Joy Moore
Day Three Hundred and Eighty-Six
Waiting for my laptop to boot up, I pull the SD cards from my pocket.
I’ve had them for months—ten months, in fact, since the day the case was closed—but as of yet I’ve been unable to convince myself to watch them.
Now, I sift through them and plug one into the card reader.
A folder pops up, and I hesitate only a moment before clicking.
There it is: the final footage from one of Xander’s five secret cameras.
It took me several days to locate them all.
I figured it out around the same time I learned about Xander’s partnership with Shake Awake.
I’d woken from a nap to find an impasto painting of a coyote on the small wall between our offices in the recording room.
The art itself was fine, but the placement struck me as odd.
Too big for the space. With everything that was going on, I shrugged it off.
Whatever. But the next morning, after dashing off a chapter of my memoir while Xander was at the dentist, I gave it a second look.
It made sense, by that point, that he would be willing to do pretty much anything.
I had to search the house in subtle, brief increments so as to not arouse suspicion.
He was clever. Hiding them in electrical outlets and fake USB chargers.
In our bedroom alarm clock. When I confessed this to Carlotta, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose.
“I think it’s time you get a lawyer.” I already had.
A week later, I met Luna at Carlotta’s house, my first “safe house,” and we discussed options for how to move forward.
It’s a video from that first camera, hidden in the coyote’s textured black-tipped tail, that I click on now.
Watching, I hold my breath as Xander clutches my arms in the grainy half-light.
He squeezes so tight his knuckles turn white, and I struggle to yank myself free.
He’s already stopped the money transfer, already heard the episode I sent to Luna.
But what he’s most concerned about is the exchange between me and Benny.
“You’ve loved him all along, haven’t you?” When I don’t respond, he backhands my cheek. “Haven’t you?”
I shrink away, shielding my face. “Stop,” I cry.
He grabs my arms again, shaking me like a rag doll. “Haven’t you?”
Again, I resist, but he’s out of his mind.
I’m worried I’ve gone too far. When he rears back to strike again, I thrust my knee into his groin.
He lets out an animal-like yowl, and as I stumble away, he shoves my back.
Hard. It’s my head that hits the recording table, not his.
I crumble to the floor, and he drops to his knees.
When the room stops spinning, he helps me up, gently, so gently, as if I’m some precious, breakable thing. He kisses my swelling brow. I cry, and he tells me he loves me. Over and over, he loves me.
Then he freezes.
We both notice Luna through the window. She doesn’t fit in the frame, but the expression she wore—a mixture of horror and confusion—will be forever imprinted on my brain.
Holding me tight, Xander yells at her to go away as she tries to open the door.
The handle doesn’t budge, and she slaps the glass, screaming for him to let me go.
His jaw flexes, veins bulging on his neck. “Go away!” he shouts, and I take advantage of this distraction to kick him hard in the shin. He yelps and buckles in pain, and I manage to wriggle free again.
Before he has a chance to recover, I reach for the Fonz.
One swing. A downward cut, right for his head. One dull thud that sends him crumpling to the floor, dazed but very much alive.
It feels as if the next part moves in double time.
Glass shatters in the next room, and Luna bursts in from my bedroom.
Without stopping, she bolts straight past Xander to let Carlotta and Emil in through the terrace door.
Though I didn’t understand their sudden appearance at the time, I learned later that they’d heard Luna shouting and come running.
A godsend, because Xander is already getting back onto his feet.
Emil takes over, restraining Xander stomach down on the floor in a police hold as Carlotta brings me outside, away from the cameras.
I can’t see us now, but I remember my hair whipping my face, Carlotta shouting over the howling wind, “Are you ready now?”
I nodded. “Take me to the shelter.”
She grabbed my elbow, and steered me toward the street and into her open garage, where we scrambled into her black Camry. Before starting the ignition, she turned to me. “Quick, before we go—is there anything you absolutely need?”
I covered my mouth. “My meds.”
“Where are they?”
I told her, and she nodded once. “You stay,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
Waiting in the locked car, head throbbing, all I could think was that I shouldn’t have involved Benny.
I’d just wanted Xander to see us forming a united front against him.
Recording an episode we could air to the world if necessary, which I would keep safe with Luna until the time came, if the time came.
I knew Xander would come home fuming after watching us through his surveillance cameras, and when I had proof of his abuse—proof on his own goddamn cameras, proof beyond the bruises coloring my skin—I could hold it over him and force him to leave me alone and grant me a divorce.
Audio feed and video feed—a one-two punch of security to guarantee my freedom.
But then I chickened out, and Benny told me he loved me, and I just couldn’t.
I couldn’t explain why I’d hidden the truth for so long.
Didn’t want to see the worry in his eyes.
I was ashamed, and I promised myself I would make things right between us when I was back from the shelter.
But of course I have no footage of myself sitting in Carlotta’s car, thinking these thoughts. What I’m watching right now is what happened in the room after I was gone. The moment I knew nothing about, and didn’t understand until Luna snuck into my hospital room the morning after my surgery.
I’m watching the moment Xander dies.
It happens without warning. One minute he’s struggling against Emil’s police hold, the next he’s completely still.
Just like that.
Emil checks his pulse, swears, and rolls him over onto his back.
“What’s happening?” Luna asks as Emil starts chest compressions.
She watches for a moment, stunned. Then she’s cursing. Cursing, and muttering, “Oh my god, oh my god.” She pulls out her phone.
“What are you doing?” Emil shouts.
“I’m calling nine one one!”
“Not yet.” He stops the compressions. “Hold on.”
“What are you—what?”
Examining Xander’s eyes, left then right, he says, “Fuck.”
This, right here, is the moment Carlotta returns for my meds. She halts in the open door.
Seeing her, Emil settles back onto his haunches with a sigh. “Head trauma.”
“Oh,” Carlotta says. “Oh no.”
“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.” Luna fumbles with her phone again.
Carlotta gently plucks it from her shaking hands. “Give it a minute,” the judge says, still surveying the room. When she seems satisfied with what she sees, she nods once at Emil. He nods back. “All right,” Carlotta says to Luna, “let’s talk this through.”
Luna is clearly bewildered, but she doesn’t argue. She swipes tears from her cheeks as the three of them run through every possible outcome. Murder. Manslaughter. Self-defense. Accident. There would be a trial. It would be national news. International news. It would almost certainly ruin my life.
“But it doesn’t have to get that far,” Emil says.
“It does not,” Carlotta agrees.
Luna looks back and forth between them. “What…?”
“Let’s just say,” Carlotta says, “Emil knows how to crash a car.”
Luna’s jaw drops.
“Remember, Joy doesn’t know he’s dead,” Emil says, inspecting Xander’s head. “And we got lucky with the blood.”
Pressing her palms to her temples, Luna says, “It’s too risky.”
“You don’t have to stay,” Carlotta says. “You can leave right now and you were never here.”
“But what about you?”
“What about me? I’m on my second round of cancer in five years. I’m sick of thinking about me.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Emil adds.
“If you want to go, then go,” Carlotta says. “We won’t judge. Like I said, you were never here. But you know what she’s been through. And you know—I know you know—that justice isn’t always served by way of the law.”
Luna slides her hands down to her neck and exhales heavily. Lowering her voice, she asks, “But how would you get away with it?”
“Let’s just say,” Carlotta says again, more pointedly, “this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve helped cover things up for a friend in need.”
I was aware, waiting in the Camry, that Carlotta was gone for a disproportionately long time, but never in a million years would I have guessed this was the conversation she was having.
On the way to the shelter, Carlotta asked where Xander’s cameras were.
Initially, I’d planned to gather them up in the morning while Xander was training with Emil, just before I snuck out of the house.
But that was no longer an option. I walked her through the entire setup, excluding only the camera directly above my desk.
Luna had given it to me a few days earlier—“for backup”—and I hadn’t yet found a good spot for it.
Because of the grille’s busy pattern it wouldn’t have caught much, if anything, which was likely why Xander hadn’t used it for one of his own hiding spots.
But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I left it out because the only cameras we needed were Xander’s.