I was counting the tiles on the floor of Mom’s treatment room, and every time I got to ten, I looked toward the door, searching for Ben. I kept expecting every nurse that walked by to be him, but so far, he hadn’t appeared. Eight and nine and ten—and it wasn’t his tall frame filling up the doorway, wasn’t his scar on the cheeks of the faces that passed. Eight and nine and ten—and the hours moved along, slow as the drugs that dripped into Mom’s bloodstream. Three and four and five—and I glanced at Mom, saw her squeezed-shut eyes wringing out the light.
She hadn’t spoken to me at all that morning, but I kept looking at her in her chair, her head tipped back, her lips dry and slightly parted. I even opened my mouth a couple times to apologize for what I’d said the night before, but then I clamped my teeth together, recalling all her secrets and everything they’d done.
I had to see Ben. Eight and nine and ten. He needed to know who Persephone was to him. I’d barely slept all night, filled with the urgency to tell him, to rewrite a history already dictated by pain. He would lose her all over again—lose whatever sacredness still colored his memories of their relationship—but he had to. He had to know. Eight and nine and—
My cell phone vibrated with a call, and for a second, I assumed that it was him. It was Lauren, though, and I shook my head, remembering that I’d never even given Ben my number.
I glanced at Mom, snoring gently beside me now. Then I looked back at my phone and sent the call to voicemail. I knew I needed to talk to her—I owed my best friend that much—and after my conversation with Ben the night before, I thought I might even be able to. But Mom’s treatment room, the hospital itself, wasn’t the place, and right then, I had only enough energy to devote myself to one difficult task.
I stood up and walked out of the room. I didn’t see any nurses in the reception area, so I approached a woman at the front desk and waited as she wrapped up a conversation on the phone.
“Thanks for your patience,” she said a minute later. “How can I help you?”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Ben Emory.”
“Hey.”
A rush of warmth shot across my chest at the sound of his voice behind me. He’d startled me, I told myself—that’s all it was—but when I turned and saw he was already smiling at me, my sternum felt lit up from inside. I raised my hand to my chest, trying to rub away the sensation.
“I found him,” I said over my shoulder to the receptionist.
I heard her chuckle and then Ben’s fingers wrapped around mine, tugging me away.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said after we’d taken a few steps. He let go of my hand, the smile still stretched out on his face. “I was actually going to call you tonight, but then I realized I don’t have your number.”
Part of me wanted to laugh, having had the same realization only minutes ago—but the other part, which had no patience for bones that felt lit up inside, got right to the point.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Okay.” Ben nodded. “Go ahead.”
“No, I—” I looked around. “Not here. Can we get together after you get off of work?”
“Oh, sure. Of course. And actually—the reason I was going to call you is because I want to show you something.”
I winced. “I don’t think I can handle any more letters.”
“No,” Ben said, smiling again. “This is a good thing, I promise. Do you want to come over tonight? I’m done here at six.”
Was it the light in the room or were his eyes just a simple shade of brown? I’d looked right into them several times over the last week, but in that moment, I couldn’t see them as the impossibly black color they’d always been.
“Yeah.” I swallowed down the thought. “That sounds good.”
“Great,” Ben said. “I can even whip something up for us, if you’d like. I can’t promise it’ll be better than frozen pizza, but—”
“No,” I cut in. “That’s okay. I’ll just eat before I come.”
His expression slackened, as if disappointed, but I couldn’t let him plan a meal for us, imagining it as some sort of date, only for me to show up and destroy him. It would be too cruel—and after everything that had happened, everything I’d learned, I knew now that cruelty was not a thing Ben deserved.
“Okay,” he said. “Well, just come when you can, then.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and I spun around before I could see him walk away. Heading back toward Mom’s room, I felt stiff and heavy with dread. After tonight, Ben would never remember Persephone the same way again, and it wasn’t fair that the messenger had to be me. He should have always known. We all should have.
When I walked back into the treatment room, Mom’s eyes were open. She stared at me as I took my seat beside her.
“Who were you talking to?” she asked.
I looked at her, but her face revealed nothing—just a pale oval of bone and skin. I turned my eyes toward the doorway. There was no way she could have seen us from there; the view didn’t reach that far. Still, there seemed no point in lying anymore. I was tired of it. I was so intolerably tired.
“Ben Emory,” I said. “He works here.”
Mom’s mouth dropped open, but then she squeezed her eyes tightly and twisted her head away from me, leaning it back against the chair.
I felt no need to explain or apologize. I just looked at the floor—eight and nine and ten—and got back to counting tiles.
• • •
I didn’t listen to the voicemail Lauren had left until Mom was back in her recliner at home, but by then it was too late.
“You’re either at your mom’s chemo,” she’d said, “or you’re still ignoring me. Either way, I’m leaving for work soon, but I’m out at seven thirty. You better call me back sometime after that.” Then she’d softened her tone and added, “Oh, and Wolf Bro called Steve to complain about his last session. He’s coming in today to discuss the issue with me—apparently the eyes don’t look beast-y enough with the new shading—so at the very least, you’re gonna want to hear that story. If I’ve forgiven you for ignoring me, that is.”
It was just after seven when I got to Ben’s, and I vowed to myself that I would call Lauren back as soon as I left. But for now, I was still carrying the weight of someone else’s lies, and before I could feel unburdened enough to talk to Lauren about my own, I needed to tell Ben the unfathomable fact of who Persephone had been.
“Hey,” Ben said when he opened his front door. “Come on in.”
He was smiling at me again, and it was enough to make me hesitate. His expression should have been wary, not welcoming; he should have locked the door when he saw me coming. But he didn’t know that yet, and I took a few extra seconds wiping my feet on the mat before walking inside, as if I could scrape off the truth.
“Can I take your coat?” he asked as he closed the door behind me.
“Uh, no, that’s okay.”
I didn’t know how long I was staying—or, more accurately, I didn’t know how long he’d want me to stay once I told him what I knew. If the situation were reversed, I’d ask him to leave immediately. Then I’d scream until the walls shook. I’d throw everything in the house to the floor.
“Okay,” he said, sliding his hands into his pockets. “I have something to show you. Or—sorry, not show you—I’m giving it to you. I remembered it when you were talking to Tommy yesterday, and I was going to give it to you when we got back to my house, but then, honestly, I just forgot about it, after the letter, and everything.”
I looked at my feet as my face flushed. “That’s okay,” I said quickly. “But can I just say my thing first?”
But he wasn’t listening. He had walked into his bedroom and was now heading straight for his nightstand drawer. After a moment of watching from the doorway, I crossed the threshold and followed him into the room where, less than a day ago, we’d pressed our bodies together, desperate to feel something other than pain. I stopped myself a few feet from the bed, closing my eyes against the image of us—mouths on skin, fingers gripping hard. I willed the memory to dissolve, then forced myself to picture Persephone instead, her blonde hair trailing down her back as she got into Ben’s car night after night.
Snapping my eyes open, I looked toward Ben, hunched over the nightstand, blocking my view.
How was I going to say it? I’d tried to rehearse it on the way over but I still didn’t know where to start. I could keep it simple—Ben, Persephone is your sister—but how could he take that seriously? And if I told him, instead, the story of how I’d found out, would he even be able to follow? Or would the words become only syllables, and then only sounds?
“Got it,” he said, turning toward me. He held his hand up in the air, palm toward the ceiling. Squinting into the space between us, I tried to translate the gesture—and then I saw it. At first I only noticed the delicate chain that dangled from his fingers, but as my eyes followed that down to the pendant hanging at the bottom, my pulse flickered.
It was the gold starfish swinging like a pendulum from his hand.
My eyes stretched wide. “Where did you get that?” I demanded.
Something flashed across Ben’s face—satisfaction, maybe, or anticipation—and I saw he was still smiling at me. “I’ve had it since she died,” he said.
My breath became shallow, the room teetering. I managed to take a couple steps backward. “No,” I whispered.
“It’s okay,” Ben said, “you can have it. I didn’t know until yesterday when you asked Tommy for it how much it would mean to you. But here—it’s yours.”
He held it out to me, his arm reaching through the air to close the gap between us. My feet continued to move backward, though the rest of my body felt frozen in place.
“Sylvie, what’s wrong?”
The smile had faded from his face, but I could still see the ghost of it, lingering in the corners of his lips.
“It was you?” I murmured, my eyes glazing with tears.
He cocked his head to the side. “What was me?”
I spun away from him then, and in the fraction of a second before I’d fully turned around, I saw his eyes widen. When I yanked open the front door, I could feel him just behind me, his shoes thudding against the hardwood floor. I stumbled down the steps, fumbling for my keys in my coat pocket, and ran toward my car, his fingers brushing my coat as he tried to grab me.
“Sylvie, stop! Wait. Stop!”
I was almost there—just about to open the driver’s side door—when he grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around. His fingers dug into my arms like dead bolts locking into place, and he pressed my back against the car, his breath erupting in bursts against my cheek.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
I stared up at him. His eyes were blacker than I’d ever seen them, even with the light from his front door shining toward us. His pupils looked wildly dilated, like an animal about to pounce. I tightened my muscles, tried to wriggle free of him, but I couldn’t move—his grip was that hard. Now, I could only stand there, helpless as Persephone once was, shaking.
But then, just as suddenly as he’d clasped onto my arms, he glanced down at his hands, and his mouth fell open. He let go.
“Sorry, I—” he started. Then he shook his head. “You’re scared of me?”
“You killed her,” I said, my voice husky with tears.
“What? Why would you say that? You know that’s not true.”
“You have her necklace. She was never without it. Ever.”
“I—I know that, but—”
“She wasn’t wearing it when they found her body. Which means that the person who has it was the last person to see her alive.”
“No,” Ben said, snapping his head back and forth. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. I found the necklace. I didn’t take it from her.”
I heard a surge of voices then, not too far away from us. There were people, it seemed, just beyond the turn in the driveway back toward the main house. They were saying words I couldn’t make out, words that sounded sharp and contentious. But I didn’t care about that. Whatever it was, whoever was arguing, didn’t matter to me then.
“You found it on her dead body!” I cried. “After you killed her!”
“No,” he protested, looking back toward his father’s house, the source of the sudden commotion. “No, I—” He thrust his eyes back onto mine. “I found it in my driveway. Right after she went missing. I was shoveling and I found it there, under the snow. I almost—”
“—and your secretary’s been giving me the runaround all fucking day.”
“I won’t be ignored like this!” the voice insisted. It was louder now, practically shouting, the boom of it echoing toward us.
“Why would it be in your driveway?” I demanded.
“I don’t know.” He glanced toward the voices again. “But I told you how we were fighting, how she was kicking all around, going nuts. It must have fallen off her then. And I don’t know, I guess it fell out of my car some point after that.”
“But—the police,” I said. “I told them to check to see if you had it.”
“They did.”
“And?”
“And,” Ben said, “I lied to them.”
“I need more. I didn’t sign up to be harassed like this. People knocking on my door.”
“They didn’t ask me about the necklace until a couple weeks after her body was found,” Ben continued. “And she was my girlfriend, Sylvie. It was her necklace. I wasn’t just going to give it to them so they could—I don’t know—hold it as evidence forever, or somehow use it as evidence against me. But, listen, if I’d known how much it meant to you—and I should have, I should have known—but I was nineteen and so stupid and I was only thinking of myself, of what I’d lost. So I kept it.”
“Get off my property right now or I will call the police,” a second voice shouted.
“Yeah, you do that. Go call the police. I’d love to have a chat with them.”
My head was reeling, the sky whirling in circles above me, but I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking toward Will Emory’s house. It was a couple hundred feet away, beyond the bend in the driveway. From where we stood, all I could see was the glow from the spotlight over the garage.
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “But that’s my dad, and the other one sounds like . . .”
He started walking down the driveway, and despite how I’d just run away from him, how I could still feel the grip of his fingers on my arms, I followed him.
“Look, I’m willing to make an even trade. Just like old times. They left this stuff at my house yesterday. Then they hauled ass out of there and—”
“They?”
“Haven’t you been listening to me? They were harassing me, asking me all these questions. I need more money if I’m gonna have to deal with shit like that from now on.”
As we crept down the driveway, we stayed close to a row of evergreen trees, careful not to crunch too loudly over the snow with our feet. When we drew near enough to make out their faces—Will’s face, Tommy’s face—I was about to take another step forward, but Ben held his arm in front of me. He put his index finger to his lips, then gestured for me to follow him to one of the larger evergreens a few feet closer to where they stood in the driveway. We crouched down behind it, my heart thumping.
“I’m not your personal savings account, Thomas. I’ve told you this.”
“Just look,” Tommy said. “Look—it’s her blanket or whatever.”
Through the branches, I watched as Tommy opened a box—the box, I saw through squinting eyes, the one I’d brought to his house the day before, then stupidly left behind when Ben dragged me out the door. I hadn’t really thought about it—there had been too many other things tugging me this way and that—but now, seeing it in Tommy’s arms, I could barely breathe. He pulled out a single corner of Persephone’s afghan, and my stomach lurched.
“See?” Tommy said. “I bet she used this all the time. Way more often than an old sweater or a dingy copy of some dumbass book—and you paid for all that shit no problem.”
It took me a moment to catch up—I was still staring at the afghan—but as I began to process Tommy’s words, I felt the nausea slither up my esophagus. I tried to swallow it down, but everything inside me was stiffening, my throat heavy and immobile as stone.
Will had Persephone’s things. Tommy had said he’d sold them to someone who needed them more than he did. But why would Will have needed them? My mind raced through possibilities. Had Persephone’s death made him feel guilty for ignoring his daughter during her life? Had he sought, too late, to know her through the things that had been hers?
I looked at Ben, whose face was contorted by confusion and surprise. Still in the dark about his dad’s relationship to Persephone, he had no context with which to make sense of it.
“You’re not supposed to just show up like this,” Will scolded. “There’s a procedure.”
“Yeah, well, fuck the procedure, because I called your secretary all day and she gave me nothing but bullshit. And I’m so sick of your rules. That was great and all when I needed a lawyer, or a place to live, or even back when it happened, but you know what I realized? I hold the fucking cards, and they’re all coming up aces.”
“Oh, is that right—you hold the cards?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, let’s call the police, then, shall we? I’ll tell them how you’re trespassing on my property, and then you can tell them . . . whatever it is you want, and we’ll see who they believe—the mayor, or a convicted sex offender.”
“They’ll believe me,” Tommy said, but there was something in his voice now that sounded unsure.
“All right, then,” Will said. “Do you want to call or should I? Because to tell you the truth, you’ve never been anything but a headache, Thomas, and I’d be happy to see you arrested again. I only gave you money when it happened because you were so easily bought. Such a bargain. But I guess that’s what happens when you never have any money—you have no idea what things are actually worth.”
Will took a step toward Tommy, and his eyes, blacker than his son’s, glinted in the light.
“You could have drained me of millions,” he continued. “Although, at a certain point, I would have just found other ways of dealing with you, I suppose.”
“Bullshit,” Tommy spat. “I see what you’re doing—you’re trying to scare me—but I’m not afraid of you. I know you’re not a killer.”
“I’m not?”
“I saw your face that night. You were fucked up about it. Snot running down your nose. Crying all over her. Begging her to ‘wake up, oh God, just please wake up,’ even as you were dumping her on the ground. It was pathetic. You’re not a killer. It was just what you’ve always said. You were pushed too far.”
“I’d be careful, Thomas. I’m feeling a little pushed right now.”
“Dad,” Ben said. He stood up from behind the tree and walked toward his father. At the same time, as if we had choreographed the move, I followed him, my body in step with his as we stomped onto the driveway.
Tommy startled when he saw us. The box slipped from his hands, and I grabbed it.
Will, too, looked shaken, the fierceness in his expression now replaced with unmasked surprise. “Ben,” he said, and then, looking at me, his eyes narrowing in on mine, he added, “You. What are you two doing—spying on me?”
“What are you doing?” Ben demanded. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Cut the shit, Dad,” Ben said through his teeth. He took a step toward his father, and even through his sweatshirt and jeans, I could tell that all the muscles in his body were tensed. “Please tell me you didn’t do it.”
“Do what?” Will asked. “You’re babbling, son.”
“Tell me you didn’t kill her.”
The air in my lungs solidified. I managed only the thinnest breath.
“Kill who?” Will asked. “That—that girlfriend of yours? Really, Ben, it’s been years. You have to move on from that.”
Ben grabbed Will by the shoulders and pushed him against the garage door. I heard Will’s back slam against the wood.
“Take your hands off me, son. Right now,” Will said.
His voice was as cold as I knew the air should have been—but I couldn’t feel anything, not even my own body. I could only watch as the scene unfolded, as if I were in the audience of a play, as if I could leave anytime I wanted to, and the story would end right there.
“Right now, Ben,” Will said again.
There was a part of Ben that almost obeyed his father—a flicker in his arms that seemed ready to let go—but then, his back rippling with the force of the movement, he pushed Will harder against the garage.
“Did you do it?” he yelled, smacking his hand against the door, inches from Will’s head.
Will winced, closing his eyes for a second, but he opened them again at the sound that spewed from Tommy. At first, it sounded like he was choking, but then, when I looked at him, I saw he was laughing—a textured, guttural noise.
Ben turned his head toward Tommy, still holding his father to the garage.
“What’s so funny?” he snapped.
“I’m sorry, this is just—oh man.” Tommy covered his mouth, but then his fingers slipped from his face when another snicker burst from his lips. His laughter condensed in the air, his breath vivid and white as it rushed right out of him.
“Fuck the money, okay?” he continued. “I changed my mind. I don’t want it. This right here is priceless.” He laughed again. “And—holy shit—so worth the wait. I mean, your face, Benji.”
“Thomas,” Will warned, but Ben tightened his grip on his father’s shoulder, his eyes never leaving Tommy’s face.
“Nah, don’t ‘Thomas’ me. I’m done with that. I mean, he heard us, right? Cat’s out of the bag now. Cat’s meowing up a fucking storm.” His laughter doubled him over, his hands clutching his knees. “Oh man. This is so—” Then he cleared his throat, straightening back up and attempting a serious expression. “No, but it is true. Your dad killed your girlfriend.”