Mother of All Secrets(71)

“Stop calling me that. I hate being called Izzy. No one calls me that.”

Isabel looked at Vanessa and nodded. Her face showed no emotion.

Connor started to lunge, unsteadily, toward Isabel, his hands outstretched, reaching for her neck. With that, Vanessa grabbed a huge knife that I hadn’t noticed on the coffee table behind her and unceremoniously plunged it into his neck, inches from my own face.





Chapter Thirty-Three



Tuesday, October 13

Blood spurted out of Connor’s neck and splashed onto my shirt. It poured out of him like lava, immediately soaking the carpet a shade of dark crimson, like spilled cabernet. His eyes went blank, and then he collapsed, falling onto the couch first, and then the floor. His body convulsed. And then he was still. So, so still.

He was dead, or appeared to be. That part we’d agreed to. But this was not what we had discussed.

“What the fuck, Vanessa!” Isabel cried out. “What about the injection?”

My body felt numb. This was not the plan. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Kira’s hand was to her mouth. Selena just kept saying, “No. No. No.” We went over and stood with Isabel, who had turned completely white.

Vanessa’s back was to us. She was still holding the knife, unmoving. She didn’t respond to Isabel’s question.

“Vanessa!” Isabel screamed.

She turned around slowly and moved a strand of hair off her face with the back of her bloody wrist, looking at all of us with disdain. “God, you guys are so gullible. There was never a magical heart attack shot. Give me a break. This isn’t Breaking Bad. Honestly, it’s unbelievable—you guys agreed to a murder and you didn’t even bother to, like, I don’t know, google the feasibility of the proposed plan? Dermatological surgeons don’t just have access to lethal drugs that make a crime look like a cardiac arrest. Especially when those drugs are completely fictional. For God’s sake. Do your due diligence. You guys are as helpless and unprepared as Allison!” She scoffed, a cruel laugh that almost reminded me of Connor’s, who was still lying at our feet, his lifeless body continuing to pump blood onto the rug.

“What do you mean?” Isabel asked, frantic. “Why did you lie to us? What are we supposed to do now, with this mess?”

Selena sank to sit down on the armrest, head in her hands. “Our lives are over.”

Vanessa rolled her eyes at the two of them. “I didn’t tell you, Isabel, because he really did deserve to die, and none of you would have agreed to do it if you thought there was any chance of getting caught.” She turned to face the rest of us. “If Isabel’s disappearing act proved anything, it’s that you all only care about your own asses. If you’d come forward as Isabel had hoped—which I highly doubted would happen, by the way—I could have left you out of this next part. But you are needed for this plan. There is still a plan, after all. It’s just not the one you thought.”

“And what is the actual plan?” Isabel asked, tears welling in her eyes.

The bloodstain on the carpet was getting bigger and bigger.

“To punish everyone who deserves it. Not just Connor,” Vanessa murmured, too calmly. My body was tingling with panic. This was going terribly, terribly wrong.

“Meaning what?” Kira choked out.

“Meaning you’re to blame here, too, Isabel. I’m sorry, but you are. You claim you had no idea what he was really out there doing to women, but please—you knew who he was and what he was capable of. And if you really didn’t know, which I find hard to believe, it’s only because you didn’t want to. No one who’s halfway normal about sex keeps a list of conquests. Plus, Allison tried to tell you, and you practically hung up on her.”

“Vanessa, there was nothing I could have done! You know that. I was trapped.” Isabel’s blue eyes were wide with panic and confusion.

“You were a doormat. So complacent. So defeated and self-pitying. Until I came to your rescue, handed you an escape plan on a silver platter. Even then, you totally just let me do the heavy lifting, figuring out every detail. What kind of a daughter are you going to raise? The way I see it, people like you really don’t deserve to be mothers,” Vanessa mused.

“What the hell does that mean?” Isabel’s anger at Vanessa’s comment seemed to have eclipsed her fear, for the moment.

“None of you do, actually. I hate to agree with Connor on anything, but you’re all so pathetic. Do you not realize that? God, there’s nothing I hate more than a weak woman. You have these amazing gifts, these beautiful children—all of whom were conceived with no difficulty whatsoever, of course—and all you do is complain about how tired you are. How hard it is. Give me a break. Do you know how lucky you are? There are so many women who’d love to be mothers and can’t be, and they’d probably do a much better job of it than you, too, because they—we—wouldn’t take it for granted.”

We stared at her, each of us unable to say anything, unsure and terrified of where this was going.

She continued, her voice filled with a quiet anger. “Years ago, I miscarried a baby boy at twenty-eight weeks. I was devastated. I had to deliver him.” Her eyes got glassy and she looked to the ceiling. “I thought that holding my blue, lifeless little boy was the lowest moment of my life. But it turned out to be hours later, when they told me that my uterus was basically destroyed and that I’d never be able to have another child.” She shook off her tears and looked back at us again. “To add insult to all of it, my fiancé at the time wasn’t really into the idea of being with someone who couldn’t give him kids. Someone who reminded him only of sadness and loss. So that was the end of that, too.” She took a deep breath. “Do you know how frustrating it is to listen to you gripe about unpredictable naps and green poops and clueless husbands and pumping when I would give anything, anything, to have my baby boy with me today? To have a family? Do you know how infuriating it is that my sister got pregnant from one time with a stranger, while on the pill, and just, you know, on a lark, figured she’d be a mom? Do you know what that did to me?” My stomach dropped.