Page 63 of Count My Lies

Harper nods.

I look back to Sloane. She has a funny look on her face, a sort of half smile, and I realize that she’s happy I’m not coming. She’s excited to have Jay to herself, especially now that she knows we’re no longer together.Good for you, Sloane. Enjoy it.

Just then, Jay comes down the stairs in slacks and a collared shirt rolled at the sleeves, carrying a beer. He’s freshly showered, hair damp,face shaved clean. Sloane is blushing already, just at the sight of him. I remember looking at him like that once. Now, I want to gouge him in the throat with a butcher knife.

Harper jumps off the couch. “Look at my new dress, Dad!” She twirls around so the skirt lifts in the air.

“Wow!” he says. “You’re gorgeous!” Then he picks her up, hoists her onto his hip. “Ready?” Harper nods. He looks to me, then Sloane, holding a beat longer on Sloane, on her body in the tight dress, then back to me. “Should we go?”

He doesn’t even notice I’m not dressed. “You guys go,” I say. “I’m not feeling well. I’m going to stay home and rest.”

Jay turns back to look at me, then nods slowly.

“We can bring you something back,” Sloane offers. “Dessert or something?”

I shake my head. “I’m going to get in bed early, so hopefully I’ll be asleep when you’re home. I’ll be fine by tomorrow, I promise. Give Mama a kiss goodbye, baby.”

Harper does, then runs back to Jay, and the three of them walk out together, down the path to the driveway. I get up, watch them from the doorway. They look like a perfect family. Before Sloane gets in the car she pauses, then turns back to look at the house. I lift a hand, wave. “Have fun,” I call. She waves back, a small, tentative smile on her face.

I go back inside and ease the door closed behind them. The house is uncharacteristically quiet. I can hear the rush of the ocean, a clock ticking in the kitchen.

From the front window, I watch the car back out of the driveway, drive down the road toward town. When I can no longer see it, I go upstairs, into the master bedroom, then to the bathroom, where I punch in the four-digit code to the safe. It beeps twice. The lock releases.

I reach in and take out the burner phone. I power it on, the little screen lighting up. Then I call him.

He answers on the second ring. “Hi, Danny,” I say.

Danny Shepherd, my first crush, my first kiss, my first boyfriend. The boy who broke my heart when he told me that he didn’t feel the same way about me, didn’t feel that way about any girl. My grandmother wasn’t surprised. Looking back, maybe I shouldn’t have been, either; after all, he loved Prince more than I did. When he came out to his parents, shortly after we broke up, they ordered him out of their house. Not knowing where else to go, he showed up on my grandmother’s doorstep, and she welcomed him in.

“He needs us,” she told me, and one look at him told me she was right. I sat beside him on the couch as he told us how his dad watched him pack a bag, his arms folded, didn’t say a word to Danny as he left.

He slept in my bed that first night. I woke to the noise of him crying at two in the morning, his side of the bed empty, and found him in the bathroom on the tile floor with a cheap razor in hand, his wrist upturned. I took it from him gently, led him back to the bedroom, held his hand until he fell asleep. My grandmother said he could stay as long as he wanted, as long as he needed. When he left a month later to move in with his cousin, he’d become like blood, like a brother. We whispered to each other when we hugged goodbye:I would / die for / you, the song we sang as kids, our fists imaginary microphones.

After Jay and I visited the island, when I realized our marriage was over, I called him. His aunt had given me his number, but it hadn’t changed. I wanted to hear a familiar voice, someone who wouldn’t sayI told you so. Someone who knew me before I became Jay’s wife. When he answered, I almost wept.

We talked for over two hours. I told him about Jay and leavingSan Francisco. He told me how he’d stayed on the island, how he’d reconciled with his parents, decided to follow his father’s footsteps in medicine, begun working as an EMT when I left for college. He’d loved it so much he never looked back; he oversaw the department now, made captain a few years ago. He’d thought about leaving, but by then his parents were aging, his mom’s health declining, and it didn’t feel like the right time. He’d never married, had just ended things with his long-term partner.

I hadn’t known it, but he’d seen us that May, when I’d come back with Jay and Harper, at dinner one night, the three of us sharing a pizza in a corner booth of a popular restaurant. He’d almost said hi, but we’d looked so engaged, with the food, with each other, that he didn’t want to interrupt. I was thinner than he remembered, my cheekbones and collarbone sharp and angular, my clothes expensive, a bracelet on my wrist that cost as much as his car. A distorted version of the girl he knew growing up.

So he’d sat at the bar, with his back to us, pint glass in hand. Which is where he was when he saw Jay and the waitress, not thirty minutes later. They were in the dim corridor leading to the bathrooms. Jay was stooped, his mouth to her ear, their bodies close. She was giggling, a pretty young thing, slender and in a short skirt, and Danny understood what he was seeing, the kind of man I was married to, why I’d lost so much weight. It broke his heart. He set his half-drunk beer on the bar and walked out.

He’d been waiting for my call ever since, waiting for me to wake up to the truth. When I did, the morning after that night, that night with the cops and the blood, that fucking night, he said he knew I would.

We’ve talked almost every day since. He’s the only one who knowseverything. When I first saw Sloane, it was his number I dialed, he who I told about my idea.

In the beginning, he indulged the fantasy, but when he realized I was serious, he tried to talk me out of it. A few days after I’d invited Sloane into our lives, he called me on the burner phone, said he couldn’t go through with it. He couldn’t help, couldn’t be a part of it. “Please,” I begged, voice cracking, “I can’t live like this. I need you.” But he hung up.

I’d thrown the phone across the room in anger. I was alone again. And I was drowning. But then he called back a few hours later, his voice quiet. “Okay,” he whispered. “I’ll do it. You and your grandmother saved me that summer. Now I’m going to save you.”Darlin’, if you want me to.

I smiled through my tears. “Thank you,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

Now, on the phone, I tell him, “Tomorrow. I’m going to do it tomorrow afternoon. Are you ready?”

When he says that he is, I tell him that I love him and I hang up. I put the phone back in the safe and relock it.

Around eight, I turn out all the lights, close my bedroom door. I want the house to be dark when they pull up, for them to think I’m in bed, asleep.

At 8:50, I see the flash of headlights, hear the crunch of wheels on the gravel driveway. I creep to the window, crouching low, and slowly lift up the bottom slat of the blinds. The headlights turn off, but no one gets out of the car.

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