Page 76 of The Better Sister

“Adam never told me any of this.”

“Exactly. It was always when you weren’t home, apparently. After the thing with Panda, Ethan started wondering if Adam was just making it all up.”

“But why?”

“To make him feel bad. To control him. That’s what abusers do, Chloe. They gaslight their victims. Adam was telling Ethan that he was starting to go crazy like his mother—just like in that video. And that was why Ethan had the webcam set up in his room—he wanted to know if those things were true. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t understand why Adam would lie to him.”

“And what were you doing in response to all this?”

“Just listening to him. He needed someone to talk to.”

I started to say that he should have come to me, but obviously he didn’t think he could. If I couldn’t stand up for myself, how was I going to protect him?

“Did he tell you what Adam was doing to me?” I still couldn’t bring myself to say the words. I would never think of myself that way.

“Yes. And it was killing me to know that he was hurting you. I thought so many times about calling you, but I didn’t want to betray Ethan’s trust. And I was scared it would backfire on me if you guys knew I was talking to him. And then one day—sometime in April, I think—he suddenly throws it out there that Adam could have lied about what happened at the pool when Ethan was little. I mean, I don’t remember anything from that night. I just assumed Adam was telling the truth. I was horrified. I was certain there was no way I was actually trying to hurt Ethan, but I took the basic facts as a given. But the reality is: Adam could have just pushed me into the water and dragged me back out. I never would have known.”

I finally pulled the documents from the mailing envelope on my lap. “The blood tests at the hospital put you at a point-one-eight BAC, mixed with flu-ox-e-tine—” I sounded out the syllables.

“Prozac,” she said. “It does a body good, but not with all the booze in the house.”

“Plus zolpidem.”

“Ambien.”

“That much, Adam told me. But the records also show that you had contusions on your arms. Adam said it must have happened when he was pulling you from the water. When you came to, he said you started resisting him, trying to go back in.” Adam was one of the most admired young prosecutors at the county DA’s office. No one would have questioned his version of events. He was the heroic dad who had saved his baby from a disturbed wife.

“Maybe. Like I said, I don’t remember anything. Or maybe it happened because he threw me in while I was passed out. Honestly, I want to believe that’s what occurred, but I can’t know for sure. But Ethan was really starting to question whether Adam lied about what went down that night. He accused him during an argument, and that’s when Adam started talking about sending him to military school.”

“Except I think maybe thereisa way to know, Nicky.” I handed her a page of the police report from the night Adam rescued Ethan from the swimming pool. I had already highlighted the paragraph I wanted her to read.

Macintosh says wife appeared to be unconscious. As he tried to pull her out of the water, she began to resist him. She kept saying “I’ll be an angel over Wallace Lake.” Per Macintosh, it’s a memory from wife’s childhood. He explained it’s a reference to family version of the prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” He took it to be an expression of his wife’s desire to end her life.

“You never saw this before?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. I never told him about that. And that’s not even the right line. It was ‘I’ll wait for you at Shadow Lake.’ We were talking about that right when the trial started, remember?”

And then she made the connection.Sheremembered the actual phrase, butIhadn’t. I had changed it in my head over the years. And during one of those phone calls Adam made to tell me how worried he was about Nicky, I had told him what a good big sister she used to be to me when I was little. I told him how I used to get scared when saying my prayers, and she made up a version about us being angels together. And then I told him my altered version, including the name of the wrong lake.

“He was lying, Nicky. You weren’t trying to kill yourself.”

“Which means I wasn’t trying to hurt Ethan.”

“Youdidn’thurt Ethan. He couldn’t even talk then. He was breathing perfectly fine by the time paramedics arrived. Adam made the whole thing up—so he could leave you and take Ethan.”

“When did you get these?” she asked.

“Yesterday. Ethan ordered them back in April. It must have taken this long for the clerk to get around to the archive search.”

She reached over and took the rest of the documents from me and began flipping through them.

“Is that why you killed Adam?” I finally asked. “Because he stole Ethan? You wanted custody again?”

She shook her head. I’d spent my whole life thinking she was a liar, and this time, I really wanted to believe her denial.

But she wasn’t denying it, at least not the part about killing Adam. “It was because Adam was starting to hurt you, and I could see how it was destroying Ethan. He wasbreakingthat sweet little boy. Sending him away? Throwing him out like that? Take a look at the newspapers, filled with headlines about monstrous men who were once boys unloved by their fathers.”

Just as I had asked:What if we had been boys?

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