The water scalds her skin. Each stream from the showerhead is a rake down her scalp. It soaks her hair, slides down the curves of her body, and pools at her feet. She stares at the drain where long blond strands cling to the trap and it reminds her of the yellow caution tape she’s seen caught in the river rocks.
She doesn’t know how long she’s been in here. Only that it’s somewhere between a while and not long enough to run out of hot water.
The steam creates a nearly opaque vapor. She feels like she’s in a scene from Psycho, with the bloody handprint on the vinyl curtain. She doesn’t have a curtain, though. Instead, there are two glass sliding doors, the bottom half of one obscured by her towel. She can watch herself shower if she wants. Not that she wants to, but when they first moved in she and Axel used to fuck in here until they ran out of hot water, then they’d finish on the bed.
She cannot tell him about the yearbook. He will want to collect it as evidence and further condemn their daughter for killing her classmates. Chloe will be guilty until proven innocent, like Mark Cutler.
The image of his body dredged up on the riverbank haunts her more than the others. He bears all the telltale signs of a suicide, except for the matching marks on his neck.
Kole is leading a search of his residence. If they find a suicide note, then it’s pretty much a closed case. But if not … it’s probable that the same person who killed Madison and Sari killed Mark Cutler.
Which means that no one is safe.
Had his picture been scribbled out in the yearbook? She hadn’t noticed, only that Libby’s was. Libby, who, for all intents and purposes, should have been next.
And still, throughout all of this, Chloe is missing.
Her eyes burn but she can’t tell if she’s crying or not. That’s the beauty of the shower. It lets you lie to yourself about things like that.
Rowan reaches for the bar of soap, finally deciding to scrub herself clean. When she straightens up, the corner of her eye catches a man in the mirror. She gasps, her left hand instinctively splaying across her throat to guard her jugular, the right wielding the soap as though it’s a brick.
“Row, it’s me.”
Axel. Her breath escapes from her like air leaking from a balloon. “Axel, what the fuck?” Her voice is sharp, shrill. She wrenches the faucet all the way to the right, shutting the water off. She steps out onto the memory foam mat. There is nothing but vapor between them.
In a past life not so long ago, she would tuck her fingers into the crevice between his hips and his jeans and yank them down. Lift up his shirt. Press her body to his. But this is not that life. That life is dead now.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.” His voice is unconvincing.
“What are you doing here?” She tears her towel off the bar and wraps it around herself.
“I live here, actually.”
“Oh, really? Because last I checked, that meant you actually came home once in a while and slept in bed with your wife.” Venom laces her words. It catches her off guard and yet at the same time, feels like a release, like biting down on a cyanide capsule. This argument has been brewing for a long time. She can feel that now. Because it isn’t just these past five days that he’s been MIA … it’s years. Work takes precedence, always. Her stomach contracts when she realizes how hypocritical she is.
She waits for his rebuttal. To point at her and tally up all her late nights at the ME’s office or out in the field. Instead, he says: “Row, don’t do this.”
Do what? The question stays inside. She doesn’t have enough energy to vocalize it.
“We need to talk. Come downstairs when you’re dressed.”
For a few seconds, Rowan is acutely aware of the water droplets dripping on her shoulders and sliding down her back. Rage boils beneath her skin. She follows Axel out into the bedroom, where the vapor dissipates. It’s easily fifteen degrees cooler. “I don’t answer to you.”
“You never did. That’s what I always loved about you.” He keeps walking.
Loved. The sound of the past tense is a mallet to her temple. She grabs his elbow before he rounds the doorframe. He turns back into her, like this is some kind of midwestern tango and she’s leading. He’s hotter than she thought he would be, temperature-wise, despite the fact that he’s just come from outside where it can’t be more than forty degrees. Something’s got him worked up.
Her mind is fucked. A moment before she hated him. But in this moment, this infinitesimal blip on the map of their lives, she wants him. More than that, she wants him to want her. Something clicks in her brain, a key turning the right tumblers to unlock the secret: Isn’t that what she’s wanted all along? Just for him to notice her. To put his work phone down or come home at a reasonable hour. To sit with her and talk about the future like they used to do. To give her more than a passing glance.
Perhaps that’s what he’s been wanting from her, too.
And was Chloe so different?
All three of them, coexisting on separate planes in the same house, wanting the same thing, but all too proud—or terrified—to ask for it. Love. A moment of someone’s undivided attention.
She wants to kiss him, but knows she shouldn’t. She watches his lips move. “I thought you buried her,” he says. “And I thought you quit smoking.”
Rowan’s heart stops. Her eyes shift from his face to the paper he holds up between them, the old cigarette box pinched between his ring finger and the meaty part of his palm. How did he get the obituary? She must have dropped it in the yard last night, when she went ballistic over that dummy. “I—” Her mouth is too dry to form an explanation. It isn’t an explanation, though, she knows. She was on the cusp of a lie. I did. Isn’t that what she was about to say?
“I’ll be downstairs.” Axel yanks his arm back and walks toward the landing, and she knows that if he goes down those stairs, it will be the last time.
“Don’t leave! Please.” Her hand flies to her mouth, but it’s too late to stop the words from reaching him. Chloe used to say that very same thing. Rowan would kiss her good-bye on her forehead, promise to be back in a few hours when she’d bagged up the body, and Chloe would beg her not to go, not to leave.
She never listened. She always left.
You’ll love me more when I’m dead. No wonder she said it.
Because it was true. Not true in the sense that she loved dead people, certainly not in the way she loved her own daughter, but true in the sense that she actually listened to them as they told her how they died with the marks on their bodies, the contents of their stomachs, and the DNA shoved beneath their fingernails.
She never listened to Chloe.
Now, Rowan remembers the same sentiment falling from her daughter’s lips the night she walked away from her at the play. All done up in her goth makeup, red lace dress, holding a bouquet of black roses, her lips a painted heart that split down the center as she whispered, “Don’t leave. Please.”
The memory threatens to turn her inside out. Clutching her towel, she sinks to the floor, her back sliding down the wall. She’s eye level with Axel’s knees now. His feet are planted at the intersection between their room and the hall that leads to Chloe’s bedroom. His presence is fragile, she knows. She could blink and he could be gone.
She flinches, imagining the note of finality the click of the back door closing would bring.
All because of her guilt. Because of her inability to tell her husband how a mistake eighteen years ago has haunted her all this time. To speak the name of the girl she murdered, the girl whose grainy black-and-white image stares at her now. The girl she has kept hidden away in a cigarette box.
“Katelynn Diggory.” His utterance of the dead girl’s name chills every molecule in Rowan’s body, as though that arrangement of letters and syllables has conjured her ghost. It lingers between them.
Finally, Axel sighs. He lowers himself to the floor. She doesn’t realize how close he’s gotten until she feels the bend of his index finger tilt her chin up. They search each other’s eyes. She sees her reflection in his pupils—wilted, worthless—and wishes he would look away.
“Rowan. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have gotten you help. We could have talked to someone—”
“I didn’t want to talk about it anymore, Axel. I wanted to move on.”
“There’s no moving on, only moving forward.” He recites a line she’s encountered all too often at counseling sessions and in self-help books.
Rowan leans with her elbows pressing into her knees, cups her hands together in front of her mouth. When she left Pennsylvania for Wisconsin, she had wanted to move on. She wanted to rewire her brain into believing that it had never happened. That she had never even gone to medical school and become an anesthesiologist, where she worked at Divine Savior Children’s Hospital and killed fourteen-year-old Katelynn Diggory who went under the knife for laryngeal surgery—and never woke up. Afterward, Rowan checked her charts. She’d accidentally grabbed another patient’s paperwork. The weight was wrong. She gave Katelynn too much.
She wanted to punish herself. So, she looked up the worst place she could find—one that was as off-the-grid as it could get—and drove through the night. Becoming a medical examiner was perfect. She had the pedigree for it, and it allowed her to still do the things she was good at, but assured she couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. They were already dead.
Axel knew this about her, and still, he loved her.
Who knowingly marries a murderer?
“This is all my fault,” she says softly. Her gaze slides to her towel and she begins picking at the cotton fibers. “Karma really is a bitch.”
Now, it’s Axel’s turn to look rueful. “What are you talking about?”
“Our daughter is dead because I murdered someone else’s, Axel. The universe has finally settled the score.”
She feels his breath hot on her skin as he exhales. “You and I both know there has to be intent for it to be classified a murder. It was an accident, Rowan. Look at me.” He tips her face up toward his again. “You did not murder Katelynn Diggory. Say it.”
She won’t. She can’t.
“Say it.”
Rowan drinks in a deep, unsteady breath. “I did not murder Katelynn Diggory.”
“No. You didn’t.” He reaches up and touches a piece of her wet hair. His hand grazes her neck, sending shivers throughout her entire body. “Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?”
He’s hinting at her being out with Deschane last night, she knows. Nothing happened. She wants to tell him that and she will, but first …
“Did you kill Mark Cutler?” she asks.
His brows cinch together, but he doesn’t look away. Instead, he stares at her harder than he ever has before, his verdigris gaze piercing her to the bone. “No,” he says.
The word sends a shot of relief through the back of her skull. He could be lying. Lies come all too easy and yet, she chooses to believe him on the sole basis that he chooses to believe her. If she cannot trust Axel, then she can trust no one. And that is too grim a thought to bear.
Without breaking eye contact, she reaches for his hand, knits her fingers through his. Her towel falls away and he leans in as she presses her naked body against him. Her other hand tugs on his belt. The newsprint flutters to the floor as he lets her pull him on top of her.
There was a time when she wanted exile. But now, in this exact frame of her messy life, she wants connection. She wants to be crushed and cradled by the man she loves, who has chosen to love her despite it all.