The Last Housewife (5)

Six months, and here was the truth: I wasn’t a writer. I’d turned into a housewife.

What would Laurel have said to that? Dear god, Clem?

I looked up and caught my reflection in the window above the sink. Raised fingers to my cheeks. I was crying, gentle tears tracking down my face. I hadn’t even felt it start. I’d trained myself to do this, years ago. To cry effortlessly, elegantly, like a silent movie actress. But now that I was older, the tears had a habit of creeping up on me, arriving when I least expected. Maybe I’d performed for so long I wasn’t capable of recognizing my real feelings. Were there even such things, or was everyone always reacting in ways we understood we were supposed to? When did the performance ever end?

Mentally, I slapped myself, and bit my tongue as punishment. It ended when you were dead, for fuck’s sake. When your body was found hanging from a tree or a showerhead in the place you loved most, the place you used to sit for hours reading scripts, or where you were a star, your body flying strong and triumphant across the grass. It ended when you killed yourself, or when somebody killed you, and all your chances to wake and breathe and cry were stolen from you forever. When everyone who was supposed to love you brushed your death aside, and the only one who cared to look deeper was a stranger. A true-crime podcast host.

But I cared. That was the truth I couldn’t shake, the one that followed me no matter where I hid, staring back from every mirror, screen, and window. I’d sequestered myself in a safe, faraway place, and still the past had found me.

Now I had a choice.

I could almost see myself making the decision, as if I were floating outside my own body. I would not let Laurel and Clem disappear into the fog of forgotten people. I’d told Laurel I would protect her, and instead I’d run. I’d promised Clem I would stick by her, yet I’d chosen wrong when it counted. I’d failed too many women.

I would not leave this to Jamie Knight, even if he was more qualified. I would go back to New York, and I would find out what happened to Laurel. I would trace the contours of her life since I couldn’t hold her hands. I would pick up her memory and cradle it. I would whisper my apologies; I would kneel on my hands and my knees in the place where she’d died and I would repent. If it was true someone had hurt her—if someone had killed her—then I would find out who and I would protect her, years too late, the only way I could.

I clutched my phone and sprinted back upstairs, through the master bedroom to the walk-in closet, where my suitcase stood tucked and waiting in the corner.





Chapter Three


When I arrived in New York at eighteen, I understood for the first time that there are some places in this world with presence. Watching the landscape change through the window on the train up from the city, I saw the gulf between where I was coming from—a strip-mall suburb in East Texas—and the Hudson Valley, where the wide, open sky didn’t just exist but confronted you. Where the dark Catskills rising in the distance made you feel small and the unrelenting river had a heartbeat, a voice that whispered you might be here now, but it had been here long before and would be long after.

Whitney was only a short train ride up from New York City, but that first time, it felt like entering a new world, one in which my life would truly begin. The day was full of firsts: my first plane ride, first train ride, hell, first time setting foot outside the great state of Texas. Unlike Heller, a Reagan-era boom town whose history was charted only by the slow evolution of fast-food signs, the towns that made up the Hudson Valley were suffused with a past so rich it was nearly tangible. The towns held the former homes or headquarters of George Washington and FDR, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, sites from the American Revolutionary War. And they thrummed with green beauty—so much that they’d given rise, I’d read, to the first true school of American painters. This, I’d thought, was where the kind of life that made history books happened.

Now, after eight years away, my awareness was finer-tuned. I understood what made the Hudson Valley beautiful, what kept the history pristine, towns quaint, land wild: money. Old money and new. Families with far-reaching Dutch heritages, New York City financiers and real estate tycoons, renowned artists, Hollywood actors—all of them had homes here, lives here. Often second lives, hidden chapters that could unfold in the dark, in a place fewer people were watching.

I drove my rental car down a residential street lined with trees and dappled with sunshine, stifling a yawn. Cross-country flights were exhausting. At this point, I couldn’t remember what I’d packed yesterday. I’d moved through my closet in a fugue state, pulling clothes off hangers and stuffing them in my suitcase. It had seemed critical to pack quickly, to purchase a seat on the next available flight and push myself out the door before Cal called or anything else intervened to change my mind.

Speaking of. I glanced at my phone, to the text I’d sent Cal and his response.

Me: Hey, decided to go to New York for a few days. Wanted to see if my old stomping grounds inspired me. See you when we’re both back.

Calvin: You should have told me! Could’ve had my assistant book your travel. Hope you solve your writer’s block. Call you later.

I’d bought myself a week, max, before Cal was back from his trip to some hedge fund they were looking to buy in Silicon Valley. Given the timeline, I’d have to work fast. I glanced at the bag from the airport gift shop that held my slapdash supplies: a laughably bright-purple notebook from the Lisa Frank line, all they’d had left; a slim packet of pens, thankfully normal; and a portable cell-phone charger. I assumed this was the full battery of things I’d need for an investigation. Jamie Knight would probably shake his head at me.