Chapter Sixty-Nine Maya

September 2023, three weeks later

A radiant blue sea stretches to the horizon under a cloudless sky. Gentle waves lap at the shoreline as a seagull circles overhead.

Dani screams and runs out to sea, her polka-dot swimsuit a bright splash of pink against the water, little feet pattering across the sand. Susie runs in after her, laughing with delight.

It’s been three weeks since Cecily died, and so much has happened. But on this Sunday, we’ve escaped to the Hamptons with Daisy’s family for the weekend. Next to me, I have a small urn with Naomi’s ashes, to scatter over the ocean like she’d wanted. I don’t want to be trapped in a box like Mom. I want someone to scatter my ashes over the ocean, so I can be free.

“How are you feeling about everything?” Daisy asks. She’s drinking a glass of Chardonnay next to me as we sit with our toes in the warm sand, watching the setting sun as it dips toward the horizon over endless rolling waves. Nate, and Daisy’s husband, Scott, are throwing the Frisbee nearby, beers in hand.

“Oh, you know…” I look at Daisy, who smiles.

“I know.”

I take a long sip of my wine, thinking about the past few weeks. We haven’t talked much about Cecily. Her death is still too fresh.

Daisy leaked the video of Cecily and Matthew moving Lila’s body to Austin Levy at the Times —Austin had briefly dated Lila at Princeton, and she had been the reporter Amy was working for, the one who told her to chase the Lila Jones story, whom she referred to as AL in her notebook.

The video went viral, appearing on all the major media outlets, and the gallery’s clients—many of whom were members of Greystone—started dropping just as quickly. When questioned, the drug dealer, Kevin Francis, came clean to the police, filling in the gaps about what happened to Naomi. He’d sold Matthew the ketamine that was found in her system, who must have given it to Cecily.

Amy’s article ran in the Times. And apparently, Matthew’s crimes ran much deeper than I could have imagined: he was in deep with Cecily’s husband Theodore, who was arrested on charges of fraud and embezzlement at Hunt Investment Group, the ill-gotten gains of which Cecily had been helping him launder through her gallery for the past decade. It was all linked—Hunt Investment Group, the Hunt Gallery, the Legacy Foundation—with Matthew DuPont at the core, orchestrating the scheme like a puppeteer. Such a well-oiled machine that it kept running even after his death.

I often think about how he manipulated Cecily: he was an adult; she was barely nineteen when they met. We all admired him back then, before we knew what kind of person he was. And yet, for so many years, he was able to get away with his crimes by using the people around him. Dangling promises of financial security and career success and friendship in front of them, pushing them to find out what price they’d sell their values for. My price—a better life for my sister.

But ten years later, Cecily was old enough to make her own choices, wasn’t she? Sure, Matthew bought the ketamine, but Cecily was the one to use it. At what point were the decisions his, and at what point were they hers?

“They look so perfect, don’t they?” Daisy says, her words cutting through my thoughts. She’s watching our girls as they swim in the ocean. Dani taught herself how to duck under small waves and pop up on the other side, and Susie is trying to copy her. The sound of my daughter’s laughter brings me back to myself. To think I almost lost her, left her without a mother. I would never have heard that sound again.

“They do.” Watching them, I remember teaching Naomi the same thing.

“I’m thinking of homeschooling Susie for the rest of her life. For some reason, I’m just not feeling very trusting of teachers these days.” Daisy lets out a laugh and looks at me guiltily. “Too soon?”

A few seconds later, I look over at her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Daisy takes my hand. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m not going anywhere.” She smiles. “You’re stuck with me for life.”

We sit with our feet buried in the sand, watching the girls, until they run back and collapse into the sand nearby where they’ve built sandcastles with their fathers.

I think of the ski trip. Of Lila. It was Matthew who’d killed her, and Cecily who’d helped him cover it up, but we’d let him get away with it. Now I understand that it wasn’t the drugs that I’d dispensed, but my silence that had killed her. My silence the ripple that set off the series of events that eventually killed my sister. How often, in the world, is silence what allows horrible people to get away with their crimes?

I wish we could go back to that day—the day we found Lila’s body—and tell the police the truth about everything. Maybe if we had, he would have been in prison long ago, and Naomi would be here with me.

The guilt twists in my stomach. It’s something I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life. From my bag, I retrieve Naomi’s urn.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell Daisy.

The urn is heavy in my arms as I make my way into the ocean. The cool water grazes my ankles as I walk deeper, lifting the skirt of my dress as the cold wraps around my calves, my thighs.

After taking a deep breath, I remove the top of the urn and slowly scatter her ashes into the ocean. Now you can drift wherever you want to go.

As if in answer, a warm breeze rolls off the sea and brushes hair from my face, and I swear, for a moment I can feel Naomi’s presence, hear her voice echoing around me. I picture her floating there like she did the day she first swam in Margaret’s pool, untamed curls floating around her as she stared up at the evening sky.

I feel the warmth of another body next to me, and when I open my eyes, Nate is at my side. When he wraps his arms around me, every muscle in my body relaxes. I breathe in, inhaling his familiar scent and the briny salt air, as overhead, the sky is fading.

“Naomi was trying to do the right thing,” I say.

He pulls me closer to his chest, and the regrets quiet to a whisper as I think of my sister, how she’ll be an absence in my life forever, a wound that will never fully heal. Today, though, I’m a little closer to the person I was before. Today I’m surrounded by people who need me—Nate, Dani, Daisy—and I want to show up for them fully. Nate and I stand together in silence, gazing out at the sea, until the last orange glow melts into the horizon.

—

After the sun has set, I make my way back to the towels, and as I’m gathering our picnic basket to leave, my phone vibrates with a text. It’s a message from Margaret St. Clair. A photo of her in an apron, slicing vegetables with a sharp knife.

We did it. ;)

I squint at the screen in the dark. It takes me a second to make sense of the words. Frowning, I read it again, and that’s when I remember: the look in Margaret’s eyes after Matthew’s body had been found. The unmistakable look of satisfaction. Or was it pride? And…the missing knife…the one she’d cleaned and slid back into the knife block right in front of me.

My heart skips as I finally understand: Margaret killed Matthew. I knew it wasn’t Cecily, it couldn’t have been. And it definitely wasn’t Nate.

Unnerved, I type: But how did you —and then I delete the sentence and instead type: Thank you.

After pressing send, I wonder for a moment what it says about me, that I’m thanking her for taking a person’s life, even if it was Matthew’s. Were we contributing to this endless violence that he’d started?

“Everything okay?” Daisy asks, looking over with a mix of curiosity and apprehension.

“Yes.” Shutting off the screen, I tuck my phone into the pocket of my bag and smile at her, tucking away my questions with it. “Let’s go home.”

Dani comes over and grabs my hand as we make our way back to the car, and it reminds me of when Naomi was little, how much I wanted to protect her. Now as the grief and shame fade away, I’m filled with a sense of purpose. As I inhale deeply, my chest feels strange, and it takes a moment to realize that this space, this lightness within me, means now I can finally breathe.