I drive Ben back to his hotel and make an excuse for why I can’t stay. I’ve slept over nearly every night for the past week, but he doesn’t argue when I claim I’m exhausted and I’m going back to my parents’ house. He probably wants to edit everything into an episode anyway. He seemed pretty thrilled by today’s turn of events.
I drive across town to my old house. To Matt’s house. He opens the door and steps out onto the porch as soon as I pull up to the curb, like he was waiting for me.
Dammit. I hate how predictable I am.
I walk up the path. Matt sweeps his arms out toward the house, as if welcoming me back. The shutters are open today, the light inside warm and inviting.
“Good timing,” he says. “I was just about to order us some dinner.”
 |
A tiny part of me thought that maybe Matt had turned over a new leaf and stopped drinking this week after Julia’s episode aired, but I see the loaded bar cart as soon as I step inside. It’s still on the same side of the living room, to the right of the huge teal couch.
The same teal couch that I bought. The same bar cart that I bought.
I stop, looking left and right. There are a few new pieces of artwork— there’s some abstract art that’s either flowers or just some random blobs of blue and yellow paint that I don’t particularly care for—but everything is mostly the same. Beautiful dark hardwood floors, high ceilings, a sleek white kitchen to my right with a huge island in the middle. I always thought
that those enormous kitchen islands were the best thing ever, and it turns out I was right.
But it’s weird how much everything looks exactly the same. If I hadn’t known that Matt remarried, I wouldn’t have guessed it walking in. Julia didn’t leave much of a mark on the house. Or even on him, maybe.
“I need a drink,” I say, even though I know I shouldn’t drink with Matt. I should encourage sobriety with Matt. That would be the mature, responsible thing to do for someone you know has a drinking problem.
“A stiff drink,” I continue. He laughs. “Me too.”
No one here is mature and responsible.
He doesn’t ask what I want; he just grabs the vodka and cranberry, because he knows what I like when I’ve had a hard day.
I sit on the couch (my couch) as he makes the drinks.
“I’m glad you finally came over,” he says as he shakes the tumbler. He’s making himself a martini.
“Why is everything the same?”
He strains the liquid into his glass. “What do you mean?” “Julia didn’t want to redecorate?”
“Why would she? You have great taste.” “Ah.”
He walks across the living room, two glasses in hand, and passes one to me. “What does ah mean?” He sits down next to me.
I take a sip of my drink and then set it on the coffee table. “It means I just realized that you didn’t let her redecorate.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. I mentioned that I liked the way things were, and she didn’t seem bothered by it.”
That seems unlikely, but I don’t know Julia. Maybe she hates decorating. Maybe she really did think I have great taste.
“Are you going to tell me?” he asks.
I raise an eyebrow like I don’t know what he’s talking about. I do. “What you remembered when we were outside.” He puts his glass on
the coffee table. He’s already finished half of the rather large martini.
I look at the photo over the fireplace. It’s of Julia and Matt’s wedding day, her in a sleeveless mermaid-style wedding dress with shoulders that look like they were perfectly sculpted in a Pilates class. Our wedding picture once hung there.
I think it’s even the same frame. They just took the old one out and stuck the new one in.
Christ, that’s weird.
“I was kissing someone out there,” I say.
I turn my attention back to Matt. His jaw twitches, like it always does when he’s angry. His mouth is set in a hard line.
“Give me a break,” I say. “I didn’t say anything!”
“I know your angry face. And you have no right to an angry face. You were fucking Nina that night.”
He blows out a breath. “Not that night, but you’re right. I have no room to judge.”
I can’t hide my surprise.
“I’m trying to be more honest,” he says, noticing the look. “With you. About everything. I thought that if I pretended to have a good marriage, I would magically have one. I should have always just been more honest with you. I don’t think you ever would have cheated if I hadn’t done it first.”
I actually have no idea whether that’s true. I absolutely slept with Kyle as a “fuck you” to Matt, but I kept doing it because I enjoyed the thrill of it.
I decide not to tell him that.
“Who was it?” Matt asks. “Will it make me mad?”
“What doesn’t make you mad?” It slips out before I can stop it. I used to love to antagonize him.
But he just smiles, a little sadly. “That’s a good point.” Jesus. I reach for my drink and take a long gulp.
“I don’t know,” I say as I put it back down. “I remember being out there, and kissing him, but I can’t see his face. But I remember Savvy interrupting us, and she looked kind of pissed.”
Matt’s eyebrows shoot up. “Pissed?”
“Yeah. She looked mad, and I think we must have left after that, because she said, Let’s go.”
“Must have been Colin,” Matt says.
“No, there’s no way,” I protest. “I didn’t really even like Colin, and I never would have made out with Savvy’s boyfriend.”
“He wasn’t really her boyfriend. They saw other people.”
“Still, I don’t think that I would have…” I trail off, considering. I make a face and shake my head. “He slept with my mom that night. Are you saying he made out with me, and then went back inside and started hitting on my mother?”
“Why not? You guys kind of look alike.” He laughs at the expression on my face. “There’s a solid chance he didn’t even know that Kathleen was your mom. The guy is dumb as a bag of rocks.”
“True.” I run a hand down my face. “I just can’t see it. Even if I was drunk. It had to be someone else.”
He reaches out, nudging my skirt up to put a hand on my knee. “It doesn’t matter,” he says gently.
I slap his hand away. “Of course it matters! It’s the first important thing I’ve remembered in years.”
“It’s not going to bring her back. Nothing will bring her back.” He puts his hand back and squeezes my knee. “I know that this whole podcast thing has been hard on you, but it’s almost over. And it doesn’t matter what that guy says. Whether Ben points the finger at you or me or Colin or Nina or whoever. He’s not the police.”
“It doesn’t matter what he says, but it matters to me who killed her. I want to know if it was me or you or Colin or Nina or my mom.”
“Your mom?”
“She was out that night! It could happen! Her alibi is Savvy’s boyfriend.”
He gives me a look that is both amused and a little pitying. I take another sip of my drink and consider whether I should do something about the fact that his hand has moved from my knee to my thigh.
I glance over at the wedding photo above the mantel. If I squint, it could be our wedding photo. If I squint, this whole house is mine again. This
whole life is mine again. My pulse begins to race. A sick feeling rises up in my throat.
Matt leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss him back, despite the frantic beating of my heart. I want to knee him in the balls, but I force myself to sink into this for a moment. I need to be twenty-four again, in this house, feeling everything I felt the night that Savvy died. I don’t want to push it away anymore. If I can remember what it’s like to be that fucked-up twenty-four-year-old again, maybe I can remember everything.
He slides an arm around my waist, pulling me closer. I remember always feeling conflicted when Matt and I would have sex. Because on the one hand, I wanted to fucking murder him.
On the other hand, we always had really fantastic sex.
He pulls away to press his lips to my neck. “Stay here with me,” he murmurs against my skin. “Don’t go back to L.A.”
I say nothing, and maybe he takes my silence to mean I’m thinking about it, because he pulls back and looks at me seriously. An uncomfortable feeling unfurls in my gut.
“Or we can go somewhere else. Start over. Just the two of us.” He pushes my hair back, and then leaves his hand on my cheek. “I’ve missed you. What happened to us?”
“What happened to you? Lucy, what happened to you?”
The memory slams into me so suddenly that I reel back with a gasp.
Matt stood in front of me. Matt of five years ago, with longer hair and a horrified expression on his face. His eyes were bloodshot. He was drunk.
“Jesus, is that your blood?”
What did I say to him? I can’t see myself. I can only see him, and that look in his eyes.
He kept glancing down at something. What is he looking at? Something in my hand. I can almost feel it. It’s wet and rough and— “Whose blood is that?”
“Lucy, no.” Matt’s voice is sharp. I blink and he comes into focus. Present Matt. He’s got both hands on my cheeks, forcing me to look at him. “Stop.”
“No, I remember something, I remember—”
“Oh my god Lucy, what did you do? Oh god. Is she dead?”
“Let’s kill…” I say the words out loud. I said the words then, to Matt.
The forest takes shape around me.
“Let’s kill…” My brain was short-circuiting. I could hear Savvy in my head, on a loop as I stood in front of my frantic husband. Fat raindrops hit my skin, landing on my eyelashes and blurring Matt’s face.
“What?” Matt dropped his hands from my face in shock. “You killed someone?”
“Deserved it,” I muttered. “We had a plan.”
“Jesus Christ.” He took a step back, his horrified expression intensifying.
“Savvy tried to…”
“To what? Lucy, what did Savvy try to do?”
“I know.” Matt shakes me gently, bringing me back to the present. “Lucy, I know that you had to.”
I can see it now. I was holding a tree branch. Huge and thick and covered in blood.
I screamed, and I dropped it. And then I ran.
I’m breathing too fast. My vision is tunneling. Matt still has his hands on my cheeks. I think he’s holding me upright.
“I don’t know what went on between you two out there in the woods, but I know that you did what you had to do,” he says firmly. “I am so sorry that I got there too late and I couldn’t protect you.”
“Why did you…” I can’t get words out. Tears stream down my cheeks. “Why didn’t you call the police? When you saw me that night? Why did they find me the next morning…?”
“I looked for you. But I grabbed that tree branch first and I took it to the trunk of my car, because I knew it would be harder for them to convict you without a murder weapon. I drove it down to the main road and dropped it in a dumpster behind a bar. When I came back, it had started raining really hard, and the road was flooded and I couldn’t get to where you’d been. I thought you’d go home, but when I got there … well, you weren’t.”
I shake my head. I’m fully sobbing now.
“It’s okay,” he says gently. “I was trying to protect you back then, and I completely botched it. I was drunk and stupid and then I freaked out about everything when you got home. It’s my fault.”
A shudder goes through me.
He puts a hand to his chest. “Seriously, it’s my fault. Things had gotten out of hand between us back then, and I knew it. I should have stopped us. I shouldn’t have let it go on so long.”
I blink at him, confused.
“The fighting,” he says. “The way we used to go at each other, hurt each other. It got to you and changed you, and I know that’s partially my fault. I don’t think you could stop yourself, that night.”
I draw a ragged breath. The way he’s describing the violence in our marriage—the violence he started, the violence that only ever left me with serious injuries—doesn’t seem right.
None of this seems right.
“Blame me,” he continues. “Scream at me. I deserve it.”
I stand and stumble backward, away from him. “No. I didn’t kill her. I never would have—no.”
He stands as well. “She tried to hurt you. I don’t know why, but you told me that she did. I should have just called the police right that second and we could have claimed self-defense, but I was drunk and I panicked. And—” He cuts himself off.
I look at him sharply. “And?”
He hesitates. “Why don’t you go lie down? Or take a bath? You love that tub. I’ll run it for you.”
He reaches for me. His fingers brush my wrist before I yank it away. I rush to the door like he’s going to chase me. He doesn’t.
I throw it open and look back at him. “You’re lying.”
He slides both hands into his pockets with a sigh. “Lucy, please just let it go. You don’t want to remember anything else. Trust me.”
I don’t trust him. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. I walk out, slamming the door shut behind me.
LUCY
“Lucy.”
I turned to see Matt walking out of the reception, a couple fist-pumping to the music on the dance floor behind him. The music faded as the door shut.
He put an arm around my waist, pulling me close. I let him. It was just the two of us in the dimly lit hallway, the murmurs of voices distant.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” he whispered. “You’re always sorry.”
He kissed me. I should have pushed him away. I might have slapped him if we were at home.
Instead, I looped my arms around his neck. I kissed him back. He tasted like whiskey.
“I’m going to do better,” he said as he pulled back to look at me.
I wondered whether by “do better” he meant that he was going to stop smacking me around, or whether he was going to stop sleeping with other women.
He wasn’t going to stop doing either, no matter how many times he claimed he was trying to be better.
He slid both hands over my ass, pressing his lips to my neck. “Remember how we had sex in the bathroom at the last wedding we went to here?”
Vividly. My body remembered too, because it was angling toward him, ready to get bent over a counter again.
Someone coughed, and I quickly stepped back from him to see Savvy standing outside the bathroom door.
“Am I interrupting?” she asked, her tone dripping with judgment. I couldn’t blame her.
My face heated. I didn’t know why I kept falling back into Matt’s arms, after everything. There was something wrong with me. Something broken that kept drawing me toward him, like a painful bruise I couldn’t stop poking at. It’s just that when it was good with Matt, it was good.
I was so deeply fucked-up.
A group of women trailed out of the bathroom behind her, laughing as they paused in the hallway. Nina was among them, and she nodded at me once.
Savvy walked past me, and I reached for her arm.
She yanked it away, my fingers only barely brushing her skin, and I heard the laughter from the women abruptly stop.
“The fucker doesn’t deserve you,” she said through clenched teeth. “You know exactly what he actually deserves.”
She stomped away, and I swallowed as I watched her go. For all my big talk, I didn’t think I could actually ever go through with killing Matt. I didn’t think I could kill anyone, but especially not him. He’d already turned me into a rage-filled monster I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t going to let him turn me into a murderer too.
Savvy, however, seemed ready to actually go through with it. I was almost reluctant to tell her the plan was off.
I turned to see the women headed back into the ballroom, stealing glances at me as they went.
Matt was still grinning at me, oblivious to Savvy’s words. “Looks like the bathroom is clear.”
The look on Savvy’s face had strengthened my resolve. “I’m not fucking you hours after you tried to drown me in the bathtub.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic. I didn’t try to drown you.”
I could still feel his hand around my neck, holding me under the water as I struggled and splashed. He’d laughed when I came up sputtering after he finally let me go. He shrugged it off so easily that I was, once again, wondering whether maybe his version of events was the true one.
I had this wild urge to start pounding my hands against my head. Like if I smacked my skull hard enough, I’d be able to think straight. I just needed to get my brain into the correct position, and then I could trust my own memories more than Matt’s.
I resisted the urge and brushed past Matt. He caught my arm.
“You know I could just find someone else.” He curled his lip. He always had the ugliest expression when he reminded me of how much other women loved him. “There are ten women in there who would immediately take me up on the offer.”
I yanked my arm away. “Then go grab one and do it. I don’t care.” His eyes glinted. “Don’t test me.”
“Go crazy, Matt. You’re already fucking half the town anyway.”
He blinked, clearly startled that I was aware of his (incredibly indiscreet) cheating.
“And there are way more than ten guys in there who would love to fuck me.” I laughed as I gestured at the doors to the reception. “Maybe I’ll give it a go too.”
His face twisted in rage. I would have been in real trouble if we were at home.
But the door opened, bringing music and laughter with it, and he was forced to hide his anger. He ducked his head and walked past me, roughly bumping my shoulder as he went.
“Hey, Lucy, you okay?”
I turned at the sound of the familiar voice.
