Page 106 of Serial Killer Games

I look her in the eyes, finally. She smiles. “It’s going to be okay.” She consults her watch. “I have to go soon.”

“Where?” I ask.

Her face is cheerful again, and it’s not all forced. “I’m babysitting Cat. I offered. Dodi has to wrap up that school assignment.”As you know, of course,her tone suggests. “Cat and I are going to give that horrible white monster a bath.”

She pulls out her phone and turns on the data, all her message notifications and missed phone calls populating the screen.Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. She swipes it all away, taps out a text to Dodi, and sends it. She already has her in her contacts.

She squeezes my hands one last time, but I hold on when she tries to pull away. She smiles at me, eyes misty.

“I’m glad we got to have this Christmas together. I think you should keep the decorations here. No point in taking them back. Where would I keep them?” And then she drops her bombshell. “I’ve decided to leave him.” She ducks and pecks me quickly on the cheek before she leaves.

Alone in the kitchen, I stare at the obituary photo of the handsome man with the glasses, the man my mother named me after. Maybe because that’s who she wished my father was. I look around the room, at all the things, all the clues about who I am and where I come from, and none of it connects to me after all. I spot two empty water glasses on the counter, one of them with Dodi’s bright red lipstick on the rim, and it calls something to mind. The water glasses Bill wouldn’t let me wash.

I find Bill on the collapsed old velvet sofa Dodi and I slepton the other night. He grips the top of his cane with both hands and rests his chin on top of them, gazing at the tree.

“It’s been a while since you’ve had a Christmas tree,” I surmise.

“Longer than you think,” he says humorously. “I’m Jewish.”

I notice it in his hand, the envelope from the lab that came in the mail before I left for Laura’s Christmas lunch. He sees me looking at it. He touches the cushion next to him, and I sit. Across from us, Dodi’s skeleton slouches in his armchair, grinning toothily. We’re silent, all three of us.

“There’s been…” He trails off, and starts over. “I did a DNA test…” He falters again.

There’s a hollow in my chest, deep and bottomless. If you stuck a hand inside, you’d lose your watch. My sentence has been commuted, but at the cost of a kind-faced father who loved my mother; a wise old grandfather, sardonic and gruff; and the gentlest, kindest aunt anyone ever had. None of them belong to me. I’m no one to any of them. I’m a stray. All I got out of this was Andrew, the one person on this planet I would happily fire into the sun, and if Laura is leaving him, she won’t be around to sweeten the bargain.

I don’t know how I’ll ever get up from this sofa.

Bill clears his throat, opens his mouth, and then abruptly folds the envelope in half and tucks it into the pocket of his robe. “Just so you know, I’ve got a liver enzyme problem,” he says at last. He clears his throat and frowns. “You’ll have to watch out when you get older, since it runs in the family.”

He avoids my eye as I stare at him. I can’t think why he’s lying to me.Don’t you know I thought I was dying?He didn’t. I told him the neurologist said I was in the clear. He has no idea how this misunderstanding has affected me.

“I have a great-granddaughter,” he says suddenly, and Istart. He spent two weeks telling me stories about all the dead, broken-off branches on our—hisfamily tree. There is no great-granddaughter.

“Two weeks ago I had no one,” Bill continues, “and now I have a great-granddaughter. And a grandson and a granddaughter-in-law—are you married? I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to sound like some old idiot. It’s fine to not be married.”

It’s the first time he’s uttered the word “grandson.” I don’t know what to say to any of this, so I just say, “We’re married.”

“And Laura?”

“She’s—” I swallow, mind whirling. “She’s not related to me by blood, but she’s always been like an aunt.”

“You don’t need to be related by blood to be family,” Bill argues gallantly on Laura’s behalf.

“Cat isn’t related to me by blood, either,” I say numbly. “She’s Dodi’s daughter, by her first husband.”

“And she’s ours now.”

Ours. Bill’s and mine. How has that letter from the lab not burst into flames in his pocket already?

“You don’t need blood relation to justify a family,” Bill repeats. He hasn’t looked me in the eye this whole time. We’re silent for a beat.

“This is a big house,” he says unexpectedly. “My granddaughter-in-law seemed to like it. That little waif seemed to like it, too.” He lets it hang there.

I can’t make any sense of this.

“And there’s that school, just down the street.”

The weird, artsy little private school, the sort of place that would probably let Cat bring mutilated Barbies for show-and-tell. I don’t follow.

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