Scared To Death (Live to Tell #2)(6)

She has no idea, and doesn’t have to make any decisions until the move, and so his clothes hang on in a dark limbo, like Marin herself.

In the large marble bathroom—her dream bathroom, she once told Garvey, when they were walking through as prospective buyers, a lifetime ago—she showers, brushes her teeth, blows her hair dry.

Same routine every morning, yet today will be different. Still a living hell, but June has arrived. Finals are over for the girls, as are the latest round of lessons and extracurricular activities that consumed the weekends. The school year that began in the immediate aftermath of Garvey’s downfall has come to an end at last. This morning, instead of heading over to their private high school off York Avenue, Caroline and Annie will be here at home with Marin, along with strangers from the cleaning service who may not turn a blind eye.

Which means you’ll have to hold yourself together.

No crying. No ranting. No hyperventilating. No swallowing a couple of the prescription pills her friend Heather gave her to make it all go away—some pills for stress, others for her relentless headaches, still others that let her crawl into bed in the middle of the day to capture the sleep that evades her in the night.

Maybe it’s better that way.

When she sleeps, she dreams.

Dreams of a little boy with big black eyes, and he’s calling for her.

“Mommy…Mommy, please help me…”

Not dreams—nightmares. Because she can never help him. Nobody can.

It’s too late to save Jeremy.

And maybe, Marin thinks, staring at her haggard reflection in the bathroom mirror, too late to save herself as well.



Brett yawns audibly, evoking a dark glance from his wife. He belatedly covers his mouth and resumes a riveted expression. Too late.

“You’re not even listening to me.” Elsa sounds more weary than irritated. She reaches for her mug of coffee.

She insisted on brewing it, insisted on sitting here in the kitchen to rehash what happened. In her lace-edged pale pink cotton robe, the front strands of her shoulder-length dark hair caught up in a barrette on top of her head, her lovely face scrubbed free of makeup, she looks more like a young girl than the worried mother of one.

“I’m listening,” Brett tells her. “I’m just tired. It’s five in the morning, and we don’t even have to be up for another—”

“I know, but there’s no way I can sleep now.”

Maybe not, but he certainly can. In fact, after he’d dutifully gone through the entire house clutching a baseball bat, checking inside closets and under beds for prowlers, he’d had every intention of climbing right back under the covers. He saw no reason to lose any more sleep. Even Renny had gone from frantic to drowsy, allowing Brett to tuck her back in with reassurances that there were no monsters.

Not in this house, anyway.

And the man—the monster—responsible for Jeremy’s death is behind bars, so…

“It was just a nightmare,” Brett had told Renny—and he tells Elsa the same thing now.

“But the window was open.”

“Maybe you just thought you’d closed it.”

“What about the screen? I never open that. Ever.”

“Maybe you did, and forgot.”

She gives him a look. One that says, I’m not crazy.

He knows she isn’t. Really, he does.

Though there was a time when he’d thought…

No. He’d never believed Elsa was actually crazy, had he?

But back when Jeremy was newly missing, she’d gone through a frightening period when she’d completely lost her grasp on reality. Most of the time, she was completely out of it—dissociative behavior, Brett later learned, was the psychiatric term. He would hear her talking to Jeremy as if he were still here, or find her frantically looking for him as if he’d just disappeared, so distraught that he feared she might harm herself. She even talked about wanting to die, but he convinced himself that she was just grief-stricken, that she’d never really try to take her own life.

When she did—when she overdosed and nearly died—he’d blamed himself.

From that moment on, he’d vowed to save his wife. From therapy to medication for what was diagnosed as acute stress disorder, from rehashing the tragedy to sidestepping the topic, from avoiding children to considering parenthood again—he swore he’d do whatever was necessary to help Elsa recover.

And she had. The sorrow never left her, but she was stable. For years.

When they learned last August that Jeremy had been murdered, Brett was poised for a relapse. She’d been grief-stricken, as had he—but there was no frightening dissociative behavior.

None that he’s seen, anyway.

What about now? he wonders uneasily, but promptly pushes the thought away. No. No way. After a decade and a half of torture, having found the answers she sought so desperately, Elsa is finally healing—or perhaps, healed.

Renny’s arrival in their lives has given her a sense of purpose again.

And yet, watching his wife with their soon-to-be-adopted daughter, Brett has worried all along.

She’s trying so hard to be the perfect mother—from preparing organic food and limiting treats and screen time, to what would probably be considered hypervigilance by any standard. Constantly fearing the worst has made her overprotective of Renny; maybe even paranoid.