February 2, 2023
5:11 p.m.
Darkness, or nearly so. Just a sliver of pink sitting on the horizon like a security blanket.
You could get hurt, Kerry, Imaginary Frank reminded me. Go back to your room and wait for the police. Wait for me.
I walked as quickly as I could, down the patio, under the awnings, past all the rooms I’d thought I’d spend this month checking on, taking care of, while I finished a novel I now realized may never be complete.
Finally, I was in front of the last one. Lights were on, and I tried the handle. Unlocked.
“Siobhan,” I said, pushing the door open to make sure. “Siobhan.”
The main room was empty. The wine still sitting on the counter, waiting.
Calling me once again.
Begging me to forget everything, all the ways I’d failed.
I stared at it, I did.
But it wasn’t Imaginary Frank who stopped me this time.
It was me.
No.
Enough.
Enough of this madness.
I walked through the main room and into the bathroom, where I’d bathed a broken, naked Siobhan only an hour or so before. “Siobhan?”
She wasn’t there. I turned back, retracing my steps to the door.
She shouldn’t be out. I shouldn’t have left her. I shouldn’t have betrayed her. I shouldn’t have done so much of what I did.
I spotted the faint press of footsteps curving around the side of the motel, though it was hard to tell in the creeping darkness, in snow that had been mussed up, trod over by me, searching for a body, begging the police to listen. Nothing was pristine now. And god, it was cold, down in my bones. I trudged across the snow, icy bits crunching beneath my boots, wind seeping into the gaps between my layers, night swallowing me like a suffocating hug, past the spot that had started it all, where I’d seen Allison’s arm reaching up through the snow. Those red fingernails. Remnants of a stolen life.
I pulled out my phone, flicked on the flashlight, pointed it ahead as I made my way toward the outbuildings.
Then I saw it: the door to the boiler room cracked open.
My heart raced, but in a moment, I caught a silhouette, just ahead to the left. Siobhan, her back to me. She was heading past the laundry room, in a direction that could only be the pantry.
The freezer.
Why are you going there, Siobhan? Why?
She was walking briskly, trudging through snow with purpose.
She couldn’t have killed Allison, she wouldn’t have, but still. I had to see what she was doing.
I flicked off my flashlight, so as not to give myself away, but in the change of light, in the sudden near-darkness, I must have stepped wrong, because suddenly I was lurching forward, my hands coming out to brace my fall, my phone dropped somewhere in the mess of snow, and then, there she was, a shadow, standing over me, her own flashlight bright in my eyes.
“I can’t see,” I said. “Please, point that away.”
Siobhan hesitated a moment, and then she moved the light down. The effect turned her face gaunt, hollow with shadows. A specter, out here in the snow, standing over me, while my hands pawed around desperately, looking for my phone, until they came against something hard, and I grasped it in my hands. I pushed myself up to standing, struggled to see against the stars blinking in my vision. “Why are you out here, Siobhan?”
Silence, and I could barely make out her face, and instead, my mind filled in the gaps with what I’d seen on that video camera. The rage that had been directed solely at Allison, that was about to turn my way now.
And then, finally: “What am I doing? What are you doing?”
“I was worried about you,” I managed.
I blinked, trying to focus, and finally, the stars subsided, and in the dark, I looked up, and I saw it, just as I had imagined: hate, right there in her eyes.
“Were you worried about me when you fucked Charlie? Were you worried about me when you cut me out of your life without even telling me the truth? Were you worried about me then?” Her voice cracked, and the anger turned to pain, to desperation. “Do you know how it felt?” she asked. “To see that lipstick? To find the condom wrapper in his coat? That wrapper is singed in my mind, you know.”
“I wanted you to find it,” I said.
“What?”
“Charlie wasn’t good enough for you. He was a drunk, like me. He’d flirted with me before, you know, always making eyes at me in the kitchen during our game nights, when the two of us were raiding the fridge for more booze. You were always so worried about him cheating on you. He never made you feel good about yourself. So I put it there, in his pocket, so you’d finally be done.”
Siobhan reared back. “Oh, so you did me a favor?”
“No, it was terrible of me, but—”
“Don’t you think if I wanted to break up with Charlie, it should have been my choice? That the relationship was mine to be part of, mine to leave? And weren’t there other ways to get that to happen, like, maybe—I don’t know—talking to me about it instead of destroying you and me in the process? Our friendship meant something to me, Kerry. It meant a whole hell of a lot. But why should I be surprised? Nothing is sacred to you, is it? You don’t care about your husband. You don’t care about your friends. You don’t care about your one real chance at having a baby.”
Breath caught in my throat, and I practically choked on the cold. “What are you talking about?”
Siobhan brushed tears from her eyes. “Didn’t know I knew, did you? I ran into Frank a few days before that party. Told him I was so sorry that another round of IVF didn’t work. You should have seen the look of surprise on his face.”
I took a quick, sharp breath, and my heart began to race even faster.
“But you destroy everything, don’t you? So why should I be surprised?”
“I didn’t—I wasn’t even—”
“Do you know how I felt for you?” she asked. “When Frank told me you guys decided to call off the transfer because you couldn’t stop drinking? How my heart absolutely ached for you? How I wanted nothing more than for you to get better?”
Tears were falling from my eyes now, warming my cheeks. I had been so good for the first round, I really had. The fertility specialist had suggested we both stop drinking for three months before the embryo transfer, said that new studies showed that consuming even as few as four drinks a week (and let’s be real, there was no way I could stick to just four drinks a week) were associated with fewer successful live births. So we had. We made mocktails and drank Spindrifts and I was good good good. And then the transfer didn’t work. And we geared up to do another. I wasn’t even pregnant. It wasn’t like I was poisoning some would-be human. And the stress was so great. The book, the futile attempts at baby-making, all of it. And so I had some wine here and there, and then a little more. And then a cocktail, only when Frank was working late and I was on my own at home.
My husband discovered my secret a few days before our second transfer was scheduled. He phoned the clinic and called the whole thing off. Said he didn’t want to waste the money if we weren’t maximizing our chances, but I knew the truth, deep down—that if I couldn’t stop drinking for a few measly months, he doubted whether I could stop at all, whether I was the kind of person he even wanted to start a family with. I had already told Siobhan—and others—about the second scheduled transfer. It was easier, a few weeks on, to say it failed.
It became easier to tell myself the same story—two failed rounds of IVF.
My uterus had failed me the first time. My willpower the second.
“And how do you repay my loyalty, my love?” Siobhan continued, not stopping. “You tear down everything that mattered to me in one fell swoop. Charlie and I are over. You and I have nothing. And Allison—Allison.”
Allison.
“What are you doing back here, Siobhan? Really? Why did you come out here into the snow when you’re already freezing, when you’re not even recovered from being out here for two days? Why were you heading to the pantry?”
Siobhan just stared at me.
I hesitated, then spit it out: “What really happened between you and Allison?”
She looked at me a moment, and then the heartbreak was replaced with rage.
“Are you serious right now? Like, are you really fucking serious? I came to get my phone,” Siobhan said. “And I was walking in that direction to get some service. To call the cops. To get us some help.”
She stared at me, ire washing across her features.
“But I’m glad to know you believe I could kill my best friend.”
Her eyes were daggers.
“I love my friends. I cherish them. And I would do anything for them. See, unlike you, I don’t hurt the people I love. You’re on your own, Kerry,” she said.
And she stormed off into the night.