Chapter 31
The dining room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Uncomfortable silence filled the air as I finished telling them all what happened the night Alex was killed.
No one interrupted me. No one asked a single question.
Tommy’s face was white. My father was crying.
When I looked at my mother, her bottom lip was trembling.
“I made Gary the murderer for a reason,” I finished evenly. “He got to live free for eleven years while Will rotted away in prison. I’m glad he killed himself.”
My mother’s face contorted into something unreadable. I reached for the wine bottle and took a swig straight from it. I pushed my chair back from the table and bent down to pick up my copy of The Smileys Next Door from where it still lay on the floor.
“Rose.” My mom reached a hand out toward me. I stormed past her to my bedroom.
No one followed me.
I didn’t go to bed.
I meant to, but instead I stomped around my room, slightly drunk and radiating with anger. I couldn’t go back out there. To look at the faces of my family members right now would be unbearable.
They might feel bad. Bad that they never asked me about what happened that night, or looked closely enough at my behavior following Alex’s death.
It had been so easy to say that Will’s arrest and his alleged murder of Alex were responsible for the monster I became in my teen years.
That was easier than investigating the truth.
Maybe they wouldn’t believe me. I could see it happening. What was one more lie when they already believed that I’d written over a hundred thousand words of them?
Now, as an adult, the weight of what had happened that night came slamming down on me.
I felt furious at all the men who had ever taken advantage of me.
First Gary, Bradley, and then even Will, who allowed my pursuit of his innocence to continue even when he himself wasn’t trying to help.
These men who had come into my life and taken what they wanted with no regard for what it would do to me.
I heard the front door beep, the sound of it opening and closing. I didn’t know who had left, whether it was my mother and Steve or Tommy and Suzannah, but I didn’t care. I grabbed Hazel’s copy of my book and walked down the hall to Hazel’s room. I was finally going to finish it.
I could hear voices coming from the kitchen as I sat on Hazel’s rug, my back pressed against the foot of her bed.
I started reading. The last chunk of the book covered the trial, keeping most of the facts the same, but blaming Gary’s character instead.
Hazel’s commentary here went: Oh my god!
Why did the Hopely girls lie about Will and Alex having sex?
Where was Gary that night? And the most painful one: Why didn’t Sam say anything about seeing Will that night?
I clenched my teeth. It was upsetting to see that something I’d been trying to ignore for days had been plaguing her too.
Sam had seen Will out there with Alex.
Without any other suspects to go on, it was getting harder and harder to ignore that piece of evidence. Was it possible that I had been completely wrong about all of this?
I slammed it shut and threw it against Hazel’s bookshelf. It smacked the middle shelf, knocking over some picture frames and tchotchkes as it fell to the floor.
I instantly felt bad for destroying any piece of her room. I immediately got to my feet, picking up her glass horse figurines and photos. I put the horses back on the shelf as carefully as I could, and then reached for the picture of Hazel and Tommy. The same one I’d looked at a few days ago.
I almost dropped it again.
Earlier this week, the picture had looked completely innocuous to me. Just a photo of Tommy and Hazel in their matching McCullough Farm T-shirts. A snapshot from a summer that could have been one of any number of normal, boring days.
But now it felt like the frame was burning my hands.
I couldn’t unsee it now, a thousand childhood memories floating back in a millisecond.
Just how much Tommy had looked like Will that summer, after his growth spurt.
Tommy’s potent dislike for Alex. How often he had worn that farm T-shirt, mostly because it had a horse on the pocket that delighted Hazel.
And, like all of the McCullough merchandise, it was bright orange.
Hazel had looked at this picture every day. She had come back to her bedroom after talking to Sam and seen it. That was why it had been turned down the day I’d come in here. She hadn’t wanted to look at it anymore, not after she’d pieced it all together. Hazel had figured it all out.
It wasn’t Will that Sam had seen out there with Alex.
It was Tommy.
I stumbled backward and vomited all over Hazel’s bedspread.