Epilogue
March
Zeke’s press conference announcing his retirement made the front page of every newspaper, which was saying a lot, considering the world was going to shit, and there were more important things to cover.
Betty was relieved that these headlines were significantly more positive than the ones about her father.
Like a cockroach of doomsday evangelicalism, he had made it out alive, though barely.
She made good on her promise and called Richard Watkins, who sent a squad to the Reno hospital and cuffed him to his bed.
The fire department had been racing down the road while Levi and Patience drove in the other direction, and Betty, Sybil and Zeke passed the fire engines in the opposite lane, holding their breaths, as if breathing meant the authorities could trace any of this back to them.
No one did. The fire was ruled inconclusive, and since her dad was the only one on-site, an insurance investigator was sent out, and Betty stopped paying attention to those details since Richard Watkins made it clear there were other charges, the ones that mattered, pending. And then Watkins followed through.
Her dad pled not guilty for the deaths of three parishioners in Georgia court and was denied bail; everyone believed he was guilty—he ran, he abandoned his family, a second fire occurred on his watch.
It was an impenetrable case. Sybil and Betty flew down to Georgia to witness the arraignment.
Betty didn’t think she’d have the stomach to step inside the courtroom, but with Sybil beside her, with a hand guiding her, she walked in with her shoulders back, head high.
Her dad wobbled to his feet and declared his innocence, and Betty knew she could speak up to clear him, but he was guilty of so much else that she thought this was poetic justice.
He’d confessed to hiring someone to spook Julian but insisted he’d never agreed to murder.
Unfortunately for him, the hired gun had disappeared like the smoke from the fires: gone, poof, no one to verify that her dad was telling the truth.
“I just wanted that FBI goon to back off my daughter,” he said.
“I had plans for her. To reunite. I was just getting them in order. I needed him to lay off. To let me bring her back into my flock.”
Betty didn’t know if she believed him, but that was beside the point.
Richard didn’t, Richard hadn’t, and even if her dad weren’t prosecuted in Georgia for the fire that Patience had set, he’d likely spend the rest of his years in jail for the hired hit.
The sentencing for the church fire was just an added bonus.
Annabeth Collins, the reporter, was in the courtroom too.
She wanted Betty’s story, she told Sybil, to tell the full truth of the church, to expose it for what it was.
Betty wasn’t yet ready to crumble the house of cards while Patience was still embroiled in it, but maybe in time she would.
She could. Only when that would be of service to her sister who had been of service to her for so long, in ways Betty was only beginning to grasp.
And not before and until it was safe to deliver Patience’s own message to their father: that it had been her this whole time. One day. Soon.
Once the judge denied her father bail, she found herself on her feet, and her dad, as if he still believed he was her keeper, turned and met her eyes.
Patience couldn’t be there, for obvious reasons—Matthew had sided with their father, and whatever came next would take time—so Betty would have to do this on her own.
Not on her own, she remembered suddenly, as Sybil rose to her feet beside her.
“I was never yours,” she said, and she could hear her voice trembling.
Her dad cocked his head. So she reached into her guts and said it with her full chest. “I was never yours. Not then, not now, not ever.” Her dad heard her this time, she could tell by the way his lips formed a thin line, how his chest rose and fell as if he were trying not to combust. She reached for Sybil’s hand and spun around, bolting from the courtroom.
If he had something to say in return, she didn’t want to hear it.
No, she didn’t need to hear it. They pushed open the doors to the courthouse, and the cool Georgia sun hit their cheeks, and for the first time in a long time, Betty thought she might believe in something like a higher power, even if that was just a belief in herself.
This morning, before Zeke’s press conference, they’d trekked north to the diner.
It was an unseasonably warm day in New York, and Sybil proposed they walk, the trees showing off their new buds, the fever that infects Manhattan on bright spring mornings palpable.
They ordered the pancakes, which Sybil laughed about because Julian never ordered pancakes, but none of them wanted the dried-out fruit plate he used to get, and they raised their coffee cups to him.
Betty sometimes dreamed about him now, how a stranger changed the course of her life by protecting her because her own parents couldn’t, and she said this aloud at the booth by the window where the Insomniacs first gathered.
Sybil got teary, and Zeke massaged her shoulder, and Betty thought that it was amazing, how strangers could become family, even when you didn’t ask for it.
Sybil liked to talk more and more about their plan Bs, how you had to accept it when plan A went to shit, so after they toasted to Julian, Betty also toasted to plan B.
What a marvel it was: to take the alternate route and have it lead you to a place you didn’t even know you were looking for.
Later, at Zeke’s press conference, Sybil and Betty sat in the last row, and when it was over, Zeke’s driver deposited them back at Sybil’s house, where Zeke could have a little privacy. Pluto greeted them all like he hadn’t seen them just a few hours earlier.
In the months since her father’s arraignment, Betty had grown a little itchy—she still wanted to return to Georgia, extract Patience and her children from Matthew’s clutches, give the interview to Annabeth Collins, but Patience, as communicated through Levi, had been clear: She was going to detonate things from the inside.
She didn’t want her younger sister entangled again, and it had to be done on her terms, cleanly, so her kids and her pregnancy—she was due in four weeks now—remained unscathed.
Before Patience disappeared with Levi that morning, she’d promised Betty she could handle it. Would handle it.
“She will, Bets,” Levi said. “We will.” She hadn’t communicated with Patience since.
She knew better than to risk her sister’s safety with Matthew; and she knew better than to risk the fact that her sister had been there that day in Reno.
Betty had told Richard the fire started spontaneously, a coincidence upon her arrival.
She didn’t think he believed her, but he didn’t much care.
“I’ll call Simone,” was the only thing Richard had said.
“She’ll want to know that we caught the guy who did this to Jules.
” Then Betty called Levi from the flip phone and told him to go out and buy a regular phone like the rest of them.
He didn’t have to cover his tracks anymore, didn’t have to worry about their fanatical father.
Levi finished his trek and decided to stay in San Francisco now, try to plant some roots, and they texted and called freely, a relief, a gift, after so many years of covert back-and-forths.
Today, Zeke propped himself up on Sybil’s marble kitchen island. “I’m genuinely exhausted,” he said. “It turns out that being unemployed is extremely tiring.”
“It’s been, like, half a day,” Betty said. “You’ve literally been officially retired for five hours.”
Zeke had been offered a coaching position on the Mets and a broadcasting deal with the networks, but he’d turned them both down for now.
Maybe I want to drive a UPS truck, he’d said last night.
Maybe I just want to coach Little League, he’d mused.
Sybil had rubbed the spot between his shoulder blades and nodded and said, “Yes, absolutely, all of that sounds wonderful.”
“Okay, but it’s been a very long day,” Zeke said, tilting his head up, winking. “Also, once athletes slack off, the cliff between healthy and sloth is a steep one.”
Betty rolled her eyes because Zeke Rodriguez turned out to be irresistibly charming now that she wasn’t running from everything.
She watched Sybil delight in his ridiculousness, a smile building at the edges of her mouth that wasn’t too different from the one that Betty knew she wore when she would see Caleb waiting in Zeke’s lobby to pick her up for a date.
When she got back in town from Reno, she called him and tried to explain, but Caleb already intuited most of what she needed to say.
She liked this, the ease between them. She had no idea where any of it would go, but for once, she tried to simply be in the present, live for the moment.
It was terrifying. And exhilarating. And she had earned it.
She called Natalie, too, apologized for blowing off the national commercial, but Natalie had seen the news about the man she now understood was Betty’s father and waved her apology off.
“We’ll use this as emotional fuel,” she said.
“You’ll be able to cry on cue. You really will be an actor’s actor!
” Betty had two auditions lined up next week.
She wasn’t sure she really wanted to be an actor, but she’d been training for it all her life, it turned out.
She might as well monetize it for now. Plan B.
Maybe there would be a plan C, eventually.
“I’m exhausted too,” Sybil said, refilling Pluto’s water bowl, giving him a treat for no reason other than he was a very good boy. “I might head up to bed.”
It was strange now, the good kind of strange, how once they got back from Nevada, sleep found them in fits and starts, but found them all the same.
“I might head up too,” Zeke said, and his eyes wandered toward Sybil.
Betty had her suspicions about what was building between them.
Whenever they crashed at Sybil’s, Zeke slept in Charlie’s room, but Betty thought they were just trying to be proper around her, like two parents who didn’t want their kid to know they still had sex.
She knew Sybil’s kids were teasing her, asking if they had a new famous stepdad yet, but Sybil just kept laughing at their texts because, Betty supposed, she’d been constrained by a man for twenty years and wasn’t ready to officially declare herself tied to another one.
Even a very good man. Not just yet. But eventually, Betty surmised, she would be. She loved this for everyone involved.
“I’m heading up too,” Betty said, and made her way to the stairs toward Sybil’s guest room.
Downstairs, Sybil would wipe down the counters, tuck Pluto in, turn off the lights and shut down for the night.
Then, when for so long, it felt like an impossibility, the three of them would slip into dreaming, soundly, restfully.
Maybe they just needed each other, Betty would think before slumber took over.
Maybe they just needed to know they weren’t alone, that they were tethered to something greater than themselves.
Maybe this was its own sort of family, the one you choose, the one that finds you.
Because after so many months when their bodies betrayed them, at long last, they finally slept.
Sometimes, when dawn broke through their windows, they would even remember their dreams. That they dreamt at all now felt like a little miracle.
That, Betty would think, was how she knew she was finally living; that, she would believe, was how she knew she was actually free.