Page 9 of It's One of Us
She is grateful she has her own crew who’ve been working with her for years, grateful she has the jobs lined up to keep them busy, because finding new and reliable tradesmen in this environment is like casting a line into the final hour of an end-of-season salmon spawn. Everyone is looking for people, and anyone worth their salt is committed for months.
Though there are plenty of craftsmen who will do whatever Olivia Bender wants, just to have a chance at the publicity. OHB Designs is regularly featured in all the magazines around town and many national publications. There’s even been talk of a television show, but she’s resisted. She hates the idea of losing her privacy, of having to conform to others’ ideals of what her life and work should look like. Anyway, trying to have a baby is a full-time job, as she’s told Park numerous times.I’d rather be a mom than have a show.How many times has she said it? Twice? Three times? At some point, she’s going to start believing it. Though now...police on the doorstep, the phone ringing, the neighbors staring. Murder, and scandal. A child, not of her blood. What of their privacy? Their lives are being upended, and it is only going to get worse.
Maybe nowisthe time to open negotiations. Maybe she should capitalize on this.
Olivia Hutton, you are a horrible person. Human, but horrible.
Stay the course. Do your work, your way. That’s what will get you through. It always has.
Olivia has a reputation for creating elegant, livable spaces that are at once homey, personal, as minimal or maximalist as her clients want, but always done with taste and restraint. She understands space and color, knows how to take down a wall and make the room come together, knows when an exposed beam or shiplap wall or quad-level crown molding or orange velvet barstool will do the trick. With her architectural design background, she is not just sought after, she is the crowning glory for anyone who gets her on their job.
She’s worked her ass off to get to this point, and she’s loved every minute. She has nurtured her talent to create livable spaces out of thin air, lives and breathes color and texture and mixed metals and raw wood and stone. Her perfect day involves hammers and nail guns and paintbrushes and rug placements and jovial shouts in colloquial Spanish and Romanians singing lullabies as they caulk bathtubs. Why would she ruin a good thing by having a kid?
This is why you keep losing the babies, Olivia. You don’t really want them.
A shudder runs through her. That isn’t true. Of course she wants them. She wants them so badly she can pretend to herself she doesn’t. Lying to yourself is the greatest lie of all, isn’t it?
She flips on the radio to drown out her thoughts, but they are breathlessly covering Beverly Cooke. It figures that brash woman was going to be a part of Olivia’s life forever. It’s always the ones you don’t want around who stay with you ad nauseam. Beverly wanted to be Olivia’s friend. She’d tried everything—texting invites to bunko nights, sending referrals, asking for advice. Olivia was just turned off by her from the very beginning. Yes, she was being judgmental, yes, she was being spiky and unfriendly. Who cares? It was not Olivia’s responsibility to make a stranger trying to force her way into her life feel better. Therapy has given her permission to take what she needs from life, from the people around her, and leave the rest. She is not going to apologize for simply not liking the woman.
But Beverly is dead, and Olivia feels bad about this, she truly does. As aggravating as the woman was, Olivia didn’t want her to die. Not really. Not like that. Raped, murdered, and submerged in the lake? It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.
If Park’s child has done this, what does that mean? What does that say about Park?
The arrow-to-the-heart thought leaves her breathless again.Will she ever not feel the betrayal at the words?Park has a child. A son. At least one son. Who knows, maybe there’s more.
Now there was a nightmarish thought.
And if her handsome, loving, giving husband could create a child who grew up to be a killer? She needs to rethink everything. She knows there’s a difference between nature and nurture, between passing on homicidal genes and creating monsters out of neglect and abuse, but plenty of kids are abused and don’t kill things. Don’t kill people. Maybe they’re all just seething like she is. Maybe they’re all just so sad. But they don’t go through with it. They don’t act on their whims.
Can she have children with a man who’s taken part in creating a monster?
Her cell rings, the caller ID popping up on the screen in the car. She expects it to be Park, but it’s Lindsey. Park’s little sister is his polar opposite and has been Olivia’s best friend since they were kids. She debates letting it go to voice mail in case Park has reached out to her, but no, there’s been no time. Park would call his wife first, not his sister.
“Hey, Linds.”
“Hey, yourself. You will never believe what I just heard.”
Olivia tenses. It’s already out there, it’s too late to contain it. Their lives, upended, ruined. “What did you hear?”
“Perry is coming home.”
4
THE PAST
Nashville,Tennessee
April 1999
“He’s here, he’s here. Oh my God, wait until you see him, he’s gorgeous.”
Olivia’s mother drops the curtain and flits around her bedroom like a demented butterfly. Her father is downstairs, waiting with the camera for Olivia to make her grand entrance.
“And so are you, my darling girl. You two will be the talk of prom.”
Olivia smiles, swallows back her nerves, and gives her nose one last sweep with the powder brush. A few grains fall onto the strapless bustline of the pale chrysanthemum organza, and she carefully brushes them away. Prom. Rite of passage. She will be going through many rites of passage tonight. First corsage. First black-tie event. First time.
It’s been planned for weeks. They have a hotel room—ostensibly, the whole crowd is going to be there, but they’ve managed a suite with an adjoining bedroom, so they’ll be able to sneak off for privacy once people start passing out. She’s not nervous to lose her virginity, not to him. They’re going to be together forever, she knows this in her heart. They have a tie that will see them through everything, a link that’s been in place since the day they met. The day the Benders moved to town, and she saw the boys across the street for the first time, she’d felt it, that zing, an invisible thread that crossed the street and tied her to him. He’d seen her lingering on the porch, threw up a hand in a jaunty wave, already so comfortable with his new surroundings. Then he punched his brother in the arm—she knew it was his brother, they looked alike, not exactly, but they were similar in the ways that counted—and the other boy made brief eye contact with her, then looked shyly away. The girl, younger, pretty, had come tearing around from the side yard screaming about a rope swing, and the three of them had disappeared through the hedge without a word. But the moment was ossified for her, clear as amber in her mind’s eye.
