The Ex(48)

Maybe other people move on, but I hadn’t. I moved more in circles. Sometimes when I thought about the connections from one man to the next, I thought that being alone was predestined.

I’ve never been able to explain why I did what I did to Jack. The best I can do is to say it was because he was too nice—at least for me. Just like Jack said, his kindness made it impossible for me to leave him.

What did my mother say after Jack’s first trip to Oregon? “I don’t know how you got someone so nice to fall in love with you.”


“BUT HE MUST NOT HAVE moved on completely,” I said now to Melissa. “Not if he had those pictures. Buckley even said something about Molly finding them once and flipping out. And he still kept them.”

“Olivia, I swear, if you of all people start crying, I’m cutting you off. And not to be rude, but ever since he got arrested, we haven’t had a single conversation that would pass the Bechdel test.”

We’d learned about the test in college, probably from Charlotte. A woman in a cartoon by Alison Bechdel said she’d only see a movie if it had two women in it who talked to each other about something besides a man. If either Melissa or I droned on too long about a guy, the other would invoke the rule and change the subject.

“I’m not talking about some man. I’m talking about Jack. Not even, but about my instincts about Jack.”

“What’s going on here? You can’t possibly be thinking about you two starting—”

“Oh, of course not. I’m actually wondering if he might have kept the pictures for a different reason. What if—what if I really broke him? He was always so fragile.” Jack saw rejection and humiliation in even the smallest slights. But on the night we broke up, the hardship wasn’t imagined. Me. Owen’s crash. The psych ward. His first book, written three years later, basically about what a bitch I am.

“How many times have we had this conversation? He had a breakdown. His brother died. But everything worked out—”

“You’re not hearing me. What if it didn’t all work out? What if Jack never got put back together again? I’m rethinking everything I thought I knew about him. Like that mix tape. It seemed sweet at the time, and now it seems a little obsessive. Maybe this side of him was always there, and I pushed him over the edge.”

“Okay, now that’s just stupid. Take anything that’s sweet for a twenty-year-old guy, and it’s like serial killer shit on a forty-year-old. Dungeons and Dragons. Pet lizards. The Doors. Making those stupid Monty Python voices. Collecting . . . anything. Need I go on?”

“Stop it, I’m serious.”

“Come on, that was funny.” I wasn’t budging. “Where’s this coming from, Olivia?”

I wanted to answer the question. I wanted to tell her that it was possible for GSR to linger on clothing for a month, but extremely rare. That Jack probably knew Malcolm Neeley would be at the football field that morning. That good people like Ross Connor and Scott Temple were telling me that maybe I didn’t know Jack as well as I thought I did.

But I couldn’t. I downed the rest of my drink and signaled for another. We stopped talking about Jack after that, but in my head, I continued an internal debate.

On one side were my suspicions. I had been so convinced from the second Buckley called me that Jack had to be innocent. But what grounds did I have for my assumptions? On the other side was my guilt. This was Jack—good, honest, and decent. Who was I to suspect him of something so heinous?

And then there was a voice trying to reconcile the two sides. Maybe he was guilty. Maybe he was an angry, vengeful psychopath. But if he was, who had made him that way?

Me. I did that.





Chapter 14


I FINALLY DRAGGED myself home after Melissa insisted on feeding me a plate of beef Stroganoff to help absorb some of the gallon of alcohol in my system.

Despite my promise to Melissa that I would take three aspirin with two glasses of water, I opened a bottle of Cabernet and carried it with an empty wineglass into my bedroom. Once I had changed into a T-shirt, I poured myself a big glass, climbed into bed, and flipped open my laptop.

The New York Post website had gone live with an article that would be in tomorrow’s pages: an interview with Malcolm Neeley’s son Max. “I was appalled at the way the lawyers for my father’s killer tried to blame the victims at the bail hearing. And I’m astonished that a sitting judge fell for it. My father wasn’t perfect, and I know a lot of people blame him for the horrifying atrocity that my younger brother committed. But Todd was mentally ill, and my father loved us both as much as he knew how. I will not allow these lawyers to deprive him of his humanity.”

Scott Temple had mentioned that the media winds could change tomorrow. Now I was wondering whether Temple had encouraged Max to go to the press. Temple and I were bound by the court’s gag order, but the victims’ families were not.

I closed the Post article, pulled up Jack’s e-mail account, and typed in the log-in information.

jack<3smollybuckley

I was in.

Scrolling through the messages felt like a more intimate version of the late-night drunken cyberstalking I’d engaged in occasionally over the years. Instead of author Q and As and book reviews posted to his Facebook page, I was reading his actual e-mail. About half was the same kind of garbage that filled my in-box: coupon codes for free grocery delivery, a reminder that his gym membership would lapse in two months, a nastygram from an online reservation system for no-showing at Gramercy Park Tavern the previous night. Most of the other half of the messages were from friends and acquaintances in response to the news of his arrest: “Jack, I doubt you can check e-mail but didn’t know what else to do. What is going on?” Lots of vague offers to help: “Let us know if we can help?” “Does Buckley need anything?” Only a few of these people had actually bothered to call Charlotte.