Chapter 39

William's family threw a party to celebrate his release. He bought me a new dress for the occasion that cost more than the one that I wore to prom.

"My family can be intense," he said.

We went out to eat at an upscale chain restaurant at the outlet mall.

"I've already met your family," I confessed over a plate of seared salmon.

William frowned.

"At the trial. It wasn't always pleasant for me there. See, there were some girls."

I tried to explain how I was harassed without directly referencing any of the murdered women, whose names made William clam up.

"Your father, he approached me, said that he appreciated my support."

"I'm sorry that happened to you," William said.

I wasn't sure if he was referring to the girls or his father. I didn't tell him about what had happened with Bentley. I read once that people who cheated confessed to their partners not because it was the right thing to do but because it was a way of assuaging their own guilt. Though it was true that I felt guilty, I was more worried about what William would do if he found out. I also didn't mention what Bentley had said about his mother being convinced that I was hitting on his father. He didn't need to know the enthusiasm with which I'd followed Mark Thompson around.

"I haven't told them about our engagement yet. I'm planning on telling them at the party."

I tried to smile with my eyes.

"I can't wait," I said.

I hadn't told my parents about the engagement either. I texted my mother and told her that I'd found a "work opportunity" in Georgia and that I would update her when I got the chance. Somehow, I never found the right moment. I never pictured that telling my parents about my engagement would also involve a discussion about acquitted serial killers and I was unwilling to puncture my vision of their joy just yet.

I was nervous about the party. Having previously met Cindy Thompson, I knew that there was nothing that I could wear that would impress her. I didn't look like her or Virginia or Anna Leigh, women raised within a tradition that taught them they needed to look a certain way. Theoretically, I railed against such conventions. Women, I thought, should be able to look however they wanted and still be considered to be worthy of love. That didn't stop me from judging myself and my inability to conform.

I made an appointment at a salon to get my hair and nails done.

"I want to impress my future mother-in-law," I told the stylist, failing to mention that my future mother-in-law was William Thompson's mother.

My natural hair color was a medium brown with the errant gray that was creeping in faster than seemed possible. I dyed it a honey blond, the lightest it had ever been.

"I want something like this," I said, showing the stylist a photo of Anna Leigh that was zoomed in so closely that it was impossible to identify it as her.

I recognized that it was weird to dye my hair the same color as a murdered woman's. It wasn't that I wanted to be Anna Leigh—though I was jealous of her law degree, family money, and renowned beauty—but rather that I genuinely liked her hair. After all, I'd spent hours upon hours staring at her picture, to the point that I sometimes forgot that we had never actually met while she was alive. It wasn't dissimilar from seeing the face of a celebrity again and again and bringing their picture to the salon.

"I love your hair. You look amazing," William said.

I didn't look as good as I wanted to, but I looked okay.

I could tell that William was nervous. He sprayed on too much cologne and kept apologizing for things that hadn't happened yet.

"I'm sorry for how they are," he said.

Mark and Cindy Thompson didn't live in a house like everyone else. Instead, they lived on an estate, a term that I didn't understand until William's car stopped in front of an electric gate and we drove up a winding driveway lined with trees. Geographically, the house wasn't isolated, a mere fifteen minutes from our own home, but structurally it was a fortress. William put his hand over mine as he steered. I wasn't sure which one of us he was trying to comfort.

The house itself was a cream-colored monstrosity. The front door was actually two conjoined doors and wide porches flanked either side of the house. The size of the house made me nostalgic for my own childhood home and its tiny bedrooms and meager two bathrooms. There was such a thing as too much space.

William handed the keys off to the valet driver like we were at a fancy restaurant. I looked down at my outfit and hoped that I wasn't underdressed.

If the Thompson family status had dropped a notch since William was accused of being a serial killer, the number of people at the party didn't show it. I walked in expecting a crowd similar to that of the gathering I had attended in Atlanta, the one where Bentley and I ended up splintering off in order to have a private chat. Some of those same people were potentially in attendance, but it was difficult to tell with the crowd.

Everyone was delighted to see William. No one seemed concerned that there was an acquitted serial killer in their midst.

"William!" they exclaimed. "So great to see you! I always knew you were innocent!"

William was gracious even as he gritted his teeth. He was nothing if not well trained in social niceties.

We wound our way through the house. William's parents were baroque in their decorating sensibilities, with everything possible gilded and heavily ornamented. The other guests barely seemed to notice me.

"This is Hannah," William said when people glanced my way, without giving me a qualifier. It felt a little like he was ashamed of me, though I knew that he was waiting to make the announcement about our engagement.

Mark and Cindy Thompson were holding court in a formal living room. Mark made a joke that I couldn't hear and all the men around him laughed. Cindy sparkled in a blue sequined dress that she somehow managed to pull off. I hadn't seen their full power at the trial, I realized.

"William," Cindy said and kissed her younger son on the cheek.

She didn't acknowledge me until Mark came up and hugged me, his touch unexpected.

"Why didn't you mention that you and my son were so close?" he said. "I wish we could've gotten to know each other better."

"So nice to see you, Hannah," Cindy said, giving me a smile that was equivalent to an early spring thaw in Minnesota. She still didn't like me, but I could sense something beyond disdain under the surface. If William allowed me to live for long enough, it was possible that she would finally accept me in her world.

I started to talk, but Mark interrupted me to greet William.

"My son is finally home," he said.

Mark directed his attention back at me.

"Why don't you have a drink? We need to get you a drink."

A server with a tray appeared. It was the only house party that I'd ever been to that was big enough to require actual servers versus a dingy little home bar setup in the kitchen.

"I'll just take a pinot grigio," I said.

I suspected that I had more in common with the servers who wandered around the room than I did with any of the actual guests. They probably couldn't wait to go home and tell all their friends that they worked at a party held for William Thompson.

My eyes darted around the room. Both William and Bentley had told me so much about their childhoods that it was strange to be standing in the space where they had spent their youth. It didn't look like a place where there had ever been children present, each room more formal than the last. How did a person grow up in such a house and become a killer? Alternatively, how did a person grow up in such a house and not become a killer?

If Bentley and Virginia were at the party, they were nowhere to be seen. As anxious as I was about the possibility of William finding out what had happened between Bentley and me, I almost wished they were there for the comfort of familiar faces. William kept getting roped into conversations about what it was like to finally be free, conversations that were peppered with jokes about the poor conditions of the prison system.

"It wasn't really like that. I spent a lot of time by myself. I wrote a lot of letters," William said with a glance in my direction.

I excused myself to use the bathroom, grabbing canapés off passing trays of food as I went. The forum had been dying to search the Thompson family estate for months and I wasn't going to let the opportunity pass me by. I wanted to see if I could find more items connecting William to the women, beyond what I'd found in the desk in his office. Though I didn't think that Mark had a role in killing the women, there was something suspicious about him. I still didn't know why he'd driven to all those sites linked to the women on the day that I trailed him. If I'd learned anything, it was that the Thompson family was always more complicated than they appeared to be on the surface.

Walking through the Thompson mansion was like walking through the board game of Clue. I got lost trying to find my way back to the front of the house and briefly wandered into the kitchen, where there was a host of catering staff prepping more platters.

"Excuse me," I said.

That was when I noticed the second set of stairs at the back of the room.

There was a grand staircase in the front of the house, the kind where girls used to line up on prom night and show off their dresses. The staircase in the kitchen was narrow and unadorned, meant as a passageway for staff to deliver things to the upper floors without being seen. The wealthy's desire to hide their help was advantageous to me in that circumstance because it meant that I could explore the rest of the house without the watchful eyes of the party guests.

The second floor was a long hallway of closed doors. Hanging on the wall in between the doors were portraits of old white men who I assumed were members of the Thompson family. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. A full-blown murder room would clash with the décor of the rest of the house, but it seemed like the kind of place where it was possible to find an errant dead body or a sick child locked behind one of the doors. That was the problem with historical homes. They were beautiful and also desperately haunted.

I hesitated before the first door. I tried to remember the story of Bluebeard. Something about a woman going into a room that she wasn't supposed to and finding the corpses of those who had come before her, but I couldn't fully recall how it went.

I opened the first door to discover a bland guest room, not unlike the one that William and I had in our own home, though the furnishings were more ornate. No corpses at all. I paused in the second room, which turned out to be a bathroom, in order to empty my bladder. Even the soap next to the sink felt expensive.

When I opened the third door, I found the bedroom of a teenage boy. The preserved childhood bedroom was the first and only similarity I'd witnessed between the Thompson mansion and the three-bedroom home that I grew up in, where the posters from my teenage years still hung on the wall. Because there was no financial incentive for the Thompsons to keep their grown children's rooms the same, I gathered that it was a rare sentimental impulse. To destroy the teenage bedroom was to destroy a conception of one's own children, to acknowledge that they were always and forever adults.

I walked inside, closing the door behind me. I wasn't sure if the room belonged to Bentley or William. There was a poster on the wall of a professional football player and a blue flannel comforter on the bed. A large desk was placed before the window with a view of the front yard where guests still streamed through the entrance. On the desk was a signed baseball in a glass case and a framed picture that I picked up for closer examination.

I gasped. In the picture there were two boys, presumably Bentley and William, with blood smeared across their faces. Upon second glance, I realized that they were standing next to a dead deer and the photograph was a memento of a hunting trip. The presence of the deer only made me feel slightly better, though I knew that Mark Thompson was an avid hunter.

I opened the desk drawers. Unlike the neat desk in William's office in our home, the contents were messy. Pens that had long since dried up, old school notebooks and assignment sheets. All of the ephemera that was saved for no reason at all. A red notebook with William and Math scrolled across the top let me know that I was, in fact, in William's room. There was something reassuring about knowing that William had once been messy, an indication that his neatness was a learned trait rather than ingrained psychopathy.

I riffled through the papers, looking for something that said "future killer" or anything that seemed like it might be related to the women, like the things he kept in his office at home. The only thing of note that I found was a series of handwritten notes with girly handwriting. They looked so much like the letters that William kept in the box in his closet that I did a double take before realizing that they were the kind of notes that kids passed to one another in school or slipped between the slats of a locker rather than things that women sent to a man imprisoned for murder. I gathered the notes together and slipped them into the clutch I'd brought with me to the party. Surely, no one would miss something that had been gathering dust for all those years.

Too much time had passed. I slipped out of the bedroom, back down the stairs, and back into the party. The crowd was now gathered in the formal living room, their attention on Mark Thompson, who held a champagne flute in the air. William stood next to him, looking less pleased with the situation than his father. I hastily grabbed a glass of champagne from a server to join the people around me.

"This wasn't just a trial for William," Mark said. "This was a trial for all of us. I have never been more grateful for God and the community that we have. We never would've made it through without you. Cheers to the future."

"Cheers" echoed through the crowd as glasses tinkled against one another.

Mark looked surprised when William raised his glass a second time and started to speak.

"Thank you to my family, blood and not. As my father said, this has been a difficult time for all of us. However, there was a bright spot in the darkness."

Oh god. When William had said that he intended to tell his parents about the engagement, I thought he meant in private. As he continued, I realized that he was going to tell the entire crowd of people.

"It was through these traumatic times that I met the love of my life, Hannah. I'm so excited to announce that upon my release, I asked her to marry me."

William's eyes searched for mine and I made my way to the front of the room through the claps and cheers of the crowd. Mark and Cindy clapped along with their guests, but there was something about their enthusiasm that felt fake. I wanted to hide, to run back up the stairs and return to William's bedroom.

"Cheers, honey," William said, and we clinked our glasses together. He'd never called me "honey" before, never mind in front of a crowd of people. The word was sticky, uncomfortable.

"Cheers," I said. I could feel the stares of their crowd as they analyzed what type of woman would fall in love with an accused serial killer and the inverse of it—what type of woman could make a serial killer fall in love with her.

I didn't know whether my mouth had positioned itself into a smile or a grimace.

Bentley was the first member of the Thompson family to congratulate us. He must've arrived while I was rooting around upstairs.

"Congratulations, brother. I can't wait to get to know your bride," he said and winked at me. I took the wink as a sign that he had no plans to tell William what had happened between the two of us at the trial.

"I look forward to getting to know you as well," I said too formally.

"It'll be good," Virginia said, "to have another woman in the family." It was the most that she'd ever acknowledged me.

"I wish you'd told us earlier," Cindy said to William. Despite all the Botox, her face was still capable of frowning.

"I'm telling you now," he said.

She pulled at my left hand without warning.

"Hannah doesn't have a ring."

Cindy looked at me like I was the one to blame for that absence.

"I still need to get her one," William replied. "I was a little busy up until recently."

"Well, I'm thrilled. Who would've thought that this is how William would meet the love of his life?" Mark said.

"I could've guessed," Bentley said, and we all laughed like it was a funny joke.

The sensation of the air around me told me that no one in the Thompson family was as happy as they claimed to be.

I spent the rest of the party being approached by guests who offered their congratulations and then asked intrusive questions about my life.

"Where are you from?"

"How did you and William meet?"

"What do you do for work?"

I did my best to answer even as I was overwhelmed by all the names and faces. I was grateful when William stepped in for me.

"Hannah is a novelist and she writes beautiful letters," he said. The party guests seemed to think that "novelist" was my real career. For the most part, they kept their comments about how we met to themselves, though a few people let things slip.

"You must be an amazing writer if you could land this man through a few letters. I remember high school. All the girls were after him."

"At least William knows that you'll always be loyal if you were willing to stick by his side through all of this."

"When did you know that you loved him?"

I didn't tell them that I'd loved William since the first time I saw Anna Leigh's face.

"Oh, you know, William's so smart and supportive. He really wants me to follow my dreams," I said instead.

The notes I discovered in William's childhood bedroom called to me from my handbag, but since I'd found them, I'd become a known entity and it was impossible to hide. Everyone talked to me like we'd been best friends for years. I noticed that most of the party guests were Mark and Cindy's age. There were few people under fifty and of that demographic, most of them seemed to be related to one of the older guests at the party. The only person I recognized outside of the Thompson family was Alexis, whom I'd first seen having coffee with Mark and again when she'd served as a character witness for William at the trial. It was clear from the way that she slid from one conversation to the next that this crowd of people was familiar to her. Seeing her, I could only think about how much happier Cindy would be if William were engaged to a woman like her instead of me.

Bentley found me in a rare moment of peace that I was using to stuff as many canapés in my mouth as possible. I'd been taking sips of wine to break awkward silences all evening, which resulted in a large consumption of wine on a very empty stomach.

"It's good to see you again, Hannah," he said.

We hadn't had a real conversation beyond the required pleasantries since our kiss. I swallowed the food in my mouth.

"It's good to see you too," I replied.

"How are things going?"

"Great. I'm engaged. Writing a novel. You know."

My plate was empty and I looked around desperately for another server; all of them seemed to have disappeared.

"Yes, my brother mentioned. Congratulations. We're going to be family."

"You're not going to tell him, are you? About what happened?"

Bentley smiled at me. It was the dazzling smile of a man who knew how good-looking he was.

"I don't even know what you're talking about," he said.

It took me a moment to realize that he was agreeing with me rather than that he had actually forgotten our kiss. I hoped that he liked my dress.

"Good," I said, and was grateful when William appeared at my side.

"My dad's business partners want to meet you," he said, placing his arm around my waist as he pulled me away.

I couldn't tell if there was weird energy in the air between them or if it was my own projection.

I approached Alexis Hutchington before the end of the party when William's father pulled him into another room to talk with some older men who were indistinguishable from one another. I wanted to gauge her intentions toward William. She'd claimed that their relationship was platonic, but as someone who had unexpectedly fallen in love with him, I couldn't quite believe that was the whole truth. I'd had my eye on her throughout the evening. From a distance, she looked as beautiful as ever, but up close she looked a little ragged, her makeup smudged around the edges like she'd been crying. Her breath carried with it a heavy smell of liquor and I gathered that she was quite drunk.

"Alexis? I'm Hannah," I introduced myself.

"Ah, yes, the new fiancée," she said, like I was the butt of a joke that hadn't been told yet.

I meant to slide into the conversation. Start with some pleasantries about the food or the expensive-looking jewelry that dangled from her ears. Instead, I asked her if she was in love with William, a question that made her burst into laughter.

"You're not the first person to ask me that. Our parents tried to set us up for years."

"So?" I pressed. "Did you ever date?"

Alexis squinted at me like she was trying to measure my soul and then glanced around the room in the way of a woman who was about to utter a secret.

"At the risk of perjuring myself, there was a time a few years back when something almost happened between us. We went on a couple of dates, or at least I thought they were dates," she said reluctantly. It was unclear whether her hesitation was due to contradicting her testimony or if she was embarrassed about having misconstrued the situation.

"There was one night that I thought we were going to hook up," she continued. "But when we got back to his apartment, William started crying. He told me that he wasn't good enough to be with me. When I asked him what he meant, he said that he was worried that I would get hurt. He told me that he couldn't be with me because he thought he was going to cause me harm."

She looked down at the floor, her pretty face unable to meet my gaze.

"Why didn't you say something during the trial?" I asked. I wanted to know more, for Alexis to paint me a picture of William's face as he cried.

"I didn't think it was going to matter. I thought he was going to be convicted. The lawyers, they coached me. Told me what to say. I guess it didn't really seem like a lie until he got off. I only testified because my parents wanted me to. They don't know about what happened between William and me. As far as they know, William is the nice boy that they watched grow up who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Mark, he practically begged me. I've never seen him act that way before."

The meeting I'd witnessed in the coffee shop suddenly became clear to me. For weeks I'd wondered what Mark had said to Alexis and now I knew. I need you. Our family needs you. Think about all the good times that we've shared. Do you really want that to be over? There was something satisfying in knowing that I'd seen Mark Thompson beg.

Alexis stopped talking when William and Mark reappeared in the living room. Later, I would smell cigar smoke on William's suit jacket. That was who these men were, the type of people who disappeared into spaces absent of women in order to smoke expensive imports.

"Thank you for being honest with me," I said and squeezed her hand.

Alexis walked away before William could say anything, heading straight to the bar that was set up in the corner.

Though I hadn't learned anything that definitively proved William's guilt, the conversation with Alexis made the party worth it, even as I fought through discomfort in the rest of the conversations with the Thompson family acquaintances. There had been a burgeoning romance between Alexis and William, a seemingly perfect couple, and he'd ended it over fear of his own actions. Something must've shifted since then that allowed him to get into a relationship with me. Either he trusted himself more or he'd decided to give in to his impulses, the ones that he had warned Alexis about the night that they almost hooked up.

"I'm going to get a ring," William murmured into my ear when we were finally back home in bed. "Any ring that you want. Do you like diamonds? I'll get you a big diamond."

I flexed my fingers and pretended to moan as William's own fingers flicked across my nipples.

I didn't tell him that what I wanted most was immaterial. He could fill my fingers with precious gems and none of them would be worth as much as the truth about what had happened to the murdered women, a gift less like a ring around my finger and more like a rope around my neck.