Page 59 of The Better Sister

“Please explain why you placed those items in your closet.”

“Mom had gone to bed, and I knew there was no way I was going to fall asleep. I kept thinking, He’s never coming back, he’s never coming back.Even now, it seems hard to believe, but that first night was... really hard. And I was looking around my room, thinking about all the times I didn’t listen to him. And disappointed him.” His face wrinkled, and I could tell he was fighting back the urge to cry. “He was always telling me my room was a pigsty... if pigs hoarded overpriced clothes,” he added with a sad smile. “So I started cleaning up my room. And I found the stuff we told the police was missing.”

Olivia showed him a photograph of his bedroom, printed from a still shot of the video the jury had already seen when he was arguing with Adam. She then showed him a photograph that the police had taken of his bedroom during a search of our apartment on the day he was arrested. It was clear that his room was cleaner in the second image.

“So why did you put those items in the closet instead of, for example, telling your stepmother you had found them?”

Ethan looked down, appearing ashamed, and then gazed up again. “I figured they had already been reported stolen anyway, so I might as well keep them. It was stupid. And wrong.”

“So why did you do it?”

“I was scared. I had seen how much more money we had recently, and I thought it was because Dad was working at a law firm. I was afraid we were going to be broke and figured some insurance company wouldn’t miss a couple thousand dollars. I was going to sell the stuff if we ever needed money.”

It was a plausible explanation. The jury didn’t know, however, what I knew. Ethan had asked me to go to Kevin’s on Saturday afternoon for his backpack, but later that night, the backpack was empty except for a burner phone.

He also had an explanation for secretly videotaping Adam in his room. “He was just so disappointed in me—making it sound like I was a really bad kid. I mean, I’m not perfect. I could follow every piece of advice he ever gave me, and I’d never be first in my class or the ninety-ninth percentile like him and my mom.”

“Just to be clear for the jury, you mean your stepmother, Chloe Taylor, correct?”

He nodded and then said “Yes” for the court reporter. “Yeah, but I call her Mom. I mean, she’s always accepted the way I am, but Dad was really upset that I wasn’t more like them. He was making it sound like I was going off the deep end. And, yes, he was even talking about sending me away to military school. So I recorded him. I was thinking it would be like an intervention or something—like when that girl put up an Insta story about her dad getting wasted all night. But I wasn’t going to go public or anything. I was just going to show him thathewas the one who was acting crazy when we argued. I was normal. Iamnormal. And now I feel like the police are treating me like I’m some horrible kid, too.”

When he wiped his face with his palms, he momentarily looked like a child again.

“So did you ever show that video to your father?”

He shook his head.

“You need to answer aloud,” she reminded him.

“No. I felt too bad about it. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.” His face pruned again, and this time he couldn’t stop the tears. He sniffed a few times and ran the sleeve of his suit jacket across his eyes, regaining his composure.

“There’s one more thing I need to talk to you about, Ethan. You said before that you refer to your stepmother, Chloe Taylor, as Mom. Do you love her?”

“Yes.”

“Are you proud of her?”

“Very. I mean, look at everything she’s done.”

“Did you write those posts on the Poppit website about her, under the name KurtLoMein?”

He looked at me with pain in his eyes as he answered quietly. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I honestly don’t know. It’s just... everything was changing. She always worked hard, but then she got sort of famous because of her magazine. Then when the Them Too stuff blew up, she was like a hero to people. She was busy all the time, and even when she was home, she was writing in her office or looking at her social. I think—”

“You mean social media?” Olivia clarified.

“Yeah. Like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Dad would tell her she was worse than a teenager, and she’d say he didn’t understand the pressure she was under. That she had twenty-five-year-olds nipping at her heels who’d steal her job the second she fell behind the digital trend.” The eyes of several jurors moved in my direction. It was clear that no sixteen-year-old would have come up with that sentence unless he’d heard it repeatedly from an adult. “I think I was hoping to get her attention, because I knew she read what people were saying about her online.”

“Finally, Ethan, just to be clear: Did you go to your house any time after Kevin picked you up on Friday night, or before you returned with your mother on Saturday morning?”

“No.”

“Did you kill your father, Adam Macintosh?”

“No, I swear.”

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