The first thing Claire Jennings did when I met her was hug me. “It’s so good to finally meet you, Lindsay!” she cried.
I stood there stiffly, accepting her unprompted hug. “It’s good to meet you too.”
Claire was a hugger. It was one of the things I learned about her during our four years as roommates. She would hug you when she met you. She would hug you after a few days apart. Sometimes she would hug you just because.
She was open and warm and sweet in a way I’d never experienced before. She was my first true friend. She loved me in a way my parents never did. She thought that I was a good person. We laughed together every day. I had never been so happy as I was when I lived with Claire. I would have done anything for my best friend.
I never told her the true story about my childhood. I made up a happier version of the truth. There was no reason for her to think I was lying. She thought I was just like her. Or if she suspected differently, she didn’t let on.
During our sophomore year, Claire started dating a boy named Ted. I never liked him very much—I didn’t like the way he leered at me or his suggestive comments. My suspicions were later confirmed when she caught him cheating with another girl. Not just another girl, but a friend of hers. She was devastated. She spent hours crying, but I did what I could to cheer her up.
I didn’t plan what happened to Ted. Not exactly.
When we ran into each other during the summer, he didn’t even recognize me as Claire’s roommate. He was the counselor at some sort of camp, and he hit on me shamelessly, even though Claire had emailed me a week earlier saying she thought they might be getting back together.
I wasn’t surprised Ted was interested in me. I was very attractive. I wasn’t on the first day of school, but the freshman fifteen actually did me some favors. I started dressing in more stylish clothing than the tomboy outfits my parents bought me because they always wanted a boy. I also finally managed to grow my hair out. It was amazing having long, silky hair instead of the severely short cut my mother always gave me in the upstairs bathroom. For the first time in my life, I had boobs. Ted couldn’t keep his grimy paws off me.
I accepted his invitation to go out on the lake that evening in one of the rowboats he would “borrow” from the camp. It had to be a secret, because he could get in trouble with the camp for taking the boat. Nobody knew we were sneaking off together—I certainly never told Claire.
Ted never returned from the lake that night.
Claire was sad about Ted’s untimely death, but she moved on. She started dating Noah Matchett, the boy living next-door to us. You could tell just from talking to him that he was a nice guy. He would treat her right. And sure enough, he married her shortly after we graduated. And he was a very good husband.
I never met anyone like Noah. All the boys (and later men) that I dated were like my father. Too handsome, too charming, and unable to keep it in their pants. But I expected it—I never cried when my boyfriends ultimately did what I knew they would do all along.
My friends were not as smart as I was. I remember the year after I graduated college, my friend Daphne came to me crying that she had caught her live-in boyfriend in bed with another woman when she came home early from her night shift. She was devastated. She could barely get out of bed for months after. It was some solace when her boyfriend was killed in a hit and run not long after.
I found that when you’re an attractive woman, it’s very easy to get a mechanic to replace your dented front fender without asking too many questions.
There were others. I don’t need to get into the details. But trust me, every single one of them deserved it. The same way my parents deserved it.
Claire remained my best friend all those years, and she never knew the truth. If not for me, she might have gotten back together with Ted. She never would have met the love of her life. There were times when I wanted so
badly to tell her, but I couldn’t be sure she would understand. I didn’t want her to look at me the way my parents did.
And then one day, everything changed.
It started out innocent—I swear. I had borrowed a pair of earrings from Claire, and I went to her house to return them. I showed up at a time when I thought she would be back from work, but her car wasn’t in the driveway. I should’ve turned away then and gone home. If I had, maybe everything would’ve turned out different. But I figured I would drop the earrings off while I was there. They were Claire’s favorite earrings, after all
—she was always very generous with her belongings. It was one of the many things I loved about her.
I rang the doorbell to the Matchetts’ beautiful white house and waited. Noah finally showed up at the door, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, a five o’clock shadow on his chin. He looked mildly embarrassed.
“Claire isn’t here,” he said.
“Oh, that’s okay.” I smiled apologetically. “I just wanted to return some earrings I borrowed.”
Noah took the baggie with the earrings in it. He looked like he was about to close the door, but then he hesitated. “Claire will be home soon. Do you want to wait?”
“Oh.” I hadn’t seen Claire in a few weeks, and I had been hoping to have a chance to catch up. “Sure.”
The Matchetts’ bathroom was like the rest of the house. Clean and homey with powder blue hand towels. I loved their bathroom. After I washed my hands, I stood there for a moment in the center of the room, breathing in the scent of their apple-scented hand soap that was running low.
When I finished in the bathroom, Noah was coming out of the basement. I raised my eyebrows at him and he shrugged. “I told Claire I would switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer. She’ll kill me if I don’t do it.”
Claire had been complaining a lot that Noah was reluctant to do chores. She said that everything she asked him to do resulted in an argument. I tried to stay out of it. I figured they would eventually get past their problems. Noah and Claire loved each other. They were nothing like my parents.
“Would you like anything to drink?” Noah asked me.
I settled down on one of the stools by their kitchen counter. “Sure.
What do you have?”
He went over to the fridge and scanned the contents. “Uh… do you want Yoo-hoo? Milk? Orange juice?” He looked up and smiled crookedly. “We also have beer.”
“Beer?”
He shrugged sheepishly.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
He pulled two bottles of Bud Light out of the fridge. He handed one to me and kept the other for himself.
I didn’t know what those two beers would lead to. And I didn’t know that Claire wasn’t going to be home anytime soon. I swear, I didn’t come to Claire’s house with the intention of kissing her husband. But somehow in the time we were talking, I noticed he was looking at me That Way. Many men had looked at me That Way before, but in all the years I knew him, Noah Matchett had never looked at me like that. Not even once. I had thought he was immune to my charms. But apparently not.
And before I knew it, his lips were on mine.
I enjoyed it. For a split second. I hadn’t kissed a man in over a year— at some point, I had gotten sick of the dating scene and given up on it. It felt nice. I won’t lie and say he wasn’t a very good kisser.
I’m ashamed to admit it was Noah who pulled away first. His face was red and he had a panicked look in his eyes.
“I’m sorry.” He got up from his stool so abruptly, he nearly tripped on it. “This was a mistake. I can’t cheat on Claire.”
My cheeks burned with shame. “You’re the one who kissed me.”
“I know, I know…” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I only did it because… look, it doesn’t matter. It was a mistake. You… you better go.”
I got out of there as quickly as I could. But before I got home, I sat in my car for an hour, hating myself. I had done something terrible. I betrayed my best friend by kissing her husband. How could I live with myself? I was as bad as my father.
I had to tell Claire the truth.
A week later, Claire and I had lunch together. Over the last several years, she had been looking more and more miserable. Like the life was being sucked out of her. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw her without circles under her eyes. She didn’t smile and laugh the way she used to.
But this time, she seemed happy. The happiest I had seen her in years. It made me think maybe I shouldn’t tell her the truth about Noah. I didn’t want to wreck her happiness. And it’s not like anything really terrible had happened. It was just a kiss.
“You’re in such a good mood,” I remarked to her. “Are things… better with Noah?”
“Well… not really.” She hesitated before her face broke out in a smile. “But there are other things in life, you know?”
I thought she was talking about her job as a teacher, which I knew she loved. Or her children, who she adored. I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to tell her the truth when she got up to go to the bathroom. Claire left her phone behind on the table, and when she was gone, a text message from Jack Alpert popped up on the screen:
Can’t stop thinking about you. Can’t wait to see you tomorrow.
Of course, there was only one conclusion I could draw. Claire was cheating on Noah.
Suddenly, it all made sense.
The reason Claire was so happy. The reason Noah felt the need to try to kiss me. She was betraying him. With his best friend. And that’s why Noah tried to return the favor with Claire’s best friend, except he couldn’t go through with it.
I had always thought Claire was the best person I ever met. I believed her to be honest and kind and loyal. Now I realized none of that was true. She was betraying the man she had pledged her life to in the worst way imaginable. She was no better than my father, who slept with his wife’s own sister. And then Noah tried to use me to get back at her.
It was despicable. They were despicable.
When she arrived back at the table and looked down at her text message, a secret smile touched her lips. I wanted to scratch her eyes out like I did to Bryan McCormick.
I could have confronted her. I could have demanded she break off her affair.
But instead, I decided to do something much worse.
Of course, none of it would have happened if I hadn’t met Warner. I met him years earlier, when he gave me some advice online about a poison that would never show up on an autopsy. We got together at my apartment and had a night of spectacular sex together. But I knew he was somebody I didn’t want to get involved with, and not just because he was far too handsome and far too charming. He was dangerous. But we still spoke every once in a while, and sometimes we got together for a little fun.
Anyway, I confided in him about everything. We agreed that my former friends deserved to be taught a lesson. Like me, this wasn’t his first rodeo. Together, we made a plan. It started out with a phony map and a knife that could carve a tree to look like animal claws.
