You Can't Catch Me(88)

The bricks are not all of my making. Liam builds them too. I’m holding back details from him, things that happened with Jessie, things that happened to Kiki. I suspect he’s unsure of whether I’ve actually given up the search for Jessie. It seems out of character for me to have done so after my dogged pursuit. But I don’t have the energy to keep up the pretense that I’m still looking for her, even if it creates suspicion.

He is suspicious of me in general now. He’ll start to ask questions, like whether I’ve checked in with the sergeant in Jackson lately, and I’ll bite back that I’m not under investigation, and he should drop it, but I’m not sure he ever will. Not till Jessie’s found.

Another brick I help him build involves the choice I made about my mother. To let her be. To let her raise Serene. To let her and the other leftovers live in their utopia on a quiet farm in Connecticut.

And then there’s all the rest of the secrets, the biggest bricks of all.

I don’t tell him that I’ve recovered the money. Not that this is the biggest thing I’m keeping from him, but still. I made my way through the labyrinth of Jessie’s passwords and used the various passports I found to identify her two substantial offshore bank accounts and liquidate them. I’m not a thief, though, so when I unlocked the final key, I used some more tricks I learned from Liam and his cohorts along the way and found a way to send JJ her portion securely, and set up a trust for Serene. I kept my promise to Five and set up a real photography prize in her name in Jackson supplied by an anonymous donation, then salted away the rest of it offshore for myself, for a rainy day.

I don’t tell Liam that I spend my mornings in the bathroom reading the Jackson paper online, looking for signs that Jessie’s popped up. As a result, that town is so alive in my mind that I feel like I know many of the locals, those who show up in the paper on a regular basis, anyway. Sometimes I forget, and I start telling Liam a story I read that day, and he gets this puzzled expression on his face. I tell him it’s my way of keeping track of the investigation, setting up a Google Alert for stories that mention the town, but like so many things I say to him now, I’m not sure he believes me.

There are so many secrets, it’s hard to keep track.

In the end I think this is what breaks us. Opening up to him enough for him to see, or sense, the vast ocean of things I’ve kept to myself was a mistake. People always say that it’s bad to keep secrets, that they corrode trust. But I don’t think that’s true. It’s knowing there are secrets that you’ll never have access to that rubs away at us. I can’t tell him everything about me, but what I have said is too much.

It doesn’t happen all at once, us falling apart. That would be easier. There isn’t any dramatic fight; we could get past that, forgive each other, and make up with sex. Instead, one night, needing more sleep than I can get with Liam watching over me, I don’t go to his place. I don’t answer his texts. I just fall into the best sleep I’ve had in months in my own bed.

In the morning, I watch JJ’s new show on my iPad as I listen to my roommates rumble around, going through their morning routines. Then I start looking for apartments on Craigslist.

I need some space to write, I tell Liam. I found my original thesis in a box at the back of my closet. After I sent it to my old editor at FeedNews, they had to print a retraction. While it was more time in the public eye, at least this time it was positive press and got me an assignment. I mostly have to write on spec, and my articles are fact-checked to infinity, but I sell them, and it’s a foothold to getting back my career.

JJ’s right that people like a second-chance story. She’s making a comeback, too. Her first episode is about a foster house, not an orphanage exactly, but a family who takes twenty children at a time. Cooking’s a major deal in this house, so she spent a week with them, teaching the kids how to make a week’s worth of basics, then opened it up to donations. They flood in and the show goes viral. JJ’s back, winning smile firmly in place, eternal optimism achievable. She tells me to write about it, and it’s one of the first pieces I sell.

Liam visits my new apartment, but he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t ask me to move in with him, though, either. We work best in transience, I’ve decided. Or maybe that’s just me. I don’t know how to keep my secrets with someone I also depend on to make sure there’s toilet paper in the house and milk in the fridge.

Maybe we could have found a way. I like to think that. As the nightmares recede and I have things to do to occupy myself, I’m not thinking all day long about what JJ and I did.

As the months pass without a body being discovered.

Then I get a text.

“Something’s been bugging me since that day at the dive bar last summer,” Covington says one day in early June, almost a year to the day since I met Jessica Two. He wanted to drop by to see the new place, he’d said.

“What day at the dive bar?” I ask, trying to keep my voice even, as if I’ve forgotten all about that conversation.

“When I told you my theory about Todd last year,” Covington says. He looks tall in my tiny apartment, as if he might not fit on most of the furniture.

I go to the fridge in the alcove kitchen and grab the beer I know he wants. “That someone killed him?”

“Yeah.”

I walk into the living room and hand him the beer, keeping my hands steady. “Have you been talking to Liam?”