Never Lie (73)

And now it’s ours. Our dream house. I don’t know how I could’ve ever not wanted to live here.

“How is the bean doing?” Ethan asks me.

I instinctively lay my right hand on my stomach. A few weeks ago, I found out that Delilah will have a baby brother or sister. We’re both ecstatic about it. After all, as Ethan points out, we have four more bedrooms to fill. Dr. Hale wasted this house, living here all alone. We will put it to good use.

“The bean is good,” I tell him.

He grins at me. “Glad to hear it.”

Delilah has found another flower to bring to me. But in her eagerness, she takes a worse spill this time and doesn’t recover quite as easily. She sits on the grass, her chubby legs stuck out in front of her, wailing until her face turns bright red.

“Oh no!” I cry, my maternal instinct kicking into overdrive. “Let me grab her.”

“No.” Ethan squeezes my shoulder. “You rest, Mama. I’ll get her.”

I smile and take another sip of my iced tea while my husband sprints into the garden to comfort our daughter. He’s so good with her. He’s sweet and patient and he makes her laugh. Although to be fair, it isn’t hard to make a one-year-old laugh. Dropping a Cheerio on the floor will do the trick.

Sure enough, after a minute, Ethan has Delilah happy and laughing again. He lifts her onto his shoulders and gives her a ride around the garden while she giggles with delight.

I watch as Ethan’s loafers trample over the patch of grass that just started growing back about eight months ago. For a year, we watched that patch anxiously. The grass on the rest of the garden was so lush and green, but nothing grew there.

I looked it up. I told Ethan that after a dead body is buried in the ground, plant growth is suppressed for about a year, but then it comes back even better than before. And it’s not like somebody was going to look at that patch of soil where nothing could grow and know that Luke Strauss’s body was buried underneath.

Digging his grave was harder than killing him. Ethan took care of both counts—I’d never found him sexier. Luke fought, but not as hard as I would have expected. I saw the resigned look in his eyes seconds before Ethan slashed his throat. And now that he’s gone, he’s reunited with his precious Adrienne, if you believe in such things.

Thankfully, two years later, the grass has grown back where we buried him. His body will act as fertilizer for years to come. As will the body of Edward Jamison, buried a few feet away.

Ethan waves to me from the garden. I love him so much. I never thought it would be possible to love again after what Cody did to me. But here I am. Married to a wonderful man. And the two of us share a secret that will bind us together for the rest of our lives. Both of us will take that secret to our graves.

At least, I will.

Sometimes I wonder about Ethan. He gets nervous when people go out into our garden. He was so anxious about the grass, I almost thought he was going to crack for a while. If somebody came around and started asking questions, I’m not sure how he would hold up.

Hopefully, that won’t ever happen. But if it does, I’m prepared to take care of the situation.

After all, my mother always said that the only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead.




THE END



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Acknowledgments


As I was finishing this final draft, I was searching through some of my previous manuscripts for general acknowledgments that I could just kind of copy, because—let’s face it—I always thank the same people. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any generic ones. I had one where I was talking about my husband trying to convince me to write about conjoined cow twins, one where I said my father was a serial killer (or wasn’t—not clear), and one where I confessed to multiple unsolved murders as well as the locations where I buried the bodies.

(Oh wait, I think I deleted that last one. Never mind.)

Do other authors obsess so much about the acknowledgments? No? Just me? And the crazy part is the thanking section only ever ends up being like a paragraph.

On that note…

Thank you to my mother, for reading and rereading this one. Thanks to Jen, for the thorough critique as always, and in general, thanks to my entire Kickass Women Writers’ Power Group (I just made up that name right now, but I think they’ll be cool with it) including Beth and Maura. Thanks to Kate for the great suggestions. Thank you to Nelle for a thoughtful critique. Thank you to Avery for critique and cover advice. Thanks to Pam for cover advice, and also for your awesome mentorship. Thanks to Val for your eagle eye.

And thank you to my father, who for the first time ever, read a book I wrote prior to publication, so that he could give me advice from the perspective of a practicing psychiatrist, including, “Manolos are not boots!” (Yes, they can be. Stick to psychiatry, Dad.)





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