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legumes.
Celia Baum had made an appointment for the next day.
To be pretty was to have a chance at being loved.
We girls had been taught kindness from a young age; kindness had been stressed. But there was another lesson in that, one the adults hadn’t known they were teaching, how kindness could be expected of a girl, demanded of her really, and then levied against her. We girls didn’t talk about this, but we knew it was true—of course we knew it was true—and so we would dare each other to venture into the forbidden area past kindness, where, we hoped, toughness might exist.
I told myself this same story every time I raced. He was chasing me; I’d better stay ahead.
“You tell her you’re a mother, too.”
“Why did you even come back after I did that?”
“Second chances? I guess I believe in them.”
didn’t tell him I pretty much was a second chance, my very existence, I mean.
Been outside as long as she’s been inside.”
“I’ll walk with you,”
“I’ll walk while you walk.”
“If you could stop apologizing. I don’t know what to say to that. So can you stop? Please?”
I kissed the top of the baby’s head and settled her back in her crib. And then I went to meet the man who’d killed her mother.
“But I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready,” I went on. “That’s how it is, right? Things just happen and then they’re happening.”
Still, we were given a word to shout if we needed help, a code word that wasn’t help.
“I don’t know who murdered you,”
“I only know it wasn’t me.”
“They already thought it was me,”
“And I had killed the others. So I figured: Four? Five? What’s the difference? More seemed better.”
“Why tell me at all?”
“Because I started to feel bad,”
“the way people do.”
If Edward Early didn’t murder me, then who did?
“Me, he says he lied. He says someone else murdered me. Not him.”
“We suspected,”
“There were differences with your murder.”
“That he didn’t display the body.” “Because I ran.” “That you ran,”
“Lou in the afternoon, the others at night.”
“You had witnesses,”
“Two of them. No witnesses for the rest of us. Also the location. A repeat. T...
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“To come here? You wanted to tell me your suspicions. About my murder.” “Yes.”
“Don’t say anything to that group.”
“You girls weren’t here in the in-between,”
is that your death, Louise, was the turning point.
Do you know how hard it is to make the case to bring someone back? Five someones?” “Five someones who are no ones,”
“The replication commission was caught up in that scandal,”
“with the bribes and that awful man they cloned. But after Louise’s death, the serial killer story went viral, the celebrities took notice, and more and more women started putting lipstick on their throats, calling for them to bring you back.”
“you were a case they could make—a pretty, young, white woman who holds people for a living. You weren’t out at night. You were married. ...
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“So now you think if people find out it wasn’t Edward Early who killed Lou, that it was some other man, they’re going to . . . what? ...
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“If it were me? I wouldn’t tell anyone what Edward Early said to you.”
“I wouldn’t have even told us.”
“Think about it: If someone else killed Lou, then that person feels safe right now. They think Lou thinks—they think the world thinks—that Edward Early did it.”
“I should go to the police.” “The ones who got it wrong the last time around?”
discrepancies?”
“You’re saying the police knew it wasn’t Early who killed her?”
bun...
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“Whoever murdered you, now you know more than they think you do. That’s an advantage. Why give it away?”
“I won’t say anything to anyone. Not even Silas.”
“We just want you to be safe.”
