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What was I then? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? The toddlerhood of adulthood.
I remember talking to someone, maybe even Jessup, about the sexiness of his forearms.
The next day, Jessup announced that she and Silas had called things off. When I asked her why, I was careful about how my voice sounded so that she wouldn’t hear the honeycomb that had suddenly appeared at the base of my throat, golden-coated and buzzing. She responded by blowing a raspberry at me, and I didn’t dare ask her what that meant.
“No. I gave it to him. I mean, I offered it. After he told me his intentions with you.”
This wasn’t about Silas and me, she clarified, she didn’t care about that. But really it would’ve been better if we’d fallen into each other’s arms, she said, if we’d snuck around, if we’d cheated. The way it all went down, she said, she felt like she’d been dealt with rather coldly.
She went on to explain that she’d joined a group of amateur detectives who investigated cold cases,
The Luminols, they called themselves.
There were seven Luminols who met regularly to float their theories and discuss their evidence.
“Are you asking the others? Fern and them?” “Only you.” “Why me?”
Besides, I didn’t need the Luminols. I had plans of my own.
“I think she’s becoming a panty liner.”
“A panty liner?”
“With w...
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It was easy to make fun of Angela. And if it was unkind, which of course it was, it was also a way to ask without asking, Am I like her? No, you’re not like her. Okay, phew, you’re not like her, either. I don’t need to tell you how many women’s friendships are built upon this firm foundation.
I just have the one question.”
“Why me?”
yeah: Why me? Is that such a crazy thing to want to ask the man who killed you?”
“I was going to ask if I could come with you.”
“That’s the thing. I don’t want to see him.”
“I want him to see me. And this time, I won’t be afraid.”
Edward Early’s benightment was only two months away. Once the doctors put him under, he’d be in stasis, essentially a coma, for the forty years of his sentence. He would dream the dreams the psychologists had designed to increase his empathy, his head stuck with a nimbus of needles arranged to light up the empty spots in his brain.
The only way I could get ahead on my guilty tally was at night while he slept, when I could put my arms around him.
He looked at me for a moment, then he offered me his hands.
And she said, Mom, you know better than anyone what a bitch I can be.
The process was saved for special circumstances.
“I may not be a mother, but I have one, don’t I?”
“And the thing is, so does Edward Early.”
He works as a nurse for a large hospital and is senior there, in charge of the other nurses.
Odd would pretend he didn’t know that Dad spoiled me, and I would pretend I didn’t know that Odd did know, and it was all love in the end, wasn’t it?
They told me from the start that their friend Talia had carried me for them,
I didn’t feel any special connection to Talia; I didn’t think of her as my mother, but I felt proud that I’d grown inside her.
In the months after he died, I’d stare at my face in the mirror because I could still see him there in my bones.
And that’s why I knew that when I needed him, Odd would take me in.
She’d been married and divorced twice. Edward was her only child.
had gone on his own way, as men can and do.
“It’s a game. Kind of.” “Kind of?” “It’s a game of you,”
“Of your murder, Lou.”
“I’m so sorry. Someone made a game out of your murder.”
“Yeah, okay. Can I be sorry instead?”
Only then did it occur to me that I was meant to be scared, that this game was a horror VR and had been designed to make its players afraid. But somehow I wasn’t.
You’d be surprised by the number of women. Or probably you wouldn’t.
“You’re going to be able to play as him?”
“No one will want to play as a serial killer.”
“Umm, Jazz?”
“Have you met hu...
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Her son murdered people. And people always blame the mother.”
It looks cozy. I want her to always feel cozy.
These teenagers had, I realized, made a pet of me.
He hadn’t found the bag, though, hadn’t found the items tucked at its bottom.
