Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I’ve returned to work on only three hours of sleep—more than I got the night before, but nowhere close to enough. I didn’t take Mom’s pills. I thought about it, even went so far as to dump one into my palm, triple-check they were safe with my meds. But in the end, it didn’t feel worth the risk, adding another drug to my system, synthetically slowing my heart.
It was two in the morning when I realized my mistake. It wasn’t just Morgan’s body I couldn’t stop seeing anymore; it was Daphne’s, too, splayed on the bathroom floor, the white marble tiles rimmed with red like bloody teeth. I even heard her whisper. Morgan. Help me. Please.
More than anything, that’s what kept me awake: the voice and words I imagined so easily. They resonated somewhere deep, a vibration in my bones. I knew it wasn’t the same as what I went through; Brad’s neglect never endangered my life. Still, I couldn’t help but hear myself in those pleas, Daphne and me calling to men who promised forever—then left our pain unanswered.
“I already gave you my card,” someone says to me.
I look at her—twentysomething, polite smile. My hand is outstretched for payment, but the screen says her card has been approved. It’s on the counter, beneath my other palm.
“Sorry.” I pass it back to her, then print out the receipt that itemizes the customizations on her gown. I had to bite my tongue when she rattled them off to me earlier, too tempted to rein in her excitement: If you need to work so hard to make it perfect, it’s really not the one . Then again, my gown was flawless in fit and style, and it might hang, unworn, in my closet forever.
After the bride leaves, I head for the door myself. I was smart enough last night to build a pick-me-up into this day. As soon as Blair left, I texted Nina, asking if she’d be free for lunch. She was slow to write back, which kept me staring at my phone, bargaining with it to chirp out her reply, but when it finally came, she proposed a Sweet Bean date, only steps from the store, so we could “maximize our time together.” Seeing that text settled something in me that had felt unsteady since Nina first picked me up from the police station. She not only wants to spend time with me again; she wants to spend as much as we can.
I practically skip to Sweet Bean, exhaustion be damned. I’m reaching for the door handle when something compels me to stop midstep. Someone’s gaze leeches onto me. I feel the bite of it. The slow, persistent suck.
I don’t have time to look around before arms grab me from behind.
“Hey.”
I relax at the sound of Nina’s voice, then spin around to hug her. Her grip is as tight as mine, and I’m sure now: I only imagined the distance between us. Maybe even misread her expression in her car the other night.
“Danishes for lunch?” she asks as we part.
I hiss in a breath through my teeth. “I think I’m going to be strong and go with a sandwich. I need more than sugar if I’m going to make it through the day.”
“Wow, such an adult. I pick sugar. They better have a raspberry left.”
As we wait in line to order, I listen to Nina gush about an antique bench she just bought, comforted by the giddy rhythm of her voice. But it’s only a minute before my eyes drift toward the table where I first saw Morgan. It isn’t difficult to place him there, or to picture the pink-haired woman he collided with. I see the back of her head, bobbing with laughter, see Morgan smiling across the table, his canines sharper than they look in pictures. The sky dims, rain taps against the window, and the barista approaches the couple to tell them they’re closing. They stand up, Morgan gestures for Rosie to go first, and as she turns, I hold my breath.
But her face is a blur of skin and pastel hair and Nina’s nudging me forward in line.
Once we collect our order, we carry it to a table outside. We take synchronized bites of our food, mirror images of each other, and I smile at how normal this is. How safe. But as soon as Nina puts her Danish down, clapping crumbs off her hands, her demeanor changes.
“So,” she says, back stiff, shoulders square.
She grills me about the last few days and what I’ve heard from the police. I hold back a sigh. I’d hoped our lunch could distract me from Morgan, provide a reprieve as restful as a nap, but it was unrealistic to think that Nina wouldn’t question me, that she didn’t agree to these plans just so we could talk it out in person.
I fill her in on all of it, and the longer I speak, the tighter Nina squints. Her eyes widen only once—“He just kept writing , Neens, he never even checked on her, and Daphne was in there dying”—but they shrink again when I tell her Morgan’s emails turned up nothing useful on Other Rosie.
“So you agree with that detective?” she asks. “You think someone’s impersonating you?”
“They have to be, right? Otherwise, it’s too big a coincidence.”
“But”—Nina rips off a piece of Danish—“why would anyone want to be you?”
I fall back as if pushed, struck by the implication. “Okay, ouch.”
“No—” She waves the pastry in the air like she’s erasing her question. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant: What motive would someone have? Why do you think they’d want to frame you?”
I shake my head, still dazed by her original wording. “I don’t know.”
She watches me while she chews. “What about a lawyer? Did you find one?”
I’m saved from answering when someone says my name. Over Nina’s shoulder I find two women approaching. One is tall with honey-colored curls; the other is running her fingers through her white-blond hair, as if to neaten it just for me.
“Hey!” I greet Piper and Edith, but my gaze is fixed on the latter. She looks a lot better than the night I met her in Just Say Yes. Her face is unmarred by tears, her mascara unsmudged, but there’s still something heavy in her features, her smile weighed down by weeks of grief.
“Looks like you had the same idea as us,” Piper says, gesturing to Sweet Bean before homing in on Nina. “Hey! Good to see you! It’s been years, right? If you don’t count Facebook. How are you doing?”
“Good, how are you?” Nina’s polite but impersonal tone tells me that she, too, has few memories of Piper from high school. I wonder if she remembers she’s one of the girls I caught mocking Winnie, the freshman Nina and I befriended soon after.
Piper points at Nina’s half-eaten Danish. “I’ll be great if you tell me you didn’t get the last raspberry.”
“You’re in luck. They just put out a fresh batch.”
“Oh thank god. I’m hoping for almond, too.”
I turn my focus back to Edith. “I’m sorry I’ve been MIA.”
It’s not just the text I never answered: Morgan Thorne is DEAD?! Even before that, I’d already failed her. I’d promised to take Edith out, to help her through her heartbreak, but I didn’t follow through, too consumed by Morgan and Daphne and what I’d hoped would be the end to heartbreak of my own.
“How are you holding up?” I ask.
Edith nods, attempting optimism, before succumbing to a shrug. “I’m okay.” Her eyes shift toward Nina, who’s watching me expectantly.
“Oh, sorry. This is my best friend, Nina. Nina, this is Edith.”
They exchange hellos and nice-to-meet-yous, but Nina still seems to be waiting for something. “I’m sorry, did you go to our high school too?” she asks after a moment.
“No, I work with Piper.” Edith scratches her neck, the skin instantly reddening beneath her nails. “And I was a customer of Rosie’s.”
“Oh, are you getting married?” Nina asks brightly.
I stiffen, opening my mouth to deflect, to save Edith from the agony of that question, but she answers right away.
“Uh, no. Not anymore. My fian— My ex-fiancé called it off, actually. And Rosie told me she’d been through the same thing. So we’ve been texting.”
Nina whips back toward me, her gaze like a slap. “Did she now,” she mutters.
I sip my water as heat rushes to my face. It takes me too long to swallow. “Yeah, I told her about my wedding gown. The one I never got to use.” I try to keep my expression neutral, willing Nina to play along with the assumption Edith made the night we met.
Nina looks at me a beat longer, letting me sweat, before glancing up at Edith. “I’m really sorry. That must be so hard.”
“Thanks,” Edith says, fidgeting with the strap of the tote bag that bulges at her side.
“You’re not the friend who was seeing Morgan Thorne, are you?” Piper asks Nina.
My cheeks flare hotter as Nina jerks back in surprise. “Me? No. Rosie’s been…” She trails off, her attention steering back to me. “I’m confused.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Piper says, but from the way she drags her gaze between the two of us, I can tell she didn’t miss it: Nina’s emphasis on my name. “Rosie told Edith she had a friend who’d just started dating Morgan Thorne.”
“Before he died,” Edith adds. “Oh—obviously.” She shakes her head at the unnecessary clarification, balling her fists into the sleeves of her jacket, an almost childlike gesture of self-consciousness. “You wanted to, like, vet him for her, right?” she asks me before addressing Nina again. “And Piper was close with his wife, so—”
“So I agreed to speak with Rosie,” Piper cuts in, and now her tone is sharp. She studies the disappointed slouch in Nina’s shoulders, the nearly visible tsk on her tongue. Then she narrows her eyes at me, clearly knowing I lied.
The realization rolls through Edith, too. “Wait. Were you the one seeing Morgan?”
I bite my lip. “Not exactly. I did lie about the friend thing, though. I’m sorry.”
Edith looks at me as if through a film of fog, unsure what she’s seeing. “?‘Not exactly’?” she repeats. “I don’t get it. Why would you pretend it was your friend?”
“That’s a great question,” Piper chimes in. “You could have easily said, ‘Hey, I just started seeing Morgan Thorne and I’m curious what—’?”
“No, I wasn’t seeing him. I never even met him.”
Piper’s mouth is frozen around the word where I cut her off. “O-kaaaay,” she finally says. “You understand that’s worse, right? You met with me under false pretenses because you, what, wanted information on him? That’s really creepy. Especially considering he turned up dead.”
“Piper,” Edith says. “That has nothing to do with this.”
“We don’t know that.” She spins on her heel toward Sweet Bean’s door, hooking her arm around Edith’s elbow. “Come on, let’s go.”
Before they disappear inside, Edith slips a glance at me, her face still crimped with confusion—and something like betrayal. Now that she knows I deceived her, I won’t be surprised if she never texts me again.
It shouldn’t hit me as hard as it does. I barely knew Edith in the first place. But she trusted me with her deepest pain, believing I lived it, too, and I took advantage of that connection—just to get closer to Morgan. Guilt rocks through my stomach, making me push my plate away.
“Why do you keep lying?” Nina asks.
I stare at my unfinished sandwich. “I don’t know.”
But that’s not true. It all boiled down to the same instinct—trying not to seem crazy. That’s why I lied to Nina, letting her think I’d stopped messaging Morgan, stopped obsessing over his Instagram, his house. It’s why I lied to Edith, too, letting her think my fiancé broke off our engagement, instead of admitting I once bought a dress without even having a fiancé in the first place. And if I’d told Edith, told Piper, the real reason I went digging for info on Morgan, I can only imagine the calculations they would have made, the conversation they might have had with each other: This Rosie woman sounds like a stalker .
Still, if I was so afraid of people hearing the truth and believing I’m crazy, doesn’t that mean I believed it too?
My skin prickles, and I feel it again, the pins-and-needles awareness of being watched. But whether it’s Nina studying me from across the table, or Piper and Edith from inside, I don’t know. My gaze is stuck to my plate. I can’t so much as glance at my best friend. She knows me too well, reads me too easily, and her eyes might as well be mirrors the way they reflect it all back: my questionable actions, my unhinged decisions. I can’t see her without seeing all of me.
“You know, part of me isn’t even sorry Morgan’s dead,” she says—and that forces my attention. Nina finishes her Danish in a bite so big I’m worried she’ll choke on it. She chews for a long time, her sentence lingering like smoke. Finally, she swallows it down. “I know you’re not supposed to say things like that. But it just scares me, thinking of what might have happened, had you kept going down that path with him.”
“You mean, like—what he would have done to me?”
I see the danger now, clear as headlights on a midnight road. Morgan made space for my darkness, invited it in. But he did that with Daphne, too—only to use it against her in the end. A woman’s pain just research for him.
“No,” Nina says. “I’m scared of what you would have done.”
I tilt my head. “Me?” But before she can elaborate, I notice a police cruiser winding through cars in the parking lot. Nina spots it, too, and we track its movement to a space in front of Just Say Yes. When Jackson Dean steps out, I stand so quickly I rattle the table, toppling our waters.
“Rosie!” Nina says, diving for napkins.
“Sorry.” I dump my own onto the pile, but I don’t stick around to help. I stumble through an apology, tell her I’ll text her later, because right now, Jackson is walking into the store and there’s only one person I can imagine he’s here to see.