Chapter Nineteen
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“It was you.”
Edith cocks her head, still holding the note in the air. As her white-blond hair grazes her shoulder, nearly colorless, I see how easily the dye would have masked it.
“What was me?” she asks.
I snatch the bottle from her bag, point to the label, blood trickling down my arm. “You’re the Rosie that Morgan was seeing.”
There’s a moment in which her face is blank, looking at the bottle without recognition. And it’s a moment of hope, a moment in which I didn’t welcome someone into my life who tried to destroy it. A moment in which I’m not some stupid girl who sees connection where there’s actually danger.
But then Edith closes her eyes, inhales slowly like she’s counting the seconds—and exhales with a nod.
When she takes the bottle from my hand, I barely feel it go.
“Why?” I ask, the word so pained it’s like I had to squeeze my windpipe to squeak it out. It’s not enough, doesn’t articulate my question. Edith and I barely know each other. So why would she pick me to impersonate, me to pin it on?
Instead of answering, Edith chews her lip. “That cop I saw you talking to—does he know about the Rosie thing?”
“Yes. From Morgan’s emails.”
She perks a bit. “He wrote emails about me?” She sounds so flattered—until fear flits across her face. “Oh god, what if the police—” Her gaze slams onto my arm. “Keep pressure on that!”
With her free hand, she presses the towel to my wound. I wrench away from her.
“Why did you do it?” I swallow through the pain in my throat. “Why pretend to be me?”
“That’s not what— I didn’t think—” She stops, seeming to gather herself. “I just met him one day. At Sweet Bean. We crashed into each other, completely by accident, and—”
“ Was it an accident? Because I was there that day too. The cops said a barista saw both of us. Two pink-haired women, at different times. So were you following me?”
“No!” Edith looks scandalized by the suggestion. “I only picked Sweet Bean because you’d recommended their Danishes for dinner when we met. And then I just—bumped into Morgan. I’d never seen him in person before, so I got kind of nervous, and when he asked me for my name, I-I don’t know.”
She pushes out a sigh, and when she speaks again, her voice is low and warbly. “I didn’t want to be Edith, the woman whose fiancé would dump her. The woman who’d been crying into frozen dinners all week. I wanted to be anyone but myself.”
She pauses, and despite my confusion, my alarm, I can’t help but think of the weeks after Brad. Times I caught my reflection in the mirror. Times I was tortured by the dark pockets beneath my eyes, the pillow creases scarring my cheeks, the nests of hair on my head. It terrified me, because I saw in that mirror what I knew Brad had seen: a woman worth leaving.
“So you lied to him,” I say, shaking off that image. “You gave Morgan a fake name. Hid your real identity the entire time you were seeing him.”
Anger pushes out the words, but as soon as they’re spoken, I feel ashamed, too. Because if I’m angry at Edith for deceiving Morgan, then don’t I need to be mad at myself? I hid my own identity from him—per DonorConnect’s guidelines, sure. But message after message, I pretended I had no clue who he was, either, even though, night after night, I’d paused outside his house, peering through the windows.
“I didn’t set out to lie,” Edith says, “but when he asked me for my name, I just kind of… blurted out yours instead.”
“Why my name?”
She wipes at tears I didn’t see spill. “Because you were kind. And interesting. You seemed so sure of yourself. So uniquely you . And you were someone who’d survived a massive heartbreak just like mine. You were on the other side of it, and… I wanted to be like that.”
I blink at her. The pain in my arm ebbs to less than an ache, as if the blood is seeping back toward the cut. Why would anyone want to be you? Nina asked. And all along, Edith had an answer. I’m kind. Interesting. Uniquely myself. But—that’s not even true. It was a brief, fleeting thought, back at the beginning of all this, but didn’t I consider dyeing my hair to look more like Daphne? I was willing to blacken the brightest part of myself, a part I actually loved, just to look like someone a man—a stranger, really—had been attracted to.
“That’s why I dyed my hair, too,” Edith adds, shaking the bottle like she might spray it on again. “The night we met, you talked about changing hairstyles, how it can separate you from the person you’d been before. And I loved your hair. I thought it could be”—she gives a shy shrug—“a fun new look for me. Something that would stop me from seeing my same old self. So I got this.” She rolls the bottle between her hands, staring at the label. “Just to try it. I’m not bold like you, I couldn’t commit to something more permanent without seeing how it looked on me first. But then I met Morgan like that, and he complimented my hair, so I had to keep dyeing it every time I saw him.”
Had to. The phrase hits my ear like a wrong note. She believes she had to keep dyeing it, believes it was the only choice, just because Morgan liked it.
I grip the towel tighter, the pain cracking open again, distracting from the off-key sentiment I know too well.
“You’re acting like it was an accident,” I say. “Using my name. Dyeing your hair like mine. But you took it way too far.” I glance at the blood on the floor, the red on my nails like chipped polish. “Why did you send someone to attack me?”
“What! I didn’t!”
“Were you here last night? While I was sleeping?”
“What?” she says again. “No. This is the first—”
“You buttoned my gown.”
I state it as a fact, but the bewilderment on her face, the flash of what a crazy thing to say , is enough to convince me I’m wrong. It wasn’t Other Rosie—Edith—who snuck into my apartment and fastened the dress. It was whoever broke in tonight, cutting me with that knife, choking me from behind. The person Edith knew, somehow, to save me from—her timing too precise to mean she’s not a part of it.
My eyes latch on to the blade beneath the table, close enough to grasp.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Edith says, “but I had nothing to do with what happened here tonight. I have no reason to hurt you!”
“What about Morgan? You had a reason for hurting him?”
I shift my weight to the right, the direction of the table. Edith doesn’t seem to notice, even as she gapes at me.
“You think I killed Morgan? How— Why—”
“I know you were there the night he died.” I slide another inch. “There were pink hairs found in his hand at the scene. And they weren’t a match for mine.”
Edith’s knuckles whiten around the spray bottle.
“The police are looking for you,” I say.
I glance at the knife, just a few feet away, but now I’m not sure that’s the right move. I should be running for my phone or running for the door. Scrambling for a weapon, when I’m already injured, might only leave me vulnerable again. And is that really the answer—more blood on a kitchen floor?
“No, no, no,” Edith mumbles through my hesitation. “I swear that wasn’t me. I mean, yes, I went to his house. But I didn’t kill him. God, I— I only went there that night to ask him about Daphne.”
My muscles, poised to spring up, freeze instead. “What about Daphne?”
“I don’t know—everything, I guess!” Her gaze falls from mine, her cheeks flushing. “You have to understand, I was so… hopeful about us. I mean, the sparks that first night at Sweet Bean— I didn’t think I’d feel sparks ever again, let alone so soon after my fiancé.”
She squeezes the bottle of dye like a stress ball, clenching and unclenching. “I made sure to be cautious. I’ve been burned—badly—and I’m not even close to ready for a new relationship. But I felt like I needed to see him again. Because feeling that… that zing with him was the only thing that had truly helped me in weeks.”
She loosens her grip on the dye, cradling it in her palm. “Morgan made me feel— I don’t even know what to call it. It’s just, he could have had any woman he wanted, but he sat there in Sweet Bean with me . Shut the place down with me . Said he wanted to do it again with me .”
Despite myself, I nod, because I know the feeling she’s talking about. Through messages alone, Morgan made me feel intriguing and funny and important, even repeating my own lines back to me, admiring them in a way that made me admire them too. Sometimes, those messages were more like mirrors, showing me reflections I hadn’t seen before, so that as I fell for him, it was a little like falling for myself.
It was like that with Brad, too. His piles of pretty words. Amazing. Beautiful. Special.
“Then you texted me about those rumors you’d seen online,” Edith says. “About Morgan maybe killing his wife. And obviously that freaked me out, but I still met up with him anyway, because you said your friend had just gone out with him.” She pauses, pointedly, to acknowledge my lie. “Hearing that made me feel like I already had to win him back. So we met at the park, and it was just like the first time. Sparks I swore I could see.”
“That’s when you gave him your number,” I recall from the emails. “Except the detective told me it was a burner.”
I let the implication charge the air. You don’t use a burner unless you want to leave no trace, no connection to the person you’re calling.
“Okay, I see how that looks,” Edith says. “But I didn’t get that for Morgan. I—” Now her cheeks darken, from pink to red. “I got it so I could call my ex.”
She dips her head to stare into her lap. “Those first few weeks, I missed him so much it felt like I couldn’t breathe. I thought if I had a second phone, I could still call him—hear his voice if he answered, hear his voicemail if he didn’t—without him knowing it was me. It was stupid, I know; I only did it a couple times. But I still had the phone in my bag when I was with Morgan, and like I said, I was nervous about the rumors you’d heard. I wanted to keep seeing him, but I figured I should be careful. Maybe it was overkill, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if he knew my number, but I haven’t exactly been thinking my clearest the past month or so. It’s like I was drawn to Morgan and… scared of him, all at the same time. And not just because of the rumors, but because, when you’ve just been burned, relationships—sparks—are scary.”
With her free hand, she flicks out her fingers— sparks! —the way you would when shouting Boo!
“It was hard to know what to think of him. On the one hand, he seemed like a good, regular guy. Like, when he told me he’s still friends with one of his college girlfriends, I thought: okay, if someone dated him and found him worth sticking around for, he can’t be that bad.”
She shakes her head at her own flimsy argument, even though part of me gets it. Morgan and I never got to the requisite exes conversation—beyond what I shared of Brad—but I bet it would have comforted me, too, his old girlfriend keeping him close. Because it means something, doesn’t it, when a woman vouches for a man?
“But it still nagged at me. The whole Daphne thing. So I looked into her, into him. I read Daphne’s books at the library. I found this interview of them together online and something just didn’t seem right . I talked to Piper, too, to get her take.”
I drop my gaze to my arm, reposition the towel to a less saturated section. Edith might not have been stalking me the day she met Morgan in Sweet Bean, but she’s certainly followed in my footsteps since then. Even if she didn’t know it.
“But still, I kept going back and forth. And Morgan kept… wanting to see me. And I can’t explain to you how intoxicating that is. It had been so long since I’d felt wanted. Pursued. Because things with my fiancé— I’d felt for a while that he was having second thoughts. That he was halfway out the door.”
She bites the inside of her cheek, bracing against the memory, but it’s visible on her face—the raw nerve she’s gnawing. “Anyway. I finally decided to just ask Morgan about Daphne in person. Which is why I was there that night. Before he died.”
I stretch my neck against the pain still ringing it, shocked at the timing of it all. Not only did Edith and I embark on the same investigation, but we ended up in the same place, on the same night: right at Morgan’s door. If I’d arrived just a little bit earlier, I might have seen her there.
“But I didn’t kill him,” she reiterates. “If anything, I wanted to start over with him. I wanted him to tell me the truth about Daphne, assure me that everything I’d seen and heard meant nothing, and in return, I was going to tell him the truth about me. That I’d given him a fake name. A fake number. But before I could get into it all, he just—kissed me. A shut-up kind of kiss. Like he knew he wouldn’t like what I was going to say. And I don’t know, maybe he ran his hands through my hair and that’s how my— I don’t remember. It was our first kiss, so I kind of—”
“What? No, it wasn’t. Your first kiss was at the park.”
“Um. Nooo…” She stretches out the word until it tilts toward a question. “It was at his house.”
“He wrote about it in his emails, Edith. You kissed at the park. In his library. In his bedroom—that was the time he squeezed your hand too hard and you freaked out and left.”
“Squeezed my—” She squints at me like she’s having trouble understanding. “We did meet up at the park, but we didn’t kiss there. He gave me a tour of his house and showed me his library, his bedroom, but when I peeked into the master bath, he grabbed my hand and yanked me backward. That’s what freaked me out. He claimed he didn’t want me to see ‘the mess in there’—and I don’t know, maybe that’s all it was—but of course I thought of Daphne. Dying in that bathroom, just a few feet away. All the rumors about Morgan killing her.”
“Wait— But— Why would he write about kissing you all those times if he never actually did?”
“I have no idea. That’s really weird.”
My head spins to make sense of it. Morgan told Blair his emails were a way to record and shape the events of his day. Now they seem like fiction, molded from moments of inspiration, Edith and I merely characters to him. Stories he believed were his to tell.
It makes me wonder what else he lied to Blair about.
“What happened when you confronted him about Daphne?” I ask.
“He got pissed at me, just for asking about his wife. His eyes like… flashed. I swear they were bright with anger. And it scared me. So I left.”
I search her face for a tell, a flicker of deceit, but she doesn’t so much as blink.
“And you didn’t go back?” I ask.
“No, I swear. I didn’t even know he was dead until two days later. I wasn’t working that weekend, so I mostly stayed in bed, off my phone, feeling depressed.”
There’s something in her expression that’s familiar to me. Just like I recognized the desperation and despair on her face when I first saw her through the glass at Just Say Yes, I recognize the agony of being misunderstood. Of not being believed.
But maybe that’s desperation, too. A frantic need to spin a story.
“Why are you here then?” I ask. “At the exact moment someone was strangling me.”
“I told you—this note.” Edith picks it off the floor beside her, holds it out for me to take, but I don’t dare touch it, don’t smudge it with prints of my own. I lean forward to read.
I spoke to the police. I know about you and Morgan. Come to my apartment at 10:30 tonight. 35 Carver Lane (above the garage).
—Rosie