“Dad.”
He jumps a mile high, dropping the knife he was using to cut an onion. It clatters across the kitchen floor and stops near my feet. It’s a big knife, a chef’s knife, and I stare at it.
I can’t actually bring myself to imagine killing him.
At the moment, I can only kill Savvy. Over and over, on a loop in my head. A tree branch straight to her skull.
“Lucy.” Dad puts a hand on his chest. “You scared me.”
“I know.” I pick up the knife and put it on the counter.
“Are you all packed?” He doesn’t hide his cheerfulness at my leaving.
“I don’t leave until day after tomorrow. And I’m having dinner with Grandma tonight.”
“Oh good, she’ll appreciate that.” He reaches for the knife, turning on the water to rinse it off.
“Did Matt tell you I killed her?”
He turns off the water. When he looks up at me, it’s not in surprise. Matt clearly already told him this conversation was coming.
“Yes.”
“When?”
He wipes off the knife with a towel, for longer than necessary. An excuse not to look at me. “He came over that night.”
I take in a breath as it clicks into place. “That’s where he went. After he came home.” I frown. “Does Nina know as well? Why was she at my house that night?”
“No. Apparently she was drunk and had planned to cause a scene so you’d know they were together. Just bad timing. He sent her away.”
“And then he came over to the house and told you both I killed Savvy.”
“Just me. I told your mom a couple days later. She…” He trails off, putting the knife aside and then bracing both hands against the counter. “She wanted to come clean right away. Said that even if it wasn’t self-defense, you’d get a light sentence. But Matt and I disagreed. You genuinely didn’t seem to remember anything, and we both thought we should just wait. I figured your memory would come back in a few days, and then you could tell us exactly what happened and we’d go from there.”
“And when it didn’t come back?”
He looks away, uncomfortable. “I figured you either just wanted to move on or you really had blocked it out. The trauma of that…” He sighs. “I can’t blame you, I guess.”
“You guess.”
“I would have preferred to face it head-on. I regret not going to the police. Matt said that your memory started to come back when Ben pushed you to remember. I chastised your mother for pushing you. I thought you needed space to do the right thing. She was right, of course.”
“You believed him, then? Matt.”
Dad looks up, startled. “Should I not have? I didn’t know then that … Well, I didn’t have the full story. But I didn’t have any reason not to believe him.”
“He was drunk. He didn’t actually see me do it. There could have been someone else there, it could have been—” My voice has gone too high, hysterical, and I stop abruptly. I know how it sounds.
“He didn’t mention anyone else being there,” Dad says gently. “He said … Well, he explained what he saw, and what you said to him.”
“He could have killed her.”
“Do you think he did?” He’s humoring me.
I see Matt’s hysterical face in front of me. I’ve already tried to convince myself a hundred times that he could have been panicking because he just killed Savvy, but it seems unlikely. I know him too well. I know what he’s like when he’s just gone too far, caused more pain than he intended. He goes calm. Fix the problem. Be nice. Convince her that it’s partially her fault.
He wouldn’t have been hysterical about killing Savvy, even drunk. He wouldn’t have had that look on his face.
“No,” I say. “But you weren’t there. You just had Matt, telling you that I killed someone. You thought I was capable of that?”
“I didn’t want to. But sometimes you have to do the best with the information you have. That’s the information I had. And Matt wanted to protect you. I saw that right away.” He gives me a sad look. “We both did.”
“And Mom wanted to hand me over to the cops.”
“She was also just trying to do what was best.”
“It wasn’t a criticism.”
He looks startled. I might have done the same thing, if I were in Mom’s place. Just get the truth out there and let the chips fall where they may.
Or maybe I wouldn’t have done the same thing. I didn’t immediately run to Ben or the cops when the memory of Matt resurfaced.
I booked a flight home to Los Angeles.
I eat a quiet, awkward dinner with Grandma. I can’t tell her the truth, the only family member who believed in me. She believed in me so strongly she turned over all our secrets to a smug podcaster.
“Ben says something happened,” she says, once she’s deep into her second gin and tonic. The television is on, muted, but I keep getting distracted by a woman on the screen with very long red fingernails. She taps them against her chin, over and over. She could take someone’s eye out with those fingernails.
I gather up the remains of my burger and walk to the trash can. “Nothing happened. I told him that.”
“I don’t think he believes you.”
I laugh hollowly.
“Did something happen?” she asks.
“Well, I had sex with him,” I say, because I want to change the subject.
“Oh, hon.” She smiles, a bit sympathetically. “I know. It was obvious that night you two came over for dinner after going to the crime scene.”
“We hadn’t actually had sex yet at that point.”
“Obvious that there was tension, I mean. I don’t blame you. I would have done the same thing. He does look like an Avenger, after all.”
I laugh despite the crushing weight on my chest. “Thanks, Grandma.”
My phone dings, and I glance down at it as I slump into the couch next to her.
It’s an email from my agent, informing me that I shouldn’t worry about my books being sold out everywhere, because the publisher is already in the process of printing an additional fifty thousand copies of each of them. “So exciting!!”
I guess it is, but I can’t really feel anything but numb right now.
“Turns out people actually did want to buy romance novels from a suspected murderer,” I say as I lower my phone.
“Of course they do,” Grandma says. “Like I told you, better to be interesting than likable.”
She flips the TV off. “Ben told me you’re convinced that he thinks you did it.”
I frown. “That’s basically what he said. He wrote out a whole ending about how I did it.”
“He says that was just one rough draft, and you weren’t supposed to see it. Just him working through some thoughts. He sounded really frustrated, if you want to know the truth. I don’t think he has an ending.”
“He’ll decide I did it, just like everyone else did.” I swallow around the lump in my throat.
“Not everyone,” Grandma says softly, putting a hand on my shoulder.
I close my eyes and tilt my head back in an effort not to burst into tears, but I fail. They leak down my cheeks and suddenly I’m crying on my grandmother’s couch like I’m ten years old again. She scoots closer to me and wraps an arm around my shoulders.
“I think I did it,” I whisper, eyes still closed. “I think I killed her.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“You don’t know.”
“Neither do you! You just said you think you killed her. You still don’t remember, do you?”
I open my eyes and roughly wipe my hand across them. “No.”
“You didn’t do it.” Her mouth is set in a hard line, the wrinkles around her eyes more prominent as she frowns harder.
“Stop having so much faith in me.”
“No.”
“I don’t deserve it.”
“Horseshit.”
“I haven’t told you everything.” My hands are shaking, and she reaches over and clasps them both.
“I don’t need you to tell me everything.” She holds my gaze, her dark eyes serious. “I don’t need you to lay out every single secret and detail of your existence for me to judge. I know you.”
I dissolve into tears again, and she wraps her arms around me and pats my back.
“Don’t give up, sweetheart. Don’t give up.”