Page 12 of The Better Sister

She sat back and let out a puff of air. “Not at all, ma’am.”Ma’am?She looked like she was older than I was. “I’m just trying to get the best sense possible of what happened tonight.”

“What happened tonight is someone murdered my husband. And we never really use the alarm when we’re at the house. I use it at night if I’m out here alone—which is rare—but otherwise it’s more for when we’re in the city. Like you said, burglars target the part-time houses.”

I imagined some amorphous figure peeking through the back window, deciding no one was home.

“And these threats,” she said, handing me my phone, “all of it was online? No letters or packages? Anyone following you home or something like that?”

I shook my head.

“We’ll take a look into it,” Bowen assured me. “We’ll be looking into everything.”

I managed to keep my cool through all of it, which is absolutely what Adam would have expected of me. The police seemed satisfied. Or at least they were doing a good job of faking it.

But then I mentioned Ethan. “At least Ethan wasn’t home,” I muttered. He had gone to see the latest Marvel movie with his friend Kevin Dunham and spent the night at his house. My son was safe. At least I could hold on to that. “I need to find him. I don’t want him to hear about this when he wakes up.”

“We’ll need to call his mother,” Bowen had said.

I must have looked so confused. And irritated. And dismayed by his stupidity. Adam calls it—calledit—my “not having it” face.

“I’m not having Kevin’s mother tell him about this. I barely know the woman.”

“Not Kevin’s mother. Yourstepson’s.”

Ethan started calling me Mama around the time he was five, after I was seeing Adam regularly, but before we got married. I corrected him at first, feeling guilty about taking the title from Nicky, not to mention missing the sound of his little voice saying “Glow-y.” But Adam convinced me that it was a sign Ethan missed having a maternal figure in his life.

And somehow the police already knew that I wasn’t actually my son’s mother.

The satisfaction they must have taken as they saw my face move from fatigue to offense and finally to realization. I pictured them googling Adam. Finding our wedding announcement in the Sunday Styles section. “The groom has a son from a prior marriage.”

The police needed to call Ethan’s mother. My husband, Adam, was dead, and now his son—my son, or so it had seemed for nearly a decade—would need his mother.

I recited her home phone number from memory. It was the same number I’d had for the first eighteen years of my life. When she asked for a second number, I had to look up the mobile information in my contacts. “Her name is Nicky Macintosh. And she’s my sister.”

7

I stared at the Dunhams’ house from the passenger seat of Detective Guidry’s car. My right index finger was fixated on a small tear in the upholstery beneath my thigh. I felt something hard and forced my thumb into the hole to get a grip on it.

Guidry shook her head when I held up a bullet-shaped piece of bright yellow candy. I was pretty sure it was a Mike and Ike.

“Sorry about that,” she said softly. “Detective Bowen has a weird sense of humor.”

“Uh-huh.” I went back to looking across the street. It was past first light but not quite sunup. Early enough to see that most of the house was still dark except for a small window to the left of the front door. I’d only been inside once a few months before, when Ethan had taken forever to come outside despite my many texts telling him I was waiting. The lit window belonged to the kitchen, I thought. Probably Kevin’s mom—was her name Andrea?—waiting for my arrival.

I had called Ethan’s cell before Guidry and I left the police station. It took two more tries before he answered, so he knew something was up. All I told him was that I was going to be picking him up early.

“How early?” Like I was torturing him.

“Like, now. In fifteen minutes.”

“Moooooom. I’m tired. I’m just sleeping, I promise.”

What did he assume I thought he was doing? If I had to guess, he and Kevin had stayed up all night playing video games.

“I’m sorry, kiddo. I’ll see you in fifteen minutes, okay?” He didn’t say anything, which meant he’d be complying. Ethan has a way of letting you know when he’s got other ideas. “I love you,” I added, wondering how he was going to go on without his father.

“Fine,” was all he said before hanging up.

We were halfway to the house when my cell rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was the 631 area code. From the East End, not the city. I picked up. It was Kevin’s mom, whose name I’d already forgotten. Apparently Ethan had been his usual loud self taking the stairs from the bedroom, waking her up. When Ethan told her I was suddenly picking him up, she decided to call me to make sure everything was all right.

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