Good Girl Bad (46)

“She was going to meet Fred. Gen found her second phone. That fucking creep was sleeping with her.” Nate’s voice is hard. Even he doesn’t know if he’s angrier with Fred or with Rebecca.

Rebecca stops, shocked.

But of course she didn’t know her daughter. She was too busy blaming everyone else for things that were on her head.

“Except Freddy went to meet her instead. They fought. She said she left when Leroy arrived. Said Tabby was crying, and Leroy was trying to comfort her. But she didn’t stay, she didn’t see what happened.”

As this sinks in, Rebecca turns back to Nate. “Let’s find her first. Come on.” She’s so impatient. To find her daughter, check she’s okay.

To say sorry.

A million, million sorrys.

There won’t be enough days in her life to say all the sorrys that she owes.

She doesn’t even know if she can stop thirty of years of reacting one way. Blind rage. But she wants to try. And she knows, intuitively, that now her pain is right there, tangible, engulfing her, her anger might not be so essential anymore. Her anger might not get the upper hand.

“She’ll be at your house. You haven’t been back since Monday morning. Where else would she go? You’re the one she feels safe with. You’re the one who feels like home.”

For a moment Rebecca holds Nate’s eyes. And even as she revolts him, and terrifies him—the dog, my God, the dog—he wants to believe in this shift, this openness.

He can’t believe that after everything, hope still strains and surges in him.

Is hope a blessing, or a curse?

Nate doesn’t think he should trust Rebecca, but the flare of hope exists anyway. But he doesn’t have time to process his thoughts, because Rebecca’s grabbing her keys, her phone, standing impatiently at the door. Everyone else in the room looks at her in bewilderment, trying to catch up. Then Nate is on his feet.

“We’ll stay with Gen,” Cheryl says, for the second time that day.

“I’ll drive,” says Casey, snatching up her keys, kicking herself for not searching Nate’s place herself, wondering what exactly her officers did when they went there, did they even go inside or just knock and leave? And what sort of idiot— But Rebecca is already down the steps, into her car, the engine revving. Nate jumps in beside her, and Casey resigns herself to following.

As she backs down the drive, Rebecca pauses long enough to look Nate in the eye again, and holds his gaze.

“I’ll fix this,” she says. “It might take a long time. But I can see all the things I did, now. I can see how I broke everything. And I promise you. I’ll fix it.”

Then she throws the car into drive and tears off down the road.





44





One Week Later

Nancy rests her hand lightly on Freddy’s head.

Occasionally she strokes her hair.

Freddy has had it cut short, into a shoulder-length bob.

I don’t want to look like her, anymore.

Nancy said nothing. She understands Freddy’s anger toward Tabby. She thinks eventually, it might be directed somewhere else. Toward her father. She doesn’t interfere, though. She doesn’t try to mold her thoughts.

Somehow, Freddy got through her year ten exams, and just shrugged when asked how they went. Nancy doesn’t really care about the results, anyway.

She cares that Freddy came to her. Before Nate or Rebecca or Gen or the police.

“She’s sleeping with Dad,” she’d said. Silently handed her the secret phone.

The text messages were all to one number, except the first two. “Watch your back” and “dirty slut.” Freddy had reddened, and admitted she had sent the last three. Nancy thinks to herself that sending messages to Rebecca and Tabby’s normal phone kind of went against her plan to keep the affair a secret, but she doesn’t say anything. She knows Freddy would not have been thinking clearly.

She asks Freddy what she meant by “watch your back.” Freddy says she doesn’t know.

“I just wanted them all to feel as bad as I did,” she says. “Maybe I was saying Tabby is not trustworthy. Maybe she’ll sleep with Leroy too. Or maybe she’ll ruin your life, too. I guess I didn’t think very hard about it.”

The messages to Tabby’s secret phone went back to June. Five months of meeting times, sweet nothings, sexting. Nancy didn’t read them all—they made her feel sick. She tries to think about what changed in June, or what changed after, but she honestly couldn’t say she noticed anything at all.

Are all wives so clueless when their husbands start to fool around?

Maybe Fred had fooled around with teenage girls before. God knows, he was out a lot. For some reason, it’s the Saturday afternoons that Nancy keeps getting stuck on. Fred had always claimed he had too much work to take Freddy to her swim meets. Nancy had been taking her all year. Every single Saturday for forty-five weeks. Locally, yes, but also all around bloody Victoria. Admittedly, even before the affair started. But still. To learn that he could premeditatively set aside his “work” to bang Freddy’s best friend—a child, dammit—filled her with rage.

Anyway, he was gone now.

Nancy didn’t ask why Freddy didn’t tell her straight away. She didn’t want Freddy to feel for even a second that she had done anything wrong. And of course she could guess. She even understands Freddy luring Tabby out to confront her: she imagines Freddy had thought, with the hormone-fuelled and reckless judgement of a sixteen-year-old, that if she could just make Tabby stop it, she could protect Nancy—even Fred—and pretend everything was fine.