Chapter Eleven
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Over the next day and a half, I watch fourteen episodes of Gilmore Girls . I get Danishes delivered for dinner. I study tutorials for dyeing your own hair—not just to distance myself from the woman who left strands of herself at the scene but to distance myself from me, too.
By the middle of the second day, I’ve decided to keep my hair as is—no energy for gloves and towels, for scrutinizing instructions on a box—but I convince myself that going back to work will help. I need normal, need routine, need the familiar rhythm of Just Say Yes to keep me afloat. I slip on a boatneck dress, step into wedges, even swipe on mascara and lip gloss. I show up with coffees and pastries for all the consultants, conscious of the extra work I’ve dumped on them during my absence. But I last only three hours and seventeen minutes before I’m mumbling excuses to Marilee and rushing out the door.
All those dresses. All those beaming brides. All the white, white, white—a perfect, too-clean canvas for the blood still pulsing through my mind.
Back home in bed, I keep Instagram open on my laptop, missing the ease of my phone. For the past two days, I’ve been refreshing Blair’s page, waiting for a post about Morgan. It makes no sense—I saw the body; I’ve scanned the news stories: bestselling author; homicide; one year since another tragedy in that home —but it won’t feel like fact, won’t feel permanent, until I hear it from someone close to him. Until I know I’m not alone in my shock.
Finally, almost forty-eight hours after I discovered his body, it comes. A carousel of photos. A caption that guts me. I’m so confused right now, I have no answers, but I know one thing: I loved him so much. I swipe through the pictures, watching the two of them grow into adulthood together: posing at parties in college (Blair with a platinum pixie cut, Morgan clean-shaven); arms slung around each other at bars in their twenties (both sporting a shaggy, shapeless hairstyle); smiling at weddings in their early thirties (Blair with a blond bob, Morgan in gold-wire glasses). Finally, they became the pair I’ve seen in person, sharing a smirk, Blair with her curtain of dark hair, Morgan with his tortoiseshell frames.
I exit Instagram, curling on my side. The post was not the comfort or closure I expected. I bet Blair’s in bed, too, thumbing through those photos, wondering how it’s possible she and Morgan will never take another. I bet she’s buried beneath blankets; I bet they’re not enough to warm her—and I ball up tighter at the thought.
I remain like that until my laptop dings with an incoming email. It’s Marilee, writing from her Just Say Yes address. The subject is three words: Message from police .
Bolting upright, I open the email. Someone from the station tried to reach me at work, Marilee relays. They told her I can pick up my phone at my earliest convenience.
My stomach drops at the thought of her fielding that call. I can only imagine the questions it sparked.
Still, this is good news. If the police are returning my phone, then that means they know it doesn’t implicate me.
But when I arrive at the station a half hour later and give the receptionist my name, she doesn’t hand it over right away. Instead, she dials an extension, and in a few minutes, the detective from the other night steps into the lobby to greet me.
“Ms. Lachlan,” he says, “thanks for coming by. Would you mind answering a few more questions while you’re here?”
“Oh. Um. I thought—”
“You can retrieve your phone on your way out. Sophie will keep it safe.” He nods over my shoulder at the receptionist, then opens a door and gestures for me to enter.
There’s something familiar in his expectant expression, and I’m nagged once again by the feeling I know him from somewhere. Or maybe it’s simply because we just did this, only forty-eight hours ago. I follow him down a hallway, into an interview room that’s nearly identical to the one we used before, and as Jackson and I sit down across from each other, the blaring lights cover me like a rash.
He notes our names, the date, and time “for the sake of the recording” and reminds me I’m free to leave whenever I’d like, same as the other night. Then he offers a tight-lipped smile, his tone becoming more casual.
“I’m sure you’ll be glad to have your phone again.” He leans back in his chair. “It’s hard to be without one these days. Unless—do you happen to have another at your disposal?”
“Another phone? My parents have a landline, if that’s what you mean. I live in the apartment above their garage.”
“I’m thinking more along the lines of”—he pauses, as if searching for his next words—“a prepaid phone. Do you have one like that?”
“You mean a burner?”
Jackson shrugs. “Some people call it that.”
“I don’t have a burner. Why— Was Morgan in contact with someone who did?”
“I’m just curious,” he says—which isn’t a no. Beneath the table, I pick at my nails. If the woman Morgan was dating used a burner, they can’t rule me out as the Rosie he might have texted or called.
“You can search my apartment,” I say, and I immediately hear Nina hissing in my head: Are you serious? Get a lawyer! “You won’t find a phone like that.”
“That won’t be necessary right now, but I’ll let you know if we plan to take you up on that offer. In the meantime, I’d like to talk to you about the list in your phone.”
I stiffen—and if my heart weren’t on a delay, it would knock. “The list?”
“In your Notes app. It appears to be… facts. About Mr. Thorne.”
I maintain my gaze, even as I want to bury my head in my hands. Nina was right; I should have asked for a lawyer before surrendering my phone. But I was only thinking of how it would exonerate me, my mind too blurred by Morgan’s blood to think through all the pieces of him I’d stored in there.
From the way Jackson’s watching me now, it’s as if those pieces are body parts.
“I got the idea from TikTok,” I say. “Some woman’s video. About a list her boyfriend showed her in his phone that he’d been keeping since their first date. Things he learned about her. Things he didn’t want to forget. Things he could use later for gift inspiration. I thought it was a good idea.” I try for a casual shrug. “That’s all it was.”
“But you said you never dated Mr. Thorne. If that’s true, why would you need a list?”
“I had a crush on him,” I admit—because surely a crush is better than the alternative. “I was hopeful that a list like that would be useful one day. So I wrote down info I gathered on social media—likes, dislikes. And I wrote down things he told me in our messages.”
Jackson’s silence is calculated. He’s trying to coax me into saying more. I resist for only a few moments, his quiet creating blanks I don’t want his mind to fill.
“I get that it isn’t… normal,” I say. “But it isn’t evidence of anything either. And what about my fingerprints? You checked them against the knife, right? So you know I never touched it. You know it was someone else.”
“The knife was wiped clean. So far, we’re unable to prove who did and didn’t touch it.”
Damn it. I should have expected that. “Well, what about the emails? The ones where Morgan was telling a friend about this other Rosie. They must have clues in them that could lead you to that woman.”
It’s only as I say that woman that I realize what I really mean: the killer. Because didn’t Jackson tell me she was there that night, that Morgan was in the middle of an email draft about their “encounter”? One that was “confrontational”? It sounded like the woman was gone before Morgan started the email, but maybe she wasn’t done with him. Maybe she came back. Maybe she picked up a knife.
A chill scampers up my spine. I ball my hands in my sweatshirt sleeves. But this theory clarifies nothing for me. It only compounds the questions I already have.
“We’re conducting a full investigation into the emails,” Jackson says, a response that’s intentionally elusive. “In the meantime, I want to get your thoughts on something. It’s pretty strange, isn’t it, that Mr. Thorne was both corresponding with you via DonorConnect and, at the same time, seeing a woman named Rosie with pink hair? You have to admit it’s quite the coincidence.”
He leans on coincidence , weighting the word with irony.
I blow out a frustrated breath. “It is a coincidence.”
“What if it’s not?”
I open my mouth to argue again, but Jackson keeps going.
“Can you think of anyone who might try to appropriate your identity?”
The question freezes me, my mouth left gaping. “What do you mean?” I finally say.
“In his emails, Mr. Thorne said he met Rosie at Sweet Bean Café, which is right next door to your workplace, correct?”
It takes me a second to nod. He met her at Sweet Bean? But that’s where I met him, too. Well, no: it’s where I saw him, and maybe would have met him, had Marilee not texted me to return to the store.
“We spoke to the staff who was working there that evening. Unfortunately, there are no security cameras—the owners are a little old-fashioned—but one of the baristas said she saw you there. Apparently, you’re a regular?”
I don’t answer—only squint at him. Morgan not only met the other Rosie at Sweet Bean, but on the day I saw him there, too?
“The barista remembers informing Mr. Thorne and his companion that the café was closing, which corroborates a detail from his email. But she said that the pink-haired woman at the table with Mr. Thorne was not you. That, in fact, you had left hours earlier.”
I shake my head, the information like a riddle. “I— So. What are you saying? You think someone followed me to Sweet Bean and—pretended to be me?”
He answers my question with one of his own: “Do you have any reason to believe that someone in your life might do that?”
“No. I can’t— It doesn’t make sense.”
Why would anyone pretend to be me? And not just that: Why would this woman use my identity to date Morgan and then kill him?
An answer flashes— she’s framing me —but the idea is absurd. Why would she want to? How would she even know she could? Besides Nina and the people at DonorConnect, nobody’s aware there’s a connection between me and Morgan in the first place.
“Maybe the barista was mistaken then?” Jackson suggests.
“No. Morgan was there. I saw him at a table with—”
I catch myself before saying Blair’s name.
“A woman. A friend, I guess. She had dark hair. Not pink. But I was only there from like five thirty to six. I went back to work to meet a bride for a consultation and was with her until closing at eight. I can send you her information, if you want.”
“That would be helpful, thank you.”
“Sure,” I say, before wondering why it’s helpful, why I still have to prove I’ve never even met Morgan, especially since: “This woman—the one who called herself Rosie. That’s your primary suspect, right? I mean, you said Morgan wrote about seeing her the night he was killed.”
Jackson pushes his lips to the side, as if considering whether to answer me. “We’re looking into all possibilities, with the most likely scenario being that the perpetrator was someone Mr. Thorne knew.”
And I barely did, in the end. I’d only just scratched the surface of who he was, who we might have been together. Even on that last day, I was more preoccupied with Daphne’s poetry than—
“Any chance this could be related to his wife’s death?” I ask. “That was only a year ago, so—”
“Her death was an accident. Why exactly would that be related?”
I’m about to answer, but then I reconsider. I don’t like the way his eyes have narrowed on me again, as if everything I say is a secret code encrypting my culpability.
“I just mean,” I try, “with two brutal deaths in the same house, in the span of a year, it makes me wonder if there’s a connection.”
Jackson hums an acknowledgment. “I’ll tell you what, Ms. Lachlan.” He leans forward, just a bit, erasing a breath of space between us. “Why don’t you let me worry about connections.”
He stands, our interview apparently over, but his gaze never leaves my face. In the silence, his implication pollutes the air: connections like Daphne’s heart in my chest, my correspondence with Morgan, the list in my phone.
Jackson opens the door. “Thanks for your cooperation. We’ll be getting the results back on the hair analysis any day now, which should help clarify some things. In the meantime—” He waves me on to the hall outside. “It’s in your best interest that you remain reachable.”
In other words: don’t skip town.
My eyes burn as I return to the lobby. As I retrieve my phone from the receptionist. As I walk out of the station and back to my car. I should be relieved. He found nothing truly incriminating on my phone, and the barista told him I wasn’t the pink-haired woman with Morgan. But Jackson’s demeanor makes it clear: even though he raised a new theory—as disturbing as it is inexplicable—that someone’s been impersonating me, he hasn’t eliminated me as a suspect. And the fact that he’s thinking it at all—that I could have stabbed Morgan, right through the heart, when his heart was the thing I’d hoped could heal mine—feels, in some strange way, like being called crazy . Like my mind is so warped with wanting I’ve done things I don’t remember.
Sitting in my car, the engine still off, I try to steady myself before the drive home. But after a few moments of measured breathing, the hair on the back of my neck begins to prickle.
At first, I assume it’s Jackson’s questions, still strumming my nerves—but as the sensation remains, I register the prickle for what it is: the feeling of being watched.
I look around, searching the parking lot, the tree line, even the back seat of my car, but I see only a dusk-drenched sky, only puddles of light from the lampposts.
Even still, squinting through the windshield, part of me expects to find a flash of pink. A woman with my body, my face, emerging from the shadows.
I’m home for only three minutes before there’s a knock at my door.
“Rosie, what is going on?” Mom demands when I open it. She barrels into the apartment, Dad hanging back a bit behind her.
“Hey, Rosie girl,” he says. His voice is soft like it was in the hospital, those weeks on the transplant list, when he spoke as if even a greeting could break me. He winces as he steps over the threshold.
“Dad, you shouldn’t have come up here.” He’s reached the point with his hip replacement that he can do stairs by himself, but it’s still a discomfort I’d rather he not waste on me. “I would have come down to you guys, why didn’t you just—”
“Call?” Mom says. “Believe me, we’ve tried. Several times.” She gestures to my phone on the kitchen table. “I assume that thing works?”
I tap its screen to wake it, but it remains black. “They must’ve turned it off,” I mutter to myself, but Mom catches the words.
“They? Who’s they?”
I stall by switching on my phone, studying the Apple icon, but I’m too exhausted to come up with a lie. “The police. They’ve had it the last couple days.”
And yet, I find I’ve only missed two texts. Both are from Edith, the first arriving yesterday, the second almost twenty-four hours later, when she didn’t receive a response.
Morgan Thorne is DEAD?!
Hello? Are YOU dead??
I set the phone face down on the table before looking at my parents. Mom stares at me, bug-eyed. Dad’s gaze drops to the floor.
“Excuse me?” Mom says. “Care to explain why the police had your phone?”
I ease out a sigh. I didn’t want to do this. I thought it might be handled by now. But I don’t know how to explain without telling them the truth. Heat flushes my cheeks as I offer a truncated version: connecting with Morgan on DonorConnect; our string of messages; his offer to meet in person; his open front door; his body, his blood, on the kitchen floor. I don’t mention that I’d figured out Morgan’s identity, his address, all on my own. I don’t mention Rosie, either—the one who might be masquerading as me—or the pink hairs she left in his hand. I’m alarming them enough as it is, and from Mom’s rapid blinking, her stuck-open mouth, it’s clear that those other details could give her a stroke.
Silence swells when I finish speaking, the air growing thick.
Finally, Mom turns away from me to walk to the living room, where she drops into an armchair. I follow Dad as he trails behind her. He places a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. Neither of them look at me.
“The police think you did it,” Mom says. A statement. Not a question.
“No,” I lie—because, soon enough, they won’t.
“That’s why they took your phone.”
“No, I gave it to him, it was my choice. I wanted him to have it so he could eliminate me as—” I stop.
“As a suspect,” Dad finishes for me.
“Which they did. They did eliminate me.” I wave my phone in the air. “They gave it back. I’m in the clear.” The lies pile up, but it’s better than making them worry. I’ve put them through a lifetime of that in the last eighteen months alone.
Dad moves to the couch, then reaches for Mom, who laces her fingers with his, squeezing them tight. I stare at those hands, linked for all my life—while they watch TV, while they browse a bookstore, while they ride in the car. Every time they drove me to my post-op checkups, their hands clasped across the console were as much a comfort to me as a reminder of how empty my own hands were.
“You don’t look right,” Dad says, and Mom’s nod comes fast.
“You’re a mess,” she agrees, always blunter than Dad. “Your eyes are bloodshot and swollen. Your hair—” I touch the back of my head, defensive, but my fingers stick in knotted strands. Shame washes over me; I didn’t even brush my hair before heading to the station. “You went to work like that today?”
“Only for a few hours. And then I— I’ve been in bed a lot and—”
“Because of your heart?” Mom asks, voice pinched with panic.
“No, no, I’ve just been having trouble sleeping.”
“Oh, Rosie, not again. Do you want some of my pills? The doctor said they’re fine to take with your meds.”
I stiffen at her choice of words: Not again. Just like Nina, she’s trying to lump the past with the present. But my history with insomnia is so unrelated to what’s happening now that it’s absurd of her to even mention it.
“I saw a dead body, Mom! And not just any dead body. The body of a man I… had a connection with. A man I cared about.”
“Rosie.” My mom breathes my name, and there’s so much disappointment in it. Right away, I hear the echo of things she’s said to me before. About my early symptoms: You’re making yourself sick. About my grief after breakups: When are you going to turn this around? Like my broken heart was a shirt I was wearing backward. A quick, easy fix. I brace myself for a statement that will sting just as much. But what she says stuns me instead.
“Was this man really corresponding with you?”
“What? Of course he was.” I glance at Dad, wanting to share a baffled look, but he seems unsurprised by the question. As if he was wondering it, too.
“Why would you even ask that?” I say.
Mom stares at me, exhaustion creasing her eyes. “The way you’re talking about him. This connection you say you had. Did the two of you really have a relationship of some sort? Or was it—” She looks up at Dad, who nods slightly, before completing her thought: “Was it like Brad?”
My reply whips out. “Brad and I had a relationship.” She jolts from the lash of it.
“Yes,” she says after a moment. “But you know what I mean. The relationship wasn’t… what you thought. For god’s sake, you rushed out to buy that wedding dress and—”
“I know, Mom,” I cut in, tone still sharp.
She’s telling me this as if I’ve forgotten. As if I wasn’t kept awake, for months after, reliving the horrors of that dress.
She leans forward, her gaze digging into me, pointed as a harpoon. “Rosie,” she says, and I feel it coming: another thing I remember too well. “That poor man never even proposed to you.”