Chapter Nine
CHAPTER NINE
My heart gallops. It’s been over an hour since police arrived, but the part of me that’s Daphne is thrashing as if I’ve only just stumbled across Morgan’s body.
His body .
A sob shakes out of me. It breaks my still-stunned silence, draws the attention of an officer, the one standing on Morgan’s walkway, tasked with watching me.
His colleagues have been filing in and out, some in uniform, others in plain clothes. There’s an ambulance in the driveway, police cruisers flashing blue and red against the dark, the rhythm in sync with the speed of my heart.
“Sorry about that, Ms. Lachlan.”
The detective reappears, having stepped inside at someone’s request to “take a look at this.” Now he towers above me—because I can’t stand up; I’m stuck on Morgan’s front steps, leaning against a column, unsure how to lift my head to meet the detective’s eyes.
He’s asking me questions again. Each one crouches in my ears, stalled on its way to my brain. My gaze sinks from his khaki-covered knees to his scuffed-up shoes to my hands in my lap—which is when I register that I’m still clutching my phone, that I haven’t set it down since I stood in the kitchen, dialing 911 for the first time in my life.
Then there are the splotches on my arm, dried from red to rust, their source now blisteringly clear beneath the porch light. Sickle didn’t cut himself during his escape into the yard; he’d walked through Morgan’s—
“Did the cat get out?” I ask. As I finally look up at him, the detective’s face comes into focus. Brown eyes. Heavy brows. Neatly trimmed beard. Hair swooped back on top of his head. There’s something vaguely familiar about him, like he could be a sharpened, leaner version of someone from my high school. I struggle to recall the name he gave me when he first arrived: Detective Jackson Dean. It doesn’t ring a bell.
“The cat?” he asks.
“The door’s been open, everyone going in and out. There’s an orange cat. Sickle. He’s an indoor cat. He shouldn’t get out, he—”
I stop speaking, my throat solidifying to stone. What’s going to happen to him? I picture him in a crowded shelter, stuffed into a hard cage, confused where all the softness has gone: stroking hands, crocheted hats. It’s almost enough to make me rush back into the house, find him myself, and claim him.
“The cat’s fine,” Jackson says—and I’m not sure why I do that, think of him as Jackson instead of Detective Dean, like maybe I did know him at some point in my life and my mind is too shell-shocked to place him. “Please, Ms. Lachlan. I know this is difficult, but I need you to answer some questions so we can determine what happened tonight. Can you tell me why you were here?”
My gaze falls to my arm again, the rust I could flake off with my nail if I dared. I’m not sure what to tell this man. The truth is too complicated, and it feels like there are too many truths at once.
I keep it simple: “We’d been talking recently. He wanted to meet up.”
He writes something in a notebook I only now notice he’s holding. He’s left-handed, like Morgan was; I remember photos of him from Instagram, signing books at an event.
“So he’d invited you over?” Jackson asks.
I stare at a crack in the concrete, my heartbeat becoming erratic. Less a gallop than a limp. “It was sort of… an open invitation. But I didn’t tell him ahead of time I was coming.”
There’s a pause, and I don’t know if Jackson’s watching me or writing down my answer. I can’t look away from the crack—the same length of my scar, the same line with a curve so subtle it’s almost straight. For a second, I wonder if there’s something of Daphne down there, too, buried beneath the walkway.
“I see,” he says. “And what did you do when you arrived?”
“I was going to ring the bell, but the door was ajar. I knocked, called out to him, but then his cat darted out, and I went after him.”
“Him as in…?” He leaves a blank for me to fill.
“The cat. Sickle. I caught him, under those shrubs, and I thought he was bleeding, so I went to bring him inside, clean him up—”
“And so you entered the house?”
“I had to get the cat inside.” How do I explain my certainty that Morgan would have been fine with it? He adores Sickle. Poses with him on Instagram in matching sunglasses. If Bumper fled my parents’ house, they wouldn’t care if it was an escaped convict who brought him back, so long as someone did. “I thought he was hurt. But he jumped out of my arms, and when I tried to follow him, he—he was there. On the kitchen floor.”
“He as in…?”
“Morgan. With the knife and—and all the…” I shut my eyes, try not to see that cloak of blood. My throat is no longer a stone; it’s a straw that’s close to closing.
“So between the time you arrived and when you say you found his body, you never spoke to Mr. Thorne?”
I shake my head. “How could I have?”
“Did you move his body in any way?”
“No. I didn’t touch him.”
“When you first arrived this evening, did you notice anyone else in the area? Anyone at all. A car on the street. Someone walking by. Even if just a neighbor.”
“No. I didn’t see anyone.”
The street had been empty. I remember that. As if conspiring to keep me and Morgan alone.
“What about those scratches?” Jackson asks, wagging his pen at my arm. “They look fresh.”
“They’re from Sickle. Or the shrubs. I’m not sure which.”
“But you didn’t have them when you first arrived?”
“No.”
He hums an acknowledgment before scribbling on his pad. “Would you be willing to—”
“Detective.”
Jackson’s head snaps up at the voice in the doorway behind me. I glance toward it, find an officer with gloves on her hands, plastic coverings on her feet. She doesn’t say anything else, but by the time I turn back to Jackson, he’s rushing past me up the steps.
“Excuse me another moment, Ms. Lachlan,” he says on the way.
The officer on the walkway—the watching one—slides back into view. I ignore him, slump against the column again, that crack on the concrete blurring before me. My heart has slowed and steadied to the point where I don’t feel it anymore, and when I blink the crack into focus, it looks less like my scar—less like a sealing place—and more like the break that it is. The dark, empty gap between two colorless slabs.
Minutes later, when Jackson returns, I brace myself for another set of questions. I have no answers left to give him. That’s why I came here tonight, for answers, for the truth, mine and Morgan’s both, but now I’ll never know: if there hadn’t been a knife, and blood, and pool-blue eyes hazed to almost gray, would tonight have been the end or a new beginning for us?
I look up at Jackson, about to ask if we can finish this later, still too in shock to be useful, but his expression is sterner than before. Everything I thought I recognized about him disappears in a tight mask of suspicion.
“Ms. Lachlan,” he says. “I’d like to continue this interview down at the station.”
The room is too well lit.
It’s nothing like the gray, single-bulbed spaces on police procedurals. Here, the walls are blindingly white, and the recessed lights above me remind me of the operating room, that “slap of sunlight” I told Morgan about the first time I spoke to him. The phrase he praised me for, warning me he might have to steal it.
It feels like hours before Jackson walks in bearing two Styrofoam cups. He sets down the water I requested in lieu of coffee, then takes a sip of his steaming drink. When he sits across from me, he has a folder tucked under his arm and a groove between his brows that looks deep enough to slot a coin into.
“Ms. Lachlan.” He slaps the folder onto the table.
“Rosie’s fine,” I tell him.
“Rosie. Right.” He clicks the top of a pen, glances at his watch. “For the sake of the recording, this is Detective Jackson Dean interviewing Rosie Lachlan at 10:06 p.m. on May 23, 2025.”
That’s when I notice the camera in the corner of the room, perched just below the ceiling. It stares at me with a beady red eye.
“As a reminder,” Jackson says, “you’re free to go at any time.” Then he opens his folder, frowns at the papers inside. “Just to be clear, you say you didn’t speak to Mr. Thorne when you went inside his house tonight.”
“I couldn’t. He was— He already—”
There were bubbles of blood at the corner of his mouth. If I hadn’t seen the rest of him, I could have believed it was juice from the tomato he’d been slicing.
“Yeah, here’s the problem with that,” Jackson says. “Mr. Thorne’s laptop was on the kitchen island—”
I nod. A laptop. A cutting board. Two of the last images I collected before the blood.
“—open to an email draft that appeared to be in progress. In it, he described a confrontational encounter at his home this evening with a woman named Rosie.”
I squint at the detective.
“A Rosie,” Jackson continues, “who he described as having pink hair.”
My eyes narrow even more, while Jackson’s shift from my face to the cotton candy strands sticking to my forehead. Something thuds in my stomach, like a shoe in a dryer.
“That’s—” I shake my head, a slow pivot from side to side. “No. We’ve been speaking through DonorConnect. But he wouldn’t know my name. Or what I look like.”
“DonorConnect?” He says it flatly. Not really a question. If he’s been looking through Morgan’s laptop, then surely he’s seen our thread. “What’s that?”
“It’s a service that connects organ recipients with their donors—or their donors’ loved ones, in my case. I was put in touch with Morgan because he’s the husband of my donor.”
Beneath Jackson’s neutral expression, I see a ripple of something. Confusion, curiosity. Maybe anticipation.
“I had a heart transplant, a little over a year ago,” I explain. I show him my MedicAlert bracelet, and Jackson leans forward to read its engraving. “Morgan’s wife, Daphne, was my donor. He and I have been talking, like I said. But he doesn’t know who I am. The service is anonymous.”
“And yet,” Jackson says, clasping his hands together, almost like he’s praying, “you know who he is.”
“I figured it out. He told me he was an author in a Boston suburb. He told me about his cat, Sickle, who I’d already seen on his Instagram.”
“So you followed him on social media? Before this… exchange on DonorConnect?”
“Yeah. I like his books.”
“Hmm,” Jackson muses. He unlinks his hands to sip from his coffee. Then he picks up his pen, taps it against the folder. “Ms. Lachlan—”
“Rosie.”
“Rosie. Why were you at Mr. Thorne’s house tonight?”
I don’t like this—the recycling of questions, when I have far too many of my own. They’re stacked like bricks in my brain, walling up the horrors I’ve seen tonight, the gush of loss that wants to drown me.
I don’t know if my questions should be answered. If I should let those bricks come tumbling down.
“I told you, he asked to see me in person. He left his information with DonorConnect and said I could use it to meet with him. You can contact the service to verify.”
I sense it’s best not to unravel too much of the truth: how well I already knew Morgan’s address, his house, every route and road that could take me to him.
Jackson nods, writing something in the margin of his paper. “Switching gears for a moment: you say you discovered Mr. Thorne’s body shortly after entering the house. But you didn’t touch it or move it in any way.”
“That’s right.”
“But see, my team has recovered hairs on the body. One was in his hand, actually. It’s hard to say for sure at the moment, but the hairs appear to be the same color as yours.” He swirls circles into the air with his pen, the tip pointed toward me. “Pink.”
“I— His hand? No. I didn’t get within five feet of him. I couldn’t, I was too— It was— The hairs have to be someone else’s.” I stretch some strands away from my face. “You can take a sample of mine, check the DNA or whatever. It won’t be a match.”
For some reason, I expect him to tell me that won’t be necessary, that these questions crowding around me are standard procedure, not something specific to a suspect. Instead, he smiles, his mouth pressed tight.
“We’ll do that, thank you. Now, you also say you’ve spoken to him through this messaging service, DonorConnect. But what about your in-person conversations?”
A sigh slides out of me, impatience at not being heard. There’s an ache, too, building in my rib cage, uncomfortably reminiscent of my days before the hospital.
“I didn’t talk to him at his house tonight,” I tell him again. “I couldn’t. Morgan was—”
“Already deceased. Yes, you said. But the thing is”—Jackson flips through the pages in his folder, stabbing certain phrases with his pen—“Mr. Thorne has been emailing a friend for several weeks now about interactions he’s had with a woman named Rosie. Not on DonorConnect, but in person. And a couple of those interactions have been pretty… intimate in nature.”
My lips part but no sound slips out. The information swims through my head, but I can’t latch on to it; it floats away from me, just out of reach.
There’s been some kind of mix-up. A glitch between my mind and reality. It’s as if the papers in front of Jackson are a transcript of my thoughts. As if he’s reading the scenes that play out in my imagination—kisses and conversations with Morgan, cuddles on the couch with him and Sickle—and mistaking the fantasy for truth.
“Wait,” I say, still struggling to stitch it all together, everything Jackson’s said since he entered the room. “Morgan wrote about seeing a woman named Rosie? Wi-with pink hair?”
“He describes a few dates in quite a bit of detail,” Jackson confirms.
“Dates? I don’t—” I drop my gaze to Jackson’s papers, but my vision is clouding, the words a blur of ink. “I’ve never been on a date with Morgan.”
My breath becomes shallow. I take only sips of air.
Jackson pitches forward, pinning his eyes to mine. Between us, his coffee releases wisps of fog. “So you’re saying this person he wrote about is not you. That he was married to your heart donor, you have messaged him through the anonymous service, but you have not dated him.”
“Yes.” My voice is more like a wheeze. I clear my throat and try again: “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
“So you never had a conversation with Mr. Thorne at”—Jackson peels his gaze from me to riffle through his papers—“Sweet Bean Café?”
The room tilts. My ribs feel like the bones of a corset cinched too tight. There’s both too much and too little to explain: I saw Morgan at Sweet Bean, locked eyes with him there, thought of creating a collision, sparking a conversation. But I didn’t. I returned to work after Marilee’s texts, met with the bride who refused to be helped by anyone else.
I keep my answer simple: “No.”
“You didn’t go to his house for dinner on Tuesday night? And before that, you didn’t meet with him at Burnham Grove Park?”
The park? I haven’t even driven by it in over eighteen months. I took Brad there one time—just for a few minutes, guiding him through my childhood stomping grounds—and that was enough to turn it haunted.
I shake my head. The too-bright walls whirl around me.
“So you’re saying he did all that with another woman. A woman who, like you, is named Rosie, and who, like you, has pink hair. That would be a pretty big coincidence, wouldn’t it? Especially since you were in contact with Mr. Thorne.”
“Anonymously. I was in contact with him on DonorConnect.”
I flop back in my chair, stare up at the ceiling where the lights burn my eyes, and for a second, I’m back in the hospital, the room growing staticky with the anesthesia some doctor has just injected. Soon, they’ll saw me open, break my ribs, reach inside me for my sick, sick heart.
I pull in a breath. Force myself to sit up straight. Because it’s more than a year later, and my heart—pumped full of meds but healthy for now—came from a woman whose husband just died. A husband whose heart I’d hoped would also be mine.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I tell Jackson. “But whoever this Rosie woman is that Morgan wrote about in those emails—that wasn’t me.” I lean forward, make sure he sees the truth in my eyes as I say it out loud: “I’ve never so much as spoken to Morgan Thorne in person. And before today, I’d never once stepped foot inside his house.”