33 Sophie
Sophie
Brunch.
The only thing close to brunch Sophie has had for eighteen months is cold pancakes peeled from her toddler’s plate.
They enter beneath a freshly printed sign that says The Scrambled Egg.
She tries to think of what used to be in this building.
The brick overlay above the door is familiar, but she can’t remember.
She ran into Marissa at the coffee shop this morning, and because she was alone and she has no willpower, Sophie was strong-armed into an imminent brunch date.
Sophie tried to wrangle Joey and Elena into it too, via the group chat, claiming it would be a chance to get information from Marissa, maybe the cop perspective, but Elena had to work.
Joey, however, agreed to tag along and said she wanted to get a read on what Marissa’s police chief dad knew about Quinn’s case. Sophie was relieved.
She feels a little silly that she’s brought her giant bag, which is actually a diaper bag, but it’s passable as a purse, and she’s really only brought it because she was planning to take it to the spell circle.
She is still trying not to think too hard about the possibility that someone could be sneaking into her room while she sleeps.
The idea makes her cold with dread. Last night she clutched the journal to her chest and woke at every sound.
Even the absence of noise had her eyes peeling open, her half-asleep body involuntarily preparing for something terrible.
At about four in the morning, she started to confuse panic about the journal with panic about Leah and ended up calling Talia, who—sanely—did not answer.
She spots Marissa in a booth, dressed in a maternity shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. Sophie wishes she’d had a chance to remind Joey not to give any clues that they’ve seen the case file.
“So glad we did this,” Marissa says after they’ve hugged. Sophie and Joey sit across from her. “It’s been so long, Soph. What’s new with you?”
Sophie pushes out a smile. “Not much. I have a daughter. Eighteen months.”
“Oh my gosh,” gushes Marissa. “I can’t wait. But we’re hoping for a boy.” She runs her hands over her belly.
Sophie decides on a morning bun with a side of bacon and a tea. Marissa gets an egg white omelet. Joey just orders coffee.
“So, Marissa,” Joey says as their drinks arrive. “I never asked you why you ended up a police officer.”
Sophie’s senses go on alert, and she hasn’t even gotten her food yet. Joey is so blunt. It’s hard to help her navigate conversations so they go smoothly.
But if Marissa senses there is an agenda behind Joey’s question, she doesn’t let on. “Well, my dad was police,” she says, adding a little laugh that says, “You should have known that, silly.”
“It’s…in the blood, I guess. He worked Quinn’s case, actually. You might remember.”
“I do,” says Joey. “Did he ever talk about it at home? Quinn’s case?”
Sophie presses her knee into Joey’s under the table. Easy.
“No.” Marissa shakes her head. “He was a professional through and through. But the case was closed within a couple of days I think. It was pretty clear to everyone what happened. But you… That’s right, you continued to investigate for, what, another several years?
” She puts air quotes around the word investigate.
Sophie notices Joey scowl into her coffee mug.
“So, when are you due?” Sophie asks quickly. She wants to show Joey that Marissa is the sort of person you can’t ask direct questions to. She needs to be buttered up. “Hopefully you’ll get good maternity leave?” Sophie adds.
“Oh gosh, mid-October. My dad’s birthday, actually. I’m so blessed that both of my parents are still around.”
Sophie blanches. It could be just an offhand comment, but it’s not, she knows.
It’s a dig because everyone in this town knows Sophie’s mom left her at an early age, and she is sure everyone knows Joey’s mom took her own life.
Her attempt at buttering Marissa up was a waste of breath.
This entire conversation is a waste of breath, and she wishes she had just said no.
Their breakfast plates arrive, and a gluey silence spreads.
Marissa was always a rule follower, rigid and self-righteous.
She once told the principal that Sophie’s skirt was too tight, and the principal evidently agreed because Sophie was forced to change into a spare pair of slacks borrowed from a teacher.
But most of Sophie’s clothes were tight.
It was the shape of her body that made them that way, not that she was buying them tight on purpose.
“That’s what Tanner thinks, anyway,” Marissa is saying to Joey when Sophie checks back into the conversation.
Distantly, she registers the name. “Tanner McGrath?”
“Mm-hm.” Marissa stabs at her egg whites. Sophie watches the omelet jiggle unnaturally. She once heard that eggs are a complete protein, containing all ten essential amino acids. But not if you eliminate the yolk.
“You two still talk?” she asks, looking down at her bacon.
Marissa looks at Joey and then back to Sophie with an unreadable expression. Then she smiles. “Didn’t you used to text with him?”
“That’s not exactly how I would describe it,” Sophie says.
Tanner was a bully and a coward, an irredeemable person who made her hate herself for a very long time.
That’s how she would describe it. He even stole her grief—grief for her dead friend that she should have been allowed to work through purely and wholly but couldn’t because he chose two weeks before her death to assault her.
Sophie has spent too much time and money unpacking this with her therapist to go into it with Marissa Berg, so instead, she just says, “He used to pick on me a bit.”
“And yet, you still fucked him,” Marissa says bluntly and without pause, adding a small out-of-place smile.
Sophie almost chokes on her morning bun. “Excuse me?”
“I know you two slept together. He told me. He said you begged him to take your virginity, that you loved him, and he felt bad for you so he did it.”
Sophie has an uncharacteristic urge to throw her hot tea in Marissa’s face. She wants, suddenly, to stab her fork into her plump pregnant hand. And she honestly thinks she might do it until Joey stands abruptly. “Okay,” she says. “I think we’re done here.”
“Quinn came to see him, you know.”
Sophie looks up. Joey pauses with her fingers wrapped around the back of her chair.
“I think it was…two days before she died. I was at his house that night. In his room. Quinn came to his doorstep. When he got back upstairs, he was crying. Like, red-in-the-face sobs. He told me about how he slept with you out of pity and how Quinn made him feel guilty and wanted him to dump me to be with you. She was trying to play matchmaker apparently, but he just wanted to be with me.”
Sophie feels goose bumps prickle beneath her clothes as she shares a look with Joey. She doesn’t believe for one second that Quinn would have wanted her to be with Tanner. But the fact that she visited him at his house just days before her death means something. She’s just not sure what.
“Anyway, that’s all in the past,” Marissa says coolly.
“Back to present day.” Slowly, she looks up at Joey, who is still standing, then she glares at Sophie again.
“You do know the whole town knows what Elena said to her celebrity friends. That Quinn was murdered. Then, Tom Winter tells me you broke into his house. At first, I didn’t believe him because, well…
but then it dawned on me that I saw you that day, all of you, in the car heading down Elk Horn Road, toward his house.
” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know what you three are up to, but this town has its eye on you. And now, I have my eye on you.”
Then, she pats her mouth with a napkin and smiles broadly. “Should we get the check?”