Chapter Thirty

CHAPTER THIRTY

There was silence in the room after the detectives left. I had a splitting pain in my chest, as if someone had run a blade down my sternum. It was shame and heartbreak and crippling fear, and it was so strong that for a moment I couldn’t move or speak.

I turned to Rose. “I’m sorry,” I said to her, my voice cracking. I was saying it to Eddie, too, but I couldn’t look at him. Not yet. “I’m sorry that you ended up tangled in this. I’m sorry that there was so much that you didn’t know. If you want us to leave your house, we will.”

I expected her to kick us out, using the tone that said everyone she spoke to was clearly an idiot, but instead she frowned. Emotions crossed her face—anger and bitterness, mixed with exhaustion that seemed similar to the kind I felt, exhaustion with everything in life. When she spoke, her voice was uncharacteristically rough.

“I hate that man,” she said. “He ruins people.”

Quentin. She meant Quentin. For the first time, I saw Rose as a woman who had been married and widowed, who had been through gut-wrenching pain. “What did he do?” I asked, my voice low. “To Robbie? What did he do?”

“Not just him. All of them.” Rose blinked, her expression becoming hard. “The way they treated him, the grunt work they gave him, the low pay. The entire department just loved to gang up on Robbie. The names they’d call him—to his face, if they could get away with it. If they got in trouble for that, then they’d say the names behind his back, as if he didn’t know.” Her hands twisted the cotton of her thin cardigan, her small wedding ring gleaming in the dim light. “But it wasn’t just that. Robbie was good—really good. He could have done so much, solved so many cases, helped so many people. He had a perfect record. He applied for every promotion, every raise, and it was like he was throwing his energy away. Nothing Robbie did mattered—not to them. It didn’t make a difference how hard he worked, how smart he was, how kind, how he followed the rules, that he was a model cop, the kind that any force would beg for. It never mattered at all.”

I screwed up my courage and glanced at Eddie. He was still leaning against the doorframe, his arms crossed. His gaze was on Rose, listening. He wasn’t looking at me. His expression was so perfectly blank, I couldn’t read it.

“I believed in him,” Rose said. “I believed in Robbie. I knew how good he was. I was a spinster before he came along, and we were mismatched. People made fun of us behind our backs, but we didn’t care. I married a good man.” She swallowed, her eyes cold. “And then one day, we decided we’d plant cucumbers in the garden. We’d put up a trellis. Why not? Cucumbers would be nice. So we went to the backyard, and I started to dig—you know, a hole so that Robbie could put the trellis in. And he said, ‘Rose, I have a headache.’ And that was all. That was the end of everything. Those were the last words he ever said to me.” She blinked. “It turned out that one of the neighbors saw it from his upstairs window, me digging while Robbie was on the ground. So the rumor got out that I’d killed Robbie and just dumped him there while I dug his grave in the garden. Like what happened wasn’t cruel enough. Like I hadn’t had to call an ambulance and sit with him until they came. Like I didn’t wish every day that I’d lain down next to him and gone where he went.”

My God. I felt cold, my fingers numb. “Rose,” I said.

“They made it a joke,” she continued, ignoring me. “The department. After Robbie was gone, after they’d treated him like that all those years, they made a joke of how he died. And Detective Quentin, the great genius? He doesn’t care. He does nothing to stop it. He knows I didn’t kill Robbie. Everyone knows. It’s been years, and he’s never said a word. Quentin is cold. He sucks people dry, like a vampire. Robbie was a piece of dirt under his shoe—he still is. So as far as I’m concerned, he can get out of my house. Nothing he has to say is of any worth to me. If your mother killed your father, she probably had her reasons.” She looked at Eddie. “And you? You’re no serial killer. I don’t care where you went for a weekend in 1993. So, no, you don’t have to leave. I’ll leave this house in a pine box before I let Detective Quentin, or any of them, manipulate me.”

“You don’t deserve this,” I told her. “You didn’t ask for it.”

“I’m not afraid,” Rose replied. “The only thing I was ever scared of was Robbie dying, and that already happened. Nothing you bring could be worse than that.”

My stomach twisted. Rose had lost her husband in the space of a few minutes. If that happened to Eddie and me, it would end me.

The door to our bedroom closed. Eddie had gone inside without a word.

He had lied to me. Or had he? He had told me about the visions, about the nightmares, about the medication he’d been given. He hadn’t told me about the incidents that led to his discharge, and he certainly hadn’t told me about owning a gun. But had he lied? Had I?

Yes, oh, yes, I had lied. Every time I mentioned my dead, dearly departed mother, I had lied to him. That night when he cooked me spaghetti and meatballs, I’d told him that my mother and I had fled my abusive father, my mother driving as fast as she could into the night. I’d never said that before we got in the car, my mother had smashed my father’s head in while he was sleeping, then set his dead body on fire.

As recently as our wedding, when Eddie’s mother had told me how unfortunate it was that my mother couldn’t be there to see me married, I’d agreed with her. She was a nice woman with a nice family. None of them needed to know about Mom, locked up in prison in California, buried under the weight of her many crimes.

My mother had done what she had to in order to survive, sure. But then she’d done other things. She’d scammed and stolen because she liked it. And I’d kept every one of her secrets, until today.

Rose stood from her chair. The sour look was back on her face, every trace of grief or sympathy gone. “You need to make that right,” she said to me, gesturing toward the closed bedroom door. “That’s on you. I’m going to watch TV in my bedroom.” She turned and left, and I was alone.

She was right. I had to make it right with Eddie, and I would. I would make all of it right. I wouldn’t run or hide. If I wanted this life, life as April Carter, no one was going to give it to me. I had to make it myself, and I had to hold on to it so it couldn’t be taken away.

I looked at the closed bedroom door, my mind spinning. Back, back to that first night, when we’d taken a wrong turn off the interstate. Back through everything that had happened since.

The Lost Girl was keeping us here. First, she’d physically kept us from leaving town, and then she’d kept us here in other ways, by drawing us into her secrets. We were tangled up with her now in ways I couldn’t understand, and even if we left Coldlake Falls right now—if we got in our car and started driving—we wouldn’t fully escape. The Lost Girl was too powerful, and sooner or later, we’d come back.

I’d made a promise to the Lost Girl, whoever she was. I’d also told her she owed me. It was time to settle up.

I couldn’t fix everything with Eddie and build the life I wanted so badly. Not until I fixed what was happening on Atticus Line.