“With what?” I asked.
He kept his eyes on the screen. Made like he was half working, but I knew him too well. “The girl. Ten years ago.”
“No, Everett. God,” I said. “And her name is Corinne. She wasn’t just some girl. She was my best friend.”
He flinched, his gaze flitting over me, as if he’d just woken up in my roomful of painted furniture. “You’re acting like I should know this, but you’ve never mentioned her. Not once. Don’t get mad at me because you neglected to tell me.”
Neglected. Like it was my duty. My failure. My fault. All the stories I hadn’t told him: Corinne and me in the principal’s office. Corinne and me in the kitchen with my mother, flour on our clothes, licking the sugar from our lips. Corinne and me in the back of Officer Bricks’s car senior year, his first month on the job, trying to keep a straight face when he said, I’m not a taxi service. Next time I’ll bring you down to the station, make your parents come for you. Nearly every story from my childhood included Corinne. And Everett hadn’t ever heard her name.
Everett didn’t like it when details surprised him. He was once blindsided in the middle of a trial—information his own client had kept from him—and he lost. It was an unforeseeable outcome for him, something he wasn’t expecting, and it hit him with a ferocity I wasn’t expecting. Behind closed doors, he became impenetrable. Closed off and borderline depressed. You couldn’t understand, he kept saying, and he was right. I couldn’t. Three days later, he started a new case, and he was back. Never mentioned it again.
If Corinne were here, she would’ve poked at this vulnerability over and over until she could expose it, and then it would be hers. And so would he.
I was more generous with people’s flaws. Everyone had his or her own demons, including me.
“I don’t know a thing about you from high school, either,” I said. “Because guess what? It doesn’t matter.”
“My family wasn’t part of a potential murder investigation.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, and I didn’t blame him.
I leaned across the table, my palms sweaty on the surface. “Oh, I get it. This would look bad for you, right? Taint your perfect family image?”
He brought a hand down on the table, harder than either of us expected to judge from the look on his face. He ran his hand through his hair and leaned back in his seat, taking me in. “This isn’t you,” he said.
It was my own fault. I wasn’t sure Everett had ever got a real grasp of who I was. We started dating when I was off for the summer, so I spent most of the summer being Everett’s girlfriend. I could be whatever he needed, whenever he needed it. I was the very definition of flexibility. I could bring him lunch at the office, say hi to his dad, stay out as late as I wanted, and sleep until noon. Could help his sister move apartments, browse the flea markets in the afternoon, always free by the time he got home from work, always willing to do what he wanted. By the time I went back to work the next month, we had crammed triple the time into the same amount of space.
I’d made myself small and unobtrusive, and I fit neatly into his preexisting life. One year later, and he knew things about me like a list of evidence presented in a case—everything removed from the scene, labeled and numbered in plastic bags: Nicolette Farrell. Age twenty-eight. Father, Patrick Farrell, vascular dementia following stroke. Mother, Shana Farrell, deceased following cancer. Hometown: Cooley Ridge, North Carolina. Education: bachelor’s in psychology, master’s in counseling. Brother: Daniel, insurance claims adjuster. Favorite foods and favorite shows and the things I liked and the way I liked them. My past just a list of facts, not something that ever truly existed for him.
“I didn’t come here to fight,” he said.
“I know.” I took a deep breath. “Corinne was screwed up, and I missed it. Or I ignored it. I don’t know. And the investigation was even more screwed up. But my dad didn’t do anything.”
“Tell me, then,” he said. “Tell me the story.” When I balked, he put his hands up, as if attempting to calm me. “This is my job. I’m good at it.”
The story. That’s exactly what it was now. A story with gaps that we attempted to fill with things that made sense. A story with different perspectives and different narrators and a single girl at the center.
“We were eighteen, had just graduated.” My voice turned low, and even to me, it sounded haunting. Haunted. “It was this time of year, almost exactly ten years ago. The fair was here, just like last week. We were all at the fair that night.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked.
I threw my hands up. “All of us. Everyone.”
“Even your dad?”
I flashed to this image—me on the stand and Everett asking questions. Getting to the truth. “No, not my dad. Daniel. Corinne and me and our other friend, Bailey—we went together in Daniel’s car. Our friends were going to be there. All of our friends.”
“And did you leave together?”
“Everett, are you going to let me tell the story, or are you going to cross-examine me?”
He folded his hands on the table. “Sorry. Habit.”
My limbs twitched. Too much caffeine. I paced in front of the table, trying to wear it off. “No, we didn’t leave together. Daniel and I got in a fight. It was kind of chaotic after that, keeping up with who stayed and who left, exactly. But I left with someone else when Corinne was still there.” I shrugged. “That’s my part of the story. Bailey couldn’t find Corinne after, so she caught a ride home with my brother later. She assumed Corinne had made up with her ex—Jackson. But Jackson swore he never saw her that night.”
Everett took a sip of his coffee, staying silent, waiting for more.
I shrugged again. “Her mom called my house in the morning, looking for her. Then Bailey’s and Jackson’s. By the end of the night, we were already searching the woods.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” You couldn’t explain the rest to someone who wasn’t there. Who didn’t know her or us. That a story is the most simplified version of events—something to file away into a sound bite, dulled and sharpened at the same time.
“I know how these things go, Nicolette.”
I nodded, but I didn’t sit down. Didn’t get any closer. “Other than the sorry excuse of an investigation, it got ugly—people accusing each other, saying things about Corinne . . . Everyone’s secrets out in the open, everyone’s thoughts and suspicions. It was a mess. I left at the end of the summer, but nothing changed. We never found her.”
Everett paused. The light on his face shifted as his computer screen turned black from disuse. “So who did it?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, if I go sit at the bar”—he shuddered—“after I recover from last night, at least . . . If I go sit at the bar and buy people drinks and ask, ‘What happened to Corinne?’, what are they going to say? There’s always a name. Even if it never gets to an arrest or trial, there’s always a common assumption. So who’s the name?”
“Jackson,” I said. “Jackson Porter.”
“The boyfriend?”
The one who mixed your drinks last night, I wanted to tell him. But The Boyfriend, yeah, that was what the investigation made him. “Right,” I said.
Everett took another sip, went back to his work. “It usually is. Are they looking at him for this other girl?”
“Annaleise,” I said, staring back out the window. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What do you think? Did he do it?”
“I don’t know.” There was too much to explain, too much to whittle down into a testimony under cross-examination on the stand. “The thing is, Jackson and Corinne were always fighting. It was nothing new.”