Page 60 of The Guilty One

“The man you married is—was—Matteo Acri,” he says, and my breathing stops, my chest suddenly hollow as if someone has scraped the contents out with a spoon. I open my mouth to say something, anything, but he’s not done. “Or, as he always liked us to call him when Tatum wasn’t around, Tate.”

I feel like someone has reached into my chest and driven a screwdriver into my lungs. It’s not possible. It’s not possible. This can’t be true. He’s lying, but why? “That’s impossible. I’ve seen his driver’s license. I married him, for goodness’ sake. I saw his birth certificate. I’m not an idiot.”

“A birth certificate that listed parents you know aren’t his birth parents.” His smile is twisted, like he feels conflicted.

“So?”

“So things aren’t what they seem already. You believe the reality you were handed, the story you were sold.”

“I believe I married Tatum Thompson.” I drop my hands, finding a flaw in this story. “Hang on. You’re telling me they switched places, and what? His parents didn’t notice? I have a picture of the five of you. Matteo and Tatum might’ve looked similar—they were around the same height, pale complexions, and brown hair—but they weren’t twins. There’s no way Matteo could’ve fooled people into believing he was Tatum. Certainly not Tatum’s own parents.”

His head bows with a slow, contemplative nod. “The Thompsons are good people. They treated us like sons. They were parents to us when we’d never had any parents. When they adopted Tatum, I think we all breathed a sigh of relief. We had somewhere safe to go when our foster parents didn’t care where we were. When they’d rather us not be with them.” He rubs a hand over the side of his face. “To be honest, I always wondered if Tatum was the reason they didn’t just adopt all of us, if he put a stop to it somehow. I always sort of assumed he told them not to after they’d met us, but I’ll never know that for sure.” He sighs, his face seeming to age almost right before my eyes. “After we buried Tatum, Matteo wanted us to leave Aubrey’s body where someone would find her. He wanted her family to have answers, to get to say goodbye. To honor her. None of us were in our right minds at that point. We were preparing to go to jail, for our lives to be over for what we’d done. And so, we went to the only safe place we’d ever known.”

I piece it together before he says it. “The Thompsons’ house?”

He nods. “It sounds crazy, I know, but they were the closest thing we had to a family. We’d known them almost as long as they’d known Tatum, and we’d been there for every holiday, every school break since tenth grade. Daphne was the one who made sure we’d been to the dentist and forced us to go to the doctor when we were sick. So, even if she couldn’t forgive us for what we’d done, we all felt we owed her the truth. And that’s what we gave her. The whole truth. Every horrible detail. We didn’t make ourselves look any better. We were monsters, too. We stood there. We watched as he did what he did. We allowed him to do what he did. Not only that night but for years. We enabled him and made excuses for him and laughed along with him, until the moment it all went wrong. We allowed him to become who he was. And I guess I want to say it’s because we knew why he was that way. We’d seen all the hell he’d been through. We also felt loyalty to him that I can’t explain. We wanted to believe he could and would change. But it doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse for it.”

He drops his head, looking at the tabletop. “And when it was all over, we told her we’d show her where his body was if she wanted us to. We told her we were going to turn ourselves in to the police, but before the media could spin the story, we wanted her to hear the truth straight from us.”

He has tears in his eyes when he looks back up. “But instead of turning us away, instead of calling us monsters for killing her son, she just cried. She just cried, and she held us, and…I still don’t know why she did it. We weren’t hers to protect. Tatum was.”

I swallow, unable to speak.

“Matteo was the one who’d done it. He was the one who needed her the most, I think. He’d lost the woman he loved. He’d killed our brother. And then Daphne said something I’ll never forget. She took our hands and pulled us in close and said, ‘We’re going to fix this. No one is going to miss Matteo Acri. No one is going to report him missing unless we do.’”

I flinch at the harsh words.

“I know,” he says, not missing my reaction. “But she was right. By that point, we were all out of foster care. Legal adults. We lived together in the dorms. We all interned at Mr. T’s company. There was no one to miss any of us. If she reported that Tatum had gone missing, there would be a big police investigation. He was the son of a media mogul, and whether or not he was liked, he was well known on campus. But if Matteo Acri went missing? If any of the rest of us went missing?” He scoffs. “I think there was maybe one article written about it. No news reports. No one ever even reached out to me for an interview. No one cared.”

“They really switched places? You’re serious?” It’s not possible, but it’s true. It feels like my life motto these days. My mouth is dry as I wait for him to confirm what he already has. I don’t want to believe it, but I can see the truth of it in his eyes, hear it in his words. My marriage, my life, my entire world, has been a lie.

He nods.

“And Lane just went along with it? Their entire family?” As I say it, I realize the truth: the Thompsons have no family. Employees, acquaintances, friends, sure, but no parents, no siblings. It was always just them and Tate. For as long as I’ve known them, and apparently even longer.

“I don’t know what discussions went on behind closed doors to get Mr. T on board, but like I said, we all worked for him. We were close. I think—I hope—he thought of us like sons as much as we thought of him like a father.”

My hands are like ice, so I tuck them under my thighs, thinking. Not only was I lied to by my husband, but also by my in-laws. Lane and Daphne have known all along that Tate isn’t Tate. They’ve lived for years with this secret, protecting him and the rest of the boys. How can they do it? How can they call him the wrong name? The name of the son they lost? How could they just let him be buried and forgotten about?

“I can’t believe this. I can’t believe any of this. It seems impossible.” Aside from my parents, Tate, and the boys, Daphne and Lane are the closest people in my life. I would do anything for them, but this? They’ve lied to me every single day with smiles on their faces. They lied when I asked about Matteo. When I showed them the photograph. They always knew who he was, and that he was the man I married to boot. The boy I was pointing to in the photograph was Tatum. The boy they claimed not to know was their own son. It’s all too much to take in.

How can I ever trust them again?

How can I ever trust myself?

I let liars into my house. Into my world.

I let them around my children.

“They had Matteo drop out of college right away—as Tatum, of course. Needless to say, he wasn’t missed. We reported Matteo as missing, but again, no one really searched for him. They found Aubrey a few days later, and that became a bigger story, which totally drowned out Matteo’s disappearance more than it already was. The Thompsons moved a few hours away. Like you said, Matteo and Tatum looked similar enough for Matteo to eventually renew his driver’s license as Tatum. Tate.” He shakes his head. “It shouldn’t have worked. I think we all just kept waiting for the rug to get pulled out from under us, but it didn’t.”

“Until now.”

He nods. “Bradley fell in love, and he wanted to tell his fiancée the truth. I called Tate to tell him he should warn Daphne, to ask her what we should do, but before I got an answer, Tate was gone and Bradley and Dakota were dead.”

“So you think the fiancée is doing this?”

“No. I really don’t know what to think. At first I thought so, but now I’m worried…” He pauses.

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