Infinite(22)

“Of course you did.”

Karly delicately brushed something from the corner of her eye, and then she closed her eyes altogether. “Anyway . . . ,” she murmured.

I thought she was just basking in the warmth of the fire and in the glow of her success. She’d worked hard for it. I had no idea, no idea at all, that she was watching two trails diverge in the woods and thinking that she was on the wrong one.

“I’m really proud of you,” I said.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

You were running so fast in your life that you never saw that Karly wanted to slow things down.

Scotty was right. Karly had told me how she was feeling that day in everything but words. I never heard her.



“I wondered who was out here,” Susannah Chance said from the doorway of the dollhouse. “I thought it might be you.”

Karly’s mother wore a satin robe tied at the waist over her nightgown, and I could have sworn she’d put on makeup to go check on an intruder. She came inside the cottage and went and made herself a cup of coffee at the Keurig machine on the counter. When that was done, she took the mug into her hands and sat down on the sofa across from me.

Physically, she looked the way Karly would have looked in another twenty-five years, although Susannah was still trying hard to look like Karly’s older sister. She’d groomed her only child to be a carbon copy of herself, with the same ambition, same charm, same need for success. Karly had spent her twenties following that blueprint under Susannah’s watchful eye.

“How are you, Dylan?” she asked.

“I’m lost.”

“Yes, of course. Tom and I are devastated. I wake up each day, and I can’t believe it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Susannah sipped her coffee. The steam rose in front of her face. She’d said she was devastated at the loss of her daughter, and I’m sure she was, but Susannah Chance didn’t show emotions easily. Her husband was the poet, the one who wore his heart on his sleeve.

“You can stay here tonight if you like,” she added.

“Thanks. That’s nice of you. But I just needed to feel her again. That’s why I came.”

Susannah looked around at the dollhouse and gave me a numb smile. Maybe loss always brings self-reflection. “I don’t know if this is the right place to do that. I think Karly felt like a doll herself when she was here. Artificial. Unreal. A plaything. That’s my fault. The truth is, she was never really happy until she met you, Dylan. And if you sometimes felt that I didn’t like you, maybe that was the reason.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing at all.

“She told me what happened between her and Scotty Ryan,” Karly’s mother went on. “She was inconsolable over what she’d done. It was a stupid, drunken, onetime mistake and had nothing to do with how she felt about you. I hope you know that.”

“I do now.”

“Did you forgive her?”

“I never got the chance.”

“Oh, Dylan.” Susannah drank her coffee and looked away, with a teary shine in her eyes. She got up and went to the sink in the kitchen, where she washed the mug carefully and dried it with a towel. Susannah was always neat and precise. She put it away in a cabinet and then tugged her robe tighter around her body. She went to the door and opened it as if she were going to leave without saying anything more, but with the night air coming in, she hesitated. “I should tell you something. I know what you did. I understand it, even if I can’t condone it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you confronted Scotty about the affair.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Dylan, why? Why couldn’t you let it go?”

I shrugged, because I had no excuse for the assault. “I didn’t plan to see him. It was chance. He was there, I was there. I should have walked away, but I gave in to my temper. I blamed him when I should have been blaming myself. That doesn’t change what he did, though.”

“Well, the police know,” Susannah said.

“The police?”

“Yes, they called me. The house was one of our listings, so they called to see if I knew anything about it. They had a description of you, Dylan. They had a witness who saw you leaving the house. They knew about the fight. I’m sorry, I couldn’t lie to them. I told them about the affair with Karly. I’m afraid it gives you a motive on top of everything else.”

“Susannah, what are you talking about?”

“They know you killed Scotty,” she replied. “They told me you stabbed him in the heart. He’s dead.”





CHAPTER 9

I expected to find the police waiting to arrest me when I got back to the hotel. Instead, at five in the morning, the lobby was quiet and empty. Apparently they didn’t know I was sleeping here. I was relieved, because I needed time to think, to figure out what to do and where to go. Scotty Ryan was dead. The man who’d had an affair with my wife had been murdered. I’d killed him.

Except I hadn’t.

I’d hit him in the face and left him alone, bleeding but very much alive. Yes, a part of me wanted to kill him. That was true, and I couldn’t deny it. When I walked into that house, I’d been consumed with rage and out for revenge. But if I’d taken a knife and plunged it into Scotty’s chest, I’d remember doing it.