Page 73 of The Missing Half

“And tell them what?” she says. “That you hit her in the head with a hammer? And now she’s dead?”

“B-but,” I stammer, “she was going to kill you. That’s self-defense, isn’t it? I mean, notself-defense, but something.”

Slowly, Kasey stands up. “Nic, what she said is true. The car crash may have been an accident, but Jules died that night, and I covered it up.”

Everything inside me sinks. Even in the face of all Jenna’s evidence, I’d been clinging to the hope that she’d gotten something wrong, that Kasey hadn’t killed Jules that night after all. But with my sister’s words, the last of that hope fades.

“So, if we call the police,” Kasey continues, “I go to jail for a very long time. And”—she nods at Jenna’s body—“so do you.”

I stare at the blood-soaked towel by Jenna’s head, and the word that has been crowding at the edge of my consciousness since Iswung the hammer mere minutes ago finally crashes through:murderer.Jenna is dead, and I killed her. I gulp in a breath, then another. My hands start to tingle. Blackness swoops into my vision.

“Hey,” Kasey says, and her voice is softer now. Through the haze of my confusion and distress, it reminds me of our childhood, when I’d crawl into bed with her after a nightmare and she’d murmur to me, the sleepy words comforting and warm like honey. “You saved my life tonight. That woman was going to kill me.”

But she wasn’tthat woman,I think. She was Jenna. And I loved her.

I must’ve voiced this out loud, because Kasey says again, “She was going to kill me.”

She’s right, isn’t she? Hadn’t I waited until Jenna cocked the gun? And if faced with the same choice now, between Jenna and Kasey, wouldn’t I choose the same thing? The answer feels so deeply ingrained in me, articulating it is like trying to describe what it feels like to breathe: Jenna may have become like a sister to me, but Kasey is blood, and I will always choose her. Again and again and again.

Still, I am a killer now. For the rest of my life, Jenna will be dead and I will be the one who murdered her. It is depraved what I have done, evil. It will twist around my DNA and change me from the inside out. The thought makes me start to hyperventilate again.

“Nic,” Kasey says. “I need you to hold it together. You can react to all of this later, but right now I need you to trust me and do what I say.”

I stare into my sister’s eyes, feeling as if I’m standing on the edge of a great precipice. If I take one step forward, I’ll go into free-fall, with God knows what waiting for me at the bottom. But this is my sister. And right now, she needs me.

“Okay,” I say. “What do I do?”

Chapter Forty-three

I get the tarp from the back of Jenna’s truck while Kasey cleans up the rest of the blood, then together we move the body. Jenna is far heavier in death than I ever could have expected, and Kasey and I have to wedge our arms beneath her torso to flip her over onto the tarp, her hands falling onto it with fleshy thuds. I swing violently from sorrow to disgust and then back again.

Slowly, we heave her body down the stairs of the garage apartment, across the lawn, and into the truck bed. I climb into shotgun and Kasey slides into the driver’s seat, using the key she found in the back pocket of Jenna’s jeans to turn on the engine.

As we pull out of the yard, I study my sister’s face. What I did to Jenna is looming at the edge of my mind like a storm on the horizon, but for now, I hold on to the distraction that is Kasey. For years, I tried to numb the pain of losing her with alcohol, but it never came close to the feeling of being in her presence. I drink everything in: her hands, her fingernails, the curve of her ear, the soft, peachy, all-but-invisible hair on her cheek. She’s wearing jewelry I’ve never seen before, and something about this makes me ache. Her arms are slimmer than they were in college, more muscular too.

There are so many questions I need to ask her, but before I canverbalize any of them, she says, “How do you know Jenna Connor? She said you were going through the stuff in our car together? And how did she find me after all this time? How didyouget here?”

All of that feels like so long ago now. I quickly tell her the basics, how Jenna and I teamed up to look into her and Jules’s disappearances, how Jenna, I assume, pieced bits of information together to find her, how I jumped in the back of Jenna’s truck when I saw the gun in her bag. “I didn’t know it was you she was coming to kill,” I say. “I didn’t even know you were alive. I can’t believe you’re alive.”

My voice is thick with incredulity and relief and gratitude, but beneath is a thread of anger. Kasey’s been alive this whole time, and she never once reached out. She looks over at me, and I can tell she knows exactly what I’m feeling.

“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

“But I don’t understand.” The conversation I overheard between her and Jenna earlier had major gaps, and I’m growing more and more impatient for her to fill them in. “What happened that night after…after you hit Jules with the car? What did you do?”

Kasey shoots me a sideways look I can’t read. “What Jenna said was true,” she says. “I hid Jules’s body. I was going to call 9-1-1—I was—but it was clear she was dead. There was no chance of saving her. If I called the police…well, everything would’ve been ruined, and for what? A split-second freak accident.”

Beyond my window, the black sky blurs with the dark wash of trees. None of this is what I imagined. This whole time, Jenna and I were looking for a depraved man, someone evil and sociopathic, and it turns out the person we should have been looking for—the person responsible—was my sister. “So, you hid her body and staged the car so it would look like she’d been taken.”

Kasey nods.

“And then what?” I ask, but suddenly I realize I already know the answer. If Kasey faked Jules’s abduction, it means she faked her own too. The truth has been staring me in the face since I learned about the accident earlier, but until this moment I’d been too addled by shock to see it.

“Even after hiding the body,” Kasey says, “I thought it could stilllook like a hit-and-run, and I was scared it would come back to me. We lived in such a small place, I didn’t think it would take much for the police to learn about the damage to our car and link it to Jules. Buttwomissing girls—that looks like something else entirely. I thought if I could make the circumstances of our disappearances look similar enough, the police would start looking for some guy. Instead of a reckless driver, they’d be looking for a kidnapper, a killer.”

Tears are spilling onto my cheeks. Kasey wasn’t taken from me. She left. “What the fuck?” I choke out. “How could you just leave like that?”

“I didn’t want to, Nic,” she says. “I promise. It was the only thing I could think to do.”

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