Page 25 of The Better Sister

The next day, I handed Ethan $500 to give to his friend and made him promise he’d never do anything so stupid again. No parent wants their kid around drugs, I explained, but his father was a former prosecutor. Of course he was going to be tougher than the typical dad. Ethan had no way of knowing that Adam’s sensitivity about law-and-order issues might stem from his own family’s history in that arena.

Now, nearly nine months later, I found that same backpack in Ethan’s bedroom and unzipped that same front pocket. On the one hand, I didn’t want to think he’d broken his promise to me. On the other hand, I couldn’t remember a time when I would have been so happy to stumble upon a joint. The pocket was empty. As I was zipping it back up, something inside the main compartment of the backpack shifted. It was open. Without meaning to, I saw a glimmer of silver inside. I reached for it and found a flip phone.

For half a second, I felt pain in my lungs, wondering how Ethan had found the burner phone I had disposed of earlier that day. Then I realized that this was an entirely different device. I flipped it open and scrolled through the recent calls. I didn’t recognize the numbers, almost all of them with 631 and 516 area codes—Long Island numbers. The contacts were stored with initials only—J, M, N, and P.

Just like I had told Adam: “Ethan’s as headstrong as you... when he wants to be.” It would have been just like him to get a second phone after his father threatened to report one of his friends to the police. Now that he had made some connections to kids on the East End, all Ethan wanted was to keep them. I of all people knew how strident his father could be. I couldn’t blame him for going behind Adam’s back to have a private way of contacting people that his father might label “bad influences.”

Ethan was sixteen years old and knew ten times more than I did about technology. He would find a way to talk to anyone he wanted to talk to, regardless of what I did with his secret phone. I started to return the phone to the backpack, but then I heard Adam’s voice in my head, telling me that I was enabling Ethan. Giving him too much slack. Ignoring warning signs. Being one ofthoseparents.

Then I heard myself arguing that Ethan was a good kid, but also stubborn. That the more we tried to control him, the more he’d do the exact opposite.

I could hear every word of a fight I’d never have with Adam again. I turned the phone off, carried it to my office, and dropped it in the top drawer. It wasn’t what Adam would do, but at least it was more than nothing.

It never dawned on me to wonder why Ethan had been carrying around a backpack with nothing in it but a tiny phone.

Part II

Nicky

15

Thanks to the smell of bacon in the apartment, I managed to get Ethan out of his room to eat breakfast. Even though it was nearly three in the afternoon and his first meal of the day, he chewed in silence and left half his eggs on the plate.

“I wish I could make this easier for you,” I said.

He shrugged. “I don’t think it felt real until today. I’m getting texts from kids who have, like, never once spoken to me, saying how great Dad was and they can’t believe they’re not going to see him again. It’s so fake, but it’s also making me realize he’s really gone.”

“People don’t know what to say when someone passes on, that’s all.” I told him his father would always be around as long as we remembered him, but I knew the words were no less hollow than the texts coming in on his phone.

News of Adam’s murder traveled quickly once theDaily Newspublished its story in the early morning hours, first online and then in the print edition in time to hit newsstands. The latest White House scandal dominated the front cover, but Adam’s murder landed in the local crime headline along the bottom edge:Husband of #ThemToo Writer Murdered in East Hampton.

Of the articles I had skimmed briefly, about half reported that he had left a wife (me by name) and a teenage son. A few mentioned that his son was from a former marriage. And only one specified that the former marriage was to the sister of his current wife.

Until now, the only public interest in our family had been focused on me, not Adam. I had seen no reason to highlight the fact that Ethan was technically my stepson, let alone my biological nephew. How do you tell people that you married your sister’s husband without sounding horrible? But now that one news outlet had gone in that direction, it would only be a matter of time before that juicy little tidbit was in the first paragraph of every single story about Adam’s murder—or about me, for that matter. At this point, I could no longer imagine caring what strangers had to say about me.

“When’s Nicky supposed to be here?” Ethan asked, pushing his uneaten scrambled eggs into a pile of ketchup.

I wondered whether my sister’s imminent arrival was at least partially responsible for the shift in his mood between last night and this morning. Nicky had called right as we were turning off the television for the evening, and I made the mistake of answering. She had insisted on coming to New York, and I hadn’t been able to talk her out of it.

I glanced at my watch. “Her flight got in half an hour ago. She should be here any second.”

He left his plate on the table and retreated to his room without comment.

When the apartment phone rang, I was expecting it to be the doorman announcing Nicky’s arrival, but it was Bill Braddock, calling to check in. I assured him that we were holding up as well as we could under the circumstances.

“I could sense the media hounds circling yesterday when one of them called me trying to get to you, but I took the liberty of trying to give you some time to grieve in private. I’m afraid my efforts were not successful.”

I considered Bill a friend, but wasn’t particularly surprised he hadn’t called before now. He was the kind of person who liked to mingle at the center of the party, not necessarily hold your hand during a dark time. I told him that, if anything, maybe the media attention would bring in information that might help the police solve the case.

“Not to pry, but what do they think happened?” he asked.

The coverage, although widespread and splashy, was short on details. There were descriptions of us and our “celebrity-soaked,” “sought-after” East Hampton “enclave,” but little information about the crime itself other than mention of a late-night break-in and fatal stabbing.

“They seem to think it was a burglary after Adam had gone to bed. He might have heard a noise and gotten up.”

Bill was making sympathetic sighs on the other end of the line. It was on his third offer to help however possible that I finally brought up the subject of Adam’s hours out of the firm the previous week. “He told me he was meeting with people from the Gentry Group, but on his time sheets, he marked the hours as client development. Do you have any idea where he might have actually been?”

“Lawyers aren’t exactly shift workers, as you know. You can sit in the office all day, but if you don’t do something we can charge a client for, you may as well be playing golf as far as the bottom line is concerned. Client development is a bit of a catchall. It could be the real deal of putting on a dog and pony show for a potential client, but half the time I think it’s socializing—lunches with a college buddy in town, that kind of thing—because you never know where the next piece of business might come from.”

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