved her so much that she felt the need to mark them.
“You know,” I said, “I had to do a paper on that book in high school, but I barely remember it. Is it good?”
She didn’t look at me when she responded.
“It’s not that it’s good,” she said distractedly. “It’s just true.” The page she’d been reading made a whispery sound as she turned it. “Be quiet, though, okay? I can’t concentrate if you’re talking to me.”
“Sorry,” I said, and I turned my attention toward the entrance of the room. I jolted then, seeing Ben walk by. He glanced in casually, but as soon as he noticed me, he hurried away down the hall.
I looked at Mom, who held the book so close that it blocked her face entirely, and then I stood up and followed him into the reception area.
“Ben,” I whispered, and when he turned around, there was a twinge of pain—or guilt—in his eyes, as if it hurt him just to look at me.
“Hey,” he said, coming to an abrupt stop. “I wasn’t trying to get in your way or anything. I forgot this was your mom’s chemo time.”
“That’s not—”
“But while you’re here, can we talk for a second? I want to apologize.”
I paused. “About what?”
Cupping my elbow gently with his palm, he led me toward a window in front of some chairs. “I’m sorry about what I said to you last week,” he said.
“Um,” I started, “you’re going to have to be more specific.”
“About Tommy Dent,” he said, shaking his head, as if disappointed with himself. “I was a jerk about it. It’s obviously a sensitive subject, and I sort of threw him in your face.”
I rubbed the toe of my shoe into the carpet, keeping my eyes on my feet as I responded.
“Actually,” I said, “you might be right about Tommy.”
When I looked back up at him, his brow was furrowed, his dark eyes slightly squinted. “You’re going to have to be more specific,” he echoed.
“I think he—” I stopped, knowing that once I said it, I wouldn’t be able to take it back. “I think he might have killed my sister.”
The words thudded against the air, louder than I’d intended, as I finally said the thing I’d only been able to imagine in sporadic flashes so far. My breath became sharp yet shallow, my skin suddenly hot. I lifted my hand to my forehead, and then my body loosened, my arms flopping to my sides.
“Here. Come with me,” Ben insisted. He put his hand on my back and I allowed myself to be led away from the windows and down a hall. We walked until we reached a door marked “Staff Only,” and then Ben nudged me inside.
At first, it was dark, but I could sense that the room was small, and when Ben flicked on a light switch and my eyes recovered from the shock of brightness, I saw that we were standing in a tiny bathroom. Ben slid the silver lock into place, and I had to blink away the image of my bedroom window, the old white latch so easy to turn that it made betraying my sister seem almost natural.
Ben pumped some brown paper from the towel dispenser and held it under the running faucet. “Here,” he said. “This will help.” Pushing my hair to one side, he held the cool, wet paper to the back of my neck.
For a moment, the dampness soothed me; it eased the prickling darkness that was swarming my vision. But then, registering the slight pressure of Ben’s palm as he cupped the base of my skull, I saw Persephone in my mind, pulling back her shirt to expose a fresh purple bruise just beginning to burn beneath her skin.
I jerked away from him, and the wet paper towel slapped onto the tile. I took in the door with its silver lock, and I reached forward to snap the lever backward. “What are you doing?” I demanded.
Ben bent over to pick up the towel and tossed it into the trash can. “Nothing,” he said. “You just got so pale all of a sudden, I thought you were going to faint.” He gestured toward the door. “Sorry—I locked that out of habit, I guess.”
When I didn’t respond, he put his hand on the door handle and opened it a little. “Do you want to go back out there?” he asked. “It’s just—you got kind of loud, and . . . the cancer center isn’t really the place for phrases like ‘killed my sister.’ ”
He laughed then, quickly and uncomfortably, but it was still a kick to my stomach.
“So which is it?” I shot at him. “I looked like I was going to faint, or I was too loud?”
He blinked at me—once, twice—and then he returned his hand to his side, letting the bathroom door fall closed. “Both,” he said. His eyes roved over my face. “How are you feeling now? Do you want to sit down for a second?”
He reached behind me and closed the lid on the toilet seat. Feeling ridiculous and stupid, but also a little unsteady, I sat down on top of it and put my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands.
“Did you have breakfast this morning?” he asked.
I pictured Mom’s plate, the food only pushed around instead of eaten, and how my stomach had growled as I scraped the cold, dry leftovers into the trash just before we left for the hospital.
“We only had two eggs left,” I muttered. “I need to go shopping.”
“Oh man,” Ben said, “I hate grocery shopping. Such a pain in the ass.”
I lifted my head just long enough to give him a look, and he took a small step back in response, leaning against the counter. “Sorry,” he said. “Not important. But, look, now that we’re on the same page about Tommy, I’m just curious—what made you come around? It was just last week that you were accusing me of killing her.”
I stared at the floor and mumbled toward the tiles, “A lot has changed since last week.”
“Okay,” Ben said, his feet shifting. “Like what?”
I hesitated, unsure of how much to tell him, how much to admit. He was Ben Emory—all I had to do was think his name and my pulse would quicken—but there was so much swimming in my head right then, so much lapping at my brain and ready to overflow.
“Well,” I said, “that picture you showed me. You were right about it. You were right about my mom and your dad.”
“Yes, that. But also how he hurt her. How they were together and it ended badly and that’s why my mom never wanted Persephone to be with you.”
I heard Ben take a breath. “Shit.” My gaze was still focused on the grout between the tiles—it wasn’t safe, in such a small space, to look him in the eye—but I knew that his body had stiffened.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “That’s not a very articulate response. It’s just—” He ran his hand over his face, his features sagging as he dragged his fingers against them. “I wish she’d told us that back then. I’m not my father.”
There was a sudden edge, cool but sharp, that slid into his voice, and it was enough to remind me of where I was, who I was with. In that tiny space stood a man who, murderer or not, had once hurt my sister. I picked my head up to glance at the door. It was only a few feet away from me. I could reach it in less than a second if I had to.
“Why didn’t she just explain that to Persephone?” he asked, his tone softening. “I don’t—I don’t understand.”
My eyes coasted back toward the floor, though my body remained alert. “She said it hurt too much to talk about it.”
Ben didn’t say anything to that, and even I couldn’t blame him.
“I don’t know,” I continued, more to myself than to him. “Maybe I should have done more—back then. Maybe I should have questioned things. I mean, Persephone was almost eighteen when my mom saw you guys together—how much longer could the dating rule really apply to her? I should have found that odd, but instead I just accepted it. I just trusted that my mom knew what was best.”
“You were a kid,” Ben said. “That’s what you were supposed to do.”
I shrugged. “I guess,” I said. Then I straightened a little. “I’m just surprised I never figured this out. I mean, even after she died, there were signs.”
“Signs? What kind of signs?”
I flicked my eyes toward his face, then quickly looked at the trash can. “You weren’t at Persephone’s wake, were you?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. I’d spent those brutal hours with my fists clenched, my eyes narrowed, scanning the crowd to see if he dared to show up.
Ben shifted his feet. “No,” he said. “I didn’t want to upset anyone. I figured you guys would have heard that I left Persephone on the road that night, and . . .” He cleared his throat. “No, I didn’t go.”
“Well your dad did,” I said. “And I hated that, because he was your dad. But it made sense, I guess, because the other council members were there, too—except my mom only shook hands with them. But when she saw your dad, she just . . . collapsed against him, and he sort of . . .” I gestured with my hand to demonstrate. “Gently patted her hair. I didn’t think about it back then, but now, it’s like—it was the kind of thing you’d see between people who have history.”
I paused, remembering the way she’d gripped his arms, how her tears had seemed swift and endless. “I don’t know,” I added. “I just think that if I’d actually thought about it, then maybe I would have put things together. It would have been too late, obviously—but still.”
Ben was silent for a moment. “Well, if we’re going by that logic,” he said, “then I should have figured it out a long time ago, too—even before Persephone died.”
I tilted my head to look up at him, but he was staring at the wall. “Why?” I asked.
He crossed his arms, squinting a little. “Your mom came to my grandfather’s funeral,” he said. “My dad’s dad.”
Richard Emory? But Mom had just spoken about him with such venom in her voice.
“It was soon after Persephone and I started dating,” Ben continued. “Soon after your mom said that we couldn’t. And when I saw her there, I thought maybe things had changed. Maybe she was coming around to the idea of the two of us. Maybe Persephone had mentioned that my grandfather had died and how—how close he and I were, and maybe your mom was trying to, I don’t know, offer her support to our family? I mean, she didn’t actually speak to me that day, but still. I asked Persephone about it, but she said nope, nothing had changed, your mom still didn’t know we were together. She couldn’t even believe your mom had been at the funeral in the first place, so it was just this weird, inexplicable thing. But now . . .”
I watched his face, saw the realization of something gather in his features, and I waited for him to continue. When seconds passed and he still hadn’t spoken, I rolled my eyes.
“But now what?” I prompted.
He shook his head slightly. “My mom had just left my dad, not that long before my grandfather died. So maybe . . . maybe your mom came to the funeral to see my dad, and to see if—now that he wasn’t married—if there was . . .” He trailed off.
“There was what?”
“Space for her again?”
He framed the words as a question, but when I snapped my head up to look at him, I could tell that, already, he believed them as fact.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “You think your father’s so great that my mom came crawling right back to him the second he became available again? Do you really think that anyone could be that pathetic?”
Ben scratched at his cheek, the one with the scar that cut across his skin. “I don’t think my father is so great,” he said.
“But you think my mother is pathetic?”
“What? No, I—”
“Then what are we talking about here?”
I stood up, latching my eyes onto his, and I waited to see who would last the longest, who would be the one to see the other look away. Even though the darkness of his irises, so close in color to his pupils, made my neck prickle, I knew that it had to be me. I crossed my arms and shifted my weight, and in a few more seconds, his gaze dropped to the floor.
“I just think,” he said, “that it’s possible to love someone for a really long time, even if you can’t be with them. I mean, I still love—”
He stopped himself before he said her name. I narrowed my eyes to slits.
“Let me start again,” he said. “I don’t think your mom would be pathetic if she still loved him. Love is love. You can’t just kick it to the curb, even if sometimes you wished like hell you could.”
But it had been nearly two decades from the time Mom and Will had been together to the time Mom went to his father’s funeral. I couldn’t imagine loving someone that long—not when they were just a memory, a wound, a thing that was already gone. How could a love like that remain so constant, dependable as the change of seasons or the months in a year? I pictured the pages of a calendar turning, the squares of days that my mother might have wasted holding out for a ghost. I envisioned her marking each date with a small, carefully drawn heart—the third, the twelfth, the twenty-first, all days she might have loved him—and then I felt my breath catch in my throat.
“Did your dad ever have Dark Days?” I asked.
Ben tilted his head. “Dark what?”
“The fifteenth of every month—does it mean anything to you? Did you ever notice your dad acting strange on those days?”
He bit his lip, seeming to consider it, and then slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. Not that I can remember anyway. Why? What’s the significance of the fifteenth?”
I sighed. “I have no idea. Just this weird thing with my mom. Guess I’ll add it to the list of all the other mysteries about her, right after why the hell she loved your dad and why she trusted Tommy Dent.”
I felt him watching me through the beat of silence that followed. “What do you mean she trusted Tommy?” he asked. “Trusted him about what?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s so stupid,” I scoffed, “but apparently he told her that he and Persephone—”
My shoulder bumped against the paper towel dispenser, and I stumbled a little, startled at how close I’d been to it.
Ben’s nearness in that small room made the space even tighter. Still, I couldn’t risk taking the conversation into the hallway where Mom might hear us. Her chair was close to the door; she might recognize my voice down the hall—or worse, recognize one that reminded her of a man she once knew.
“Apparently,” I tried again, “he told her that he and Persephone had been really good friends.”
Ben looked at me as if I’d just insulted him. “That’s insane,” he said. “I told you the other day—he was stalking her. He’d, like, wait outside his house for me to drop her off at night. He left her all these notes that were just—” He shook his head, as if trying to shake away the memory. “They were not friends.”
“I know that,” I said. “But my mom believed him for some reason.”
“That’s insane,” Ben repeated, rubbing the back of his neck. “But I don’t get it, why would he tell her that—besides the fact that he’s crazy.”
I shrugged wearily. “He wanted Persephone’s things.”
Ben stared at me blankly. “I’m sorry, I’m not following.”
“Me either,” I said. “All I know is that after Persephone died, Tommy visited my mom a bunch and fed her a story about how the two of them had been such good friends. He said he wanted to have some mementos of her—and somehow that worked, because my mom ended up giving him basically all of Persephone’s stuff.”
Ben paused. “She what?”
“Well,” I said, “technically she traded it.”
His eyes clouded, as if a fog had rolled in front of them. “Traded it for what?”
I tried to picture Mom’s body succumbing to the pills. Was it different from how she’d slump against the headboard after too many drinks? Did her nerve endings start to feel like beginnings, like she could float away from her skin and hover near the ceiling, watching, with only mild curiosity, the sad hollow woman below?
“She—had him do stuff around the house,” I said. “Cleaning, mowing, et cetera.”
Ben took his time absorbing my answer. “Tommy did chores for your mother. And in return, she gave him her daughter’s things? That can’t be it. There’s got to be more to it than that. Did you try asking her—”
“Look,” I interrupted. “My mom hasn’t been well for a really long time. After Persephone died, she fell apart. She wasn’t thinking clearly. But yeah, she gave him all of Persephone’s stuff. And I don’t know why he wanted it or what he planned to do with it, or if he even still has it, but that’s what happened.”
Ben was quiet for a while, staring at something just to the right of my head. When he finally spoke again, his voice sounded deeper than before. “Well,” he said, “we should find out.”
I waited for him to clarify, but he just kept staring into space.
“Find out what?” I asked.
He looked at me, briefly, as if he’d almost forgotten I was there, and then he returned his gaze to the wall. “Find out why he wanted her stuff,” he said. “Find out what he planned to do.”
“Oh yeah? And how do you expect to do that? You can’t exactly go back in time and spy on him.”
His brows knitted together. “No, not spy. Talk. I think we need to talk to Tommy Dent.”
A sound—not quite laughter, not quite breath—squeezed through my lips. “You mean, like, visit him? Go to his house?”
Ben nodded in a slow, unhurried way. “Yes.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere near Tommy Dent. Do you have any idea what kind of—how he—he raped a girl! He was in jail for eleven years.”
“I know,” Ben said coolly.
“He doesn’t even live on my street anymore.”
“I know. He lives in Hanover.”
I narrowed my eyes again. “How do you know that?”
He looked right at me, and beneath the fluorescent bathroom lighting, his irises seemed as dark and solid as coal. “It may be news to you, Sylvie—that he killed Persephone. But I’ve believed it was him from day one.”
The light above us flickered. I glanced at the sink, the door, the toilet, anywhere but his face. “Okay,” I said, “but—”
“And it’s weird, right? That he wanted Persephone’s things? I mean, it’s suspicious as hell. I could maybe see him wanting some kind of keepsake, given how obsessed he was with her, but all of it? No. I don’t think so. There’s something not right there.”
“There’s something not right with Tommy,” I said, and Ben nodded.
“I know. Which is why we should go see him. Maybe after all these years he’s got his guard down. He thinks he got away with it, that he’s untouchable. We can ask him about it and see if he slips up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can take to the police.”
I allowed myself to imagine it—sneaking off down a hallway while Ben distracted Tommy, finding his bedroom, rummaging through drawers until my fingers latched onto a box. It would be small, no bigger than a cell phone, no thicker than a couple of inches. I saw myself open it, saw the lid lift away, and inside, coiled on a piece of cloth, I saw a gold chain, a pendant shaped like a star.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I don’t—”
“I have the day off tomorrow,” Ben cut in. “We could go then. Early afternoon, maybe? I could pick you up and we could drive there together.”
“Pick me up?” I heard myself ask, my voice distant and soft.
His car on the street, still running. A plume of exhaust in the air. My sister going back to him, and back to him, opening the door and slinking inside.
“No,” I said, snapping to attention.
“There’s no we! I’m not going with you to Tommy’s!”
He’d been using that word—we—as if we were teammates or partners or even on the same side. I glared at him, trying to make my eyes as sharp as possible, and the flicker of determination on his face slowly dimmed to embers.
“Okay,” he said after a moment, and he put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry.”
“I need to go.”
I stepped forward and yanked open the door, Ben dodging to the side so it didn’t hit his feet. I blinked as I entered the hallway, trying to orient myself.
“Sylvie, wait,” Ben said.
When I turned around, he was stepping into the hall and pulling a pen from his pocket. “Here, let me just . . .” He looked around and tore off a strip of paper from a nearby bulletin board. Using his palm as a writing surface, he scribbled something down.
“Here. Take this.”
He held the paper out to me, and I could see, as it dangled from his fingers, that he’d written a series of numbers on it.
“You’re giving me your phone number?” I asked. “Seriously?”
“In case you change your mind,” he said.
I thought about refusing to take it, just walking away and letting him stand there, stupidly watching me go, but something about that felt childish. It was just a piece of paper; I could put it in my pocket and throw it away when I got home.
“I’m not going to change my mind,” I promised, and when I reached out to take it, my fingers grazed against his. I pulled back quickly, as if recoiling from an electric shock, and he smiled at me—kindly, one might think, a little sheepishly even. If he had been anyone else, I might have smiled back as a measure of habit.
As he headed off down the hall, I watched him get farther away. Then I saw him round the corner and finally disappear. I had to get back to Mom—I knew that I did—but my feet wouldn’t move. The feeling of his skin was still singeing mine. Ben’s fingers—I knew what they could do, the colors they coaxed from blood. Stuffing his number into my pocket, I made myself remember. I made myself think of what they’d done.