I tried to appear attentive as the couple across from me flipped through the binder of photographs, murmuring appreciatively. Normally, I’d say it was a good sign—except for the telltale tension in the bride-to-be’s shoulders, and the way her eyes kept darting up to my face when she thought I wasn’t looking.
My phone, facedown on the table, vibrated. I pressed the button to silence it without picking it up, resisting the urge to check who was calling.
“Your portfolio is really, really impressive,” the bride said, fiddling with the edge of her paper napkin. “Really.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I replied, mentally calculating how much I’d just lost on gas by agreeing to this meeting. I should have known better. The groom being the one to contact me, the way he’d specified, I showed Maddie some of your photos, when I asked if she’d seen the website.
“It’s just,” she began, and stopped. Her husband-to-be, an earnest-looking young man with a chin dimple and too much hair gel, put a hand on her wrist.
“Babe, it’s exactly what you were looking for. You’re always complaining about washed-out photos. You wanted someone who isn’t afraid of color.”
My phone started buzzing again. “Sorry about that,” I said, picking it up to check the caller ID. Liv. I declined the call again and tucked it into my purse. Whatever the latest crisis was, and it was always a crisis, she’d have to wait a few minutes more.
“It’s just,” the bride said again. She bit her lip. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound totally awful. Your photos are really, really—”
“Impressive,” I finished for her, smiling. When I smiled, only one side of my mouth went up. She flinched.
“Come on, Maddie,” Husband-to-Be said—I couldn’t remember his name. It was probably Jason. It was usually Jason, for some reason. The ones who trotted me out like a surprise, as if to shame their partners into hiring me. It had mostly stopped happening since I tripled my prices, which magically turned my scars from a pitiable flaw to part of my edgy appeal.
“It’s all right,” I assured him. “It’s your wedding day, Maddie. Everything should be perfect.”
“Right,” she said, relieved that I understood.
“And if anyone isn’t perfect, you shouldn’t have to have them there,” I added. Her smile faltered.
“Your prices are very high,” she snapped, turning pink. “Maybe you should consider lowering them. You might get more business.”
I sighed. “My prices are high because my work is really, really good,” I said, parroting her words back to her. “I make sure that my photo is front and center on my website because I don’t want anyone to waste their time or mine. And now we’ve done both.”
I stood, picking up the binder. My coffee sat untouched on the table, but I had only ordered it to kill time while I was waiting for them to show up twenty minutes late. “I hope you have the wedding of your dreams, Maddie. Jason, nice to meet you.”
“My name’s Jackson, actually,” he muttered, not lifting his eyes past my chin. As I walked away I heard him whispering furiously to her. Just as the door swung shut, she burst into tears. I stopped on the sidewalk and shut my eyes, letting out a breath and telling myself to relax the muscles that had slowly tightened throughout my body.
The only thing worse than brides like Maddie was getting to the meeting only to discover that the client was a “fan.” Not of my photos, of course. Of the dramatic story my life had become when I was eleven years old.
I pulled my phone out of my purse. Liv hadn’t left a message, but that wasn’t surprising. She hated being recorded. We’d spent enough time with cameras shoved in our faces, and the clips still lived on the internet under names like GIRLS FOIL SERIAL KILLER IN OLYMPIC FOREST and SURVIVORS OF “QUINAULT KILLER” ALAN MICHAEL STAHL SPEAK OUT.
Back then Liv had what her mom called “stubborn baby fat” and a round face made rounder by blunt bangs and a bob. In the years after, she’d sprouted up and slimmed down, and then she just kept vanishing by degrees, melting away until you could count the vertebrae through her shirt. She made sure there wasn’t enough of herself left to get recognized.
I didn’t have the option. The scar on my cheek, the nerve damage that kept the corner of my mouth tucked in a constant frown—those weren’t things I could hide. Changing my name had cut down on the number of people who found me, but I’d never get rid of the scars, and I refused to try to hide them. I kept my hair cut short and sharp, and I always photographed myself straight on. I described my style as unflinching. My most recent therapist had been known to suggest I was using honesty as armor.
As if on cue, the phone started buzzing again. This time I answered, bracing myself to talk Liv down from whatever crisis the day had brought. “Hey, Liv. What’s up?” I asked brightly, because pretending it could be anything else was part of what we did.
She was silent for a moment. I waited for her. It would come in little hiccup phrases at first, and then a flood. And at the end of it I would tell her that it was going to be okay, ask if she was taking her meds, and promise I didn’t mind at all that she’d called. And I didn’t. I was far more worried about the day she stopped calling.
“I’m trying to reach Naomi Cunningham,” a male voice said on the other end of the line, and I blinked in surprise.
“That’s me. Sorry, I thought you were someone else. Obviously,” I said, letting out a breath and sweeping windblown strands of hair back from my eyes. “Who’s calling?”
“My name is Gerald Watts, at the Office of Victim Services. I’m calling about Alan Michael Stahl.”
My mind went blank. Why would they be calling me now? It had been over twenty years, but— “Has he been released?” I asked. I remembered the word parole in the sentence. Possibility of parole after twenty years. But twenty years was eternity to a child. Panic bloomed through me like black mold. “Wait. You’re supposed to call us, aren’t you? We’re supposed to be allowed to testify, or—”
“Ma’am, Stahl has not been released,” Gerald Watts said quickly and calmly. “I’ve got better news than that. He’s dead.”
“I—” I stopped. Dead. He was dead, and that was it. It was over. “How?”
“Cancer. Beyond that, I’m not able to share private medical information.”
“Do the others know? Liv—I mean Olivia Barnes, and—”
“Olivia Barnes and Cassidy Green have been notified as well. We had a little more trouble getting hold of you. You changed your name.” He said it like it was just a reason, not a judgment, but I stammered.
“You can still figure out who I am, it’s not like I hide it, but it cuts down on the random calls and stuff,” I said. I’d had strangers sending things to my house for years. Or just showing up themselves, ringing the doorbell, asking to meet the miracle girl and gape at my face.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “Him dying, it’ll get reported here and there. You might want to take some time off, if you can. Go someplace you won’t get hassled. Shouldn’t take long for the interest to die down.”
“I’ll be fine. It never takes long for some new tragedy to come along and distract everyone,” I said.
He grunted in acknowledgment. “Ms. Cunningham, if you need to speak to a counselor, we have resources available to you.”
“Why would I need to talk to a counselor?” I asked with a high, tortured laugh. “I should be happy, right?” The man who’d attacked me was dead. A little less evil in the world.
“This kind of thing can bring up a lot of complicated feelings and difficult memories,” Gerald Watts said gently. He had a grandfatherly voice, I thought.
“I’ll be fine,” I told him, though I sounded faint, almost robotic. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Take care of yourself,” he said, a firm instruction, and we said our goodbyes.
I stood at the curb, my toes hanging over the edge, my weight rocking forward. There was something about that feeling. After the attack, I’d had damage to the membranous labyrinth in my left ear. I’d had fits of vertigo. Years later, after it faded, I would stand like this, almost falling, and that rushing feeling would return. But I was in control. I was the one who decided if I would fall.
I closed my eyes and stepped off the curb.
I was on my second glass of wine by the time Mitch came home. He dropped his messenger bag with the kind of dramatic sigh that always preceded a long rant about the soul-stifling horror of working in an office.
“You wouldn’t believe what a shit day I’ve had,” he declared, kicking off his shoes as he headed for the fridge. “Bridget is on my ass about every little thing, and Darrel is out sick again, which means that I have to pick up the slack. Fuck, all that’s in here is IPAs. I might as well drink grass clippings.”
“There’s a porter in the back,” I said, sipping my wine and staring at the wall.
“Thank God.”
I picked out patterns in the wall texture as Mitch cracked open the beer and dropped onto the couch next to me. I liked Mitch. There was a reason I liked Mitch. In a moment I would remember what it was.
I ran a finger along the rim of my glass, examining him. His hair flopped over his eye, too long to be respectable by exactly a centimeter, and he maintained a precise amount of stubble. We’d met at the gallery opening of my ex-girlfriend, forty-eight hours after she dumped me for being “an emotional black hole” and then demanded I still attend to support her. Mitch had stolen a whole tray of fancy cheeses and we hid in the corner drinking champagne and waxing faux-eloquent about tables and light fixtures as if they were the exhibit. It had been a bit cruel and definitely stupid, but it had been fun. This man, I’d thought, is an asshole.
So of course I’d gone home with him.
“And how goes the wedding-industrial complex?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. I paused. “No, it wasn’t. The bride didn’t want a photographer with a mangled face.”
“Bitch,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re wasting your time with those people.”
It was, more or less, what I’d said to her. But it meant something else, coming from him. “Today was a waste of time,” I agreed. The whole thing felt so far away.
“You’re better than this,” Mitch said. His hand dropped to my knee, his head lolling on the back of the couch. “I mean, Jesus. You have actual talent. And you’re spending your time on Extruded Wedding Product #47.”
“I like what I do,” I said evenly.
“It’s beneath you.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t interested in this argument, not again.
“All those women are so desperate to have their perfect day. I can’t even imagine getting married. I just try to picture it, you and me at the altar and the tux and the floofy white gown, and it’s like a complete parody. I don’t see the point. Do you?”
“I don’t see the point of marrying you, no,” I replied, but he was already moving on. We were back to complaining about work—something about a jammed copier.
“I mean, Jesus, this job is going to kill me,” he groaned when he’d finally wound down.
My glass was empty. I reached for the bottle on the coffee table and discovered that was empty as well.
“You polished that off by yourself?” Mitch asked, amusement with a rotten underside of judgment.
“An old friend of mine called today,” I said.
“Bad news?” he asked. His posture shifted, canting toward me. Two parts comfort, one part hunger. That was the problem with writers. They couldn’t help digging the edge of a fingernail under your scabs so they could feel the shape of your wounds.
My scars had climbed across the skin of half a dozen characters already. Sometimes he sublimated them into metaphor—gave a girl a faulty heart, a cracked mirror to stare into—but reading those stories, I could always feel his fingertips tracing the constellation of knotted tissue across my stomach, chest, arms, face. He’d gotten permission at first, but after a while it was like he owned the story just as much as I did.
The parts I’d told him, anyway.
“It was Liv,” I said.
“Having another one of her spirals?” Mitch asked knowingly.
I bristled. I hated Mitch talking about her like he knew her. They’d never even met. “I didn’t actually talk to her,” I said. I needed more wine. The bottle hadn’t been full when I started, and it wasn’t hitting me hard enough to blunt the edges properly.
Mitch reached for my hand. I stood and walked to the kitchen, pulling another bottle of red down and casting about for the corkscrew. Alan Stahl was dead. He would never get out. He would never come after me.
He’d promised to. After he was sentenced, he’d told his cellmate he was going to get out and slit my throat. Part of me had always been waiting for him to show up at my doorstep, ready to finish what had been left undone twenty years ago.
I set the knife against the rim of the foil and twisted. The knife slipped, the tip jabbing into my thumb. I swore under my breath and just put the corkscrew straight through the foil instead, pulling the cork out through it. Wine glugged into the glass, splashing up the sides. The bottle knocked against the glass and almost tipped it, and then Mitch was grabbing it from me, taking my hand and turning it upward.
“Naomi, you’re bleeding,” he said.
I stared. The cut on my thumb was deeper than I’d thought, and everything—the bottle, the glass, the corkscrew, the counter—was smeared with blood. I wrenched my hand free of Mitch and stuck my thumb in my mouth. The coppery taste washed across my tongue, and instantly I was back in the forest, the loamy scent of the woods overlaid with the metallic smell of my blood, the birds in the trees flitting and calling without a care for the girl dying below.
When I remembered it, I pictured myself from above, crawling over the ground, dragging myself up onto that log. I didn’t remember the pain. The mind is not constructed to hold on to the sense of such agony.
“Look at me. Naomi, come on. Look at my face,” Mitch said, touching the underside of my chin delicately, like he was afraid I would bruise. I met his eyes with difficulty. “There you are. What’s going on? If you didn’t talk to Liv—”
“I know why she was calling,” I said. I swallowed. It was mine until I said it out loud. Then it belonged to Mitch, too, and all the people he told, and the people they told. But of course the story already belonged to countless others—Cassidy and Liv and Cody Benham and whatever journalist found out about it first, and surely there would be some footnote article in the papers tomorrow, “QUINAULT KILLER” DIES IN PRISON.
“Naomi. You’re drifting again,” Mitch said. This was why I liked him. I remembered now.
“Alan Stahl is dead,” I said. “Cancer. He died in prison. He’s gone.” If I could say it in just the right way, it would make sense. Everything would fall into its proper order, and I would know how I was supposed to feel.
“Oh my God. That’s great news!” Mitch seized my shoulders, grinning. “Naomi, that’s good. I mean, I’d rather he be tortured every day for another twenty years, but dead is the next best thing. You should be celebrating.”
“I know. It’s just complicated,” I said, sliding past him. I grabbed a kitchen towel and pressed it to my thumb. The bleeding wasn’t too bad. It would stop soon.
“It must be bringing up a lot of trauma,” he said with a wise nod. And that was why I didn’t like him.
“Can you stop talking like you know what I’m going through better than I do?” I stalked to the hall closet, pawing through it one-handed for a bandage.
“You’ve never really processed what happened to you. You shy away from it in your work. You need to confront it head-on. This is a perfect opportunity. Turn it into the catalyst you need to really dig in. You could do a series of self-portraits, or—”
“Oh, for the love of God, Mitch, will you let it go?” I said. I found the package of Band-Aids and held it under my arm while I fished one out. Mitch moved in to help, but I turned, blocking him with my body. “I don’t want to turn my trauma into art. I don’t want you to turn my trauma into art.”
“You’d rather churn out identical images of identical smiling people and never create anything of meaning or significance?” he asked.
I slammed the closet door shut. “Yes. If those are my two options, I will take the smiling people. Who are not identical, and neither are the photos. They’re happy, so you think they’re beneath me. But you know what? It means a hell of a lot more to a hell of a lot more people than a story in an obscure magazine that doesn’t pay and never even sent you the contributor copies.” That was harsher than I’d intended, but I didn’t back down. I couldn’t. I was running blind through the forest, and the hunter was behind me. I could only go forward.
“I didn’t realize you thought so little of my work,” Mitch said stiffly.
“Whereas I knew perfectly well how little you thought of mine,” I snarled back. Then I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. “I’m sorry. Can we just pretend that I didn’t say any of that?”
“You’re under a lot of stress.” Translation: He’d find a time to bring this up when he could be the unambiguous victim. But I let him wrap his arms around me and tuck my head against his chest. I held my hand curled awkwardly, my thumb throbbing, as he made soothing sounds and stroked my hair. “Come on. Let’s drink. It’ll solve all our problems.”
I laughed a little, surrendering. I’d have a drink, and we wouldn’t fight, and Stahl would stay dead, and the past would remain the past, and no one would ever have to know the truth.
Then I heard it—the faint buzz, buzz, buzz. My phone was ringing in my purse. I maneuvered past Mitch in the narrow hall and got to it on the last ring. Liv—really Liv this time.
“Hey,” I said as soon as I picked up, Mitch trailing behind me.
“Naomi. I’ve been calling all day,” Liv said, fretful. I could picture her perfectly, folded up in the corner of her couch, wrapping her long black hair around her finger. “Did you hear?”
“About Stahl? Yeah. I heard.”
“I can’t believe he’s dead.” She sounded far away.
“I know. Liv, hang on.”
Mitch was standing too casually halfway across the room. I held up a Just one minute finger and slipped back through the hall into the bedroom, shutting the door behind me.
“Are you okay?” I asked quietly when the door was shut. If I was a mess, I couldn’t imagine how Liv was holding up. “Have you talked to Cassidy?”
“A little. She texted. I haven’t … I wanted to talk to you first,” Liv said carefully.
“About Stahl?” I asked.
“No. Not exactly.” She took a steadying breath. “I did something.”
“Liv, you’re kind of freaking me out,” I told her. “What do you mean, you did something? What did you do?”
Her words sank through me, sharp and unforgiving. “I found Persephone.”