No One Knows Us Here(80)

After that time I didn’t murder my stepfather, I thought about it a lot. I thought of how to get away with it. When other girls my age were fantasizing about weekend parties and boys and college applications, I was thinking about all the ways I could do it. I’d run over scenarios and weigh their pros and cons during class when I should have been learning how to graph a parabola or write a villanelle.

Drown him, push him from a great height. Shoot him, stab him, poison him, light the house on fire. Cut the brakes. There were so many ways to do it, but only three ways to get away with it. That’s what I figured.

Make it look like an accident.

Make it look like self-defense.

Never get caught.

I didn’t kill him, but I felt like I could, if it came to that again. It comforted me, knowing what was possible. It gave me the strength to keep going, to bide my time until I could leave home forever. He never did touch me again. I thought that was enough. I thought I had stopped him. I thought it was over, but it wasn’t over. I had been a fool to think it was over. He didn’t stop—he moved on to someone else. His own daughter. My little sister.

I could have saved her. That thought had haunted me, ever since she came to stay with me. And my mother, too. If I had taken care of Jason all those years ago, my mom would still be alive and Wendy would be okay and I wouldn’t be standing here, in Leo’s kitchen, right now.

The air between me and Leo quieted. Everything froze then. The island lights illuminated the dust floating through the air. Faint streaks became visible on the quartz countertops. The coils of his curls glistened. The light bounced off his skin, so smooth and tan, taut across the bones of his skull. Even from halfway across the room, I could make out the glacier blue of his eyes. I swear I could see a reflection of myself in the black pools of his pupils, like a hidden detail in an old Dutch painting.

Leo had a patient little smirk on his face, like he knew he had already won. Like he just needed me to calm down so we could sit on the couch and talk this out like adults. “You chose this,” he said.

I yelled. I yelled a crazed, unleashed kind of yell, more animal than human. I backed up slowly, keeping my eyes trained on Leo. Then I ran, as fast as I could, back into the kitchen, and flung my whole body straight into the cabinets.

“Rosemary, what the hell—”

I yelled again and banged my face against the cupboards over and over again until I felt blood trickle down my nose. I didn’t feel a thing—no pain—but I could smell it. I could taste it. The sharp, iron taste of blood.

“What are you doing?”

I turned to glare at him. I couldn’t even feel my face, or whatever I’d done to it. “Making it look like self-defense,” I said.

He looked confused and then like he was going to laugh. My hand shot out, reaching for the nearest knife on the magnetic rack. The boning knife. I raised it up over my head in one swift movement.

He was scared then, with the knife’s pointy little edge so close to his pulse. His eyes pled with me. His lips curled back, revealing those straight gapped teeth. I wasn’t looking at his face, but at his neck. His head was arched back, his neck wide open. Time slowed down, and my vision narrowed only to that part of his body. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, once. His skin smooth, freshly shaven. Poreless. He hadn’t missed a hair. I could almost feel it under my fingertips, just looking at it. Soft as a baby.

“Why are you doing this to me, Leo?” I hissed, pressing the tip of the knife against his throat, just enough to indent the skin without drawing blood. “Why won’t you just let me go?”

Leo blinked at me. He no longer looked scared. He sensed an opening, a reprieve. The corners of his mouth turned up in a calm, placating smile, the kind of look you give a little kid or a dog. “You know why,” he said. “Because I love you.”

I plunged the blade deep into his throat, all the way down to the handle.





CHAPTER 26


I don’t know how long I stood over his body. The knife was still in my hand. For however long it was—seconds, minutes—I couldn’t move at all. My mind was empty and blank, a sky with no stars. I blinked down at Leo lying on the kitchen floor but couldn’t make sense of it.

The knife had entered his throat so easily. It seemed like something that should have been harder to do, something that required more strength, more muscle. There was no give at all. Just—slip! My hand drew away from his neck, and my arm fell to my side. His eyes were round and scared and—surprised. He didn’t think it would come to this. He didn’t know—and how could he? I had never told him—that I had been preparing for this day for years, so long it felt like I’d been preparing for it my whole life.

He reached up and grasped his neck with both hands, and blood oozed out between his fingers. It didn’t spurt out of him like a fountain. It came all at once, like lava gushing from the cracks in the earth, thick and hot. He tried to say something, but of course he couldn’t, and then he crumpled to the ground.

It was very fast, or at least that was how it seemed to me then. I stood ready to fight, ready to plunge the knife in again and again until the job was finished, but that hadn’t been necessary. He was dying all on his own, twitching once or twice and then lying still, his eyes open. He was dead.

His body was lying in an unnatural position, his legs twisted over to the side, his head resting in a pool of dark blood. The way his head was angled, you couldn’t see the wound I’d made in him, the drain of his throat. The towel that he’d slung over his shoulder lay underneath him, soaked in blood, a bright-red flag.