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It wasn’t so much a buzzing, she realized, as a vibrating noise, and while that thought would normally make her smile—that thought might even lead to a dumb double entendre she would laugh over with friends—she didn’t move because, even though she had no reason to believe this from a simple vibrating buzz, the sound made her blood run cold. The sound was a precursor, she thought. The sound, like her first baby being born, was going to change her life forever.
Stop with the hyperbole, Emily told herself.
After college, Emily had gone to Iowa to get a master’s in creative writing. Yep, she’d wanted to be a novelist. It was not lost on her that the next love of Myron’s life, the one he’d fallen for after they’d broken up and she’d married Greg, was the novelist Jessica Culver. Culver had been one of Emily’s favorite writers, living the life that Emily had sometimes imagined could have been her own. In the end, Jessica Culver had left Myron too, and Emily realized that was something else the two women had in common. Not merely writing, not merely breaking it off with Myron, but a streak of self-destruction in the guise of independence.
The buzzing was coming from Jeremy’s room.
When she was twenty-four, Emily gave up writing completely. She didn’t even journal. The idea of putting pen to paper repulsed her. She didn’t know why. It was only lately, in the last year or so, the craving came back. She had started a novel. She wasn’t sure what fueled that—the need to reach people, the need to tell a story, the desire for fame, glory, immortality?
Did you need to know your motive?
The buzzing was coming from under Jeremy’s bed.
Emily got down on her hands and knees to see better. Her Upper East Side apartment had three bedrooms. One for her, one for Jeremy, one for Emily’s younger daughter Sara. The vast majority of the time, it was just Emily here. Jeremy was, well, wherever he was. Sara had taken a job in Los Angeles working as a production assistant for a major streamer.
The buzzing stopped.
Didn’t matter.
It took another minute or two, but Emily found the phone. And when she did, her heart sunk. She stood and walked zombie-like back into the kitchen. The live coverage of Greg’s release was over. A commercial played exalting the virtues of selling your own gold by mail. A little while later, Emily sat heavily at the kitchen table and stared straight ahead. Then she picked up her mobile phone and hit the number.
Myron answered on the third ring. “Emily?”
“I’m at my apartment,” she said, her voice sounding very far away in her own ears. “Please come over right away.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As you watch Myron Bolitar, two competing, disparate thoughts ricochet through your brain.
One: You have lost control of the narrative.
Two: It is going exactly according to plan.
You no longer know which is true. You wonder whether there is a world where this paradox could be made whole, where the contradictions become harmonious. In a sense, it doesn’t matter. You are coming to the end of the journey.
That means killing Myron.
You wonder whether you are being analytical here or if you are looking for a rationalization. The truth—the hard truth—is you are still sane enough to know that you are not sane. You enjoy killing. You enjoy it a lot. You also believe that there are many people who feel—or would feel—exactly the same as you. You are not so different from them, but they have never let themselves “go there,” to use a popular modern idiom, so they don’t know what monster may lie dormant within them.
You have.
It changed you.
You hadn’t expected that. If you’d ever been asked to ponder what killing another human would have been like, you’d have honestly said that idea holds no appeal to you, that the thought of murder repulses you. Like anyone would. Like a so-called “normal” person. You were one of them. You’d never cross that line. And you never meant to. But once you did, well, things changed, didn’t they? For a moment you were a god. You felt an exhilarating rush like nothing else before. It knocked you down in surprise. And that’s when you knew.
You would seek the feeling again and again.
Even now, you don’t consider yourself a psychopath. You feel like someone who had an epiphany, a rare insight with almost religious undertones, and so now you see the world with a clarity that mere mortals can never quite understand.
And yet.
And yet, with that same clarity, you also know that you are unwell. You just don’t care. Circular reasoning but there you go. Human beings are selfish creatures. We want what we want, and the rest of the world is window dressing, background, extras in a movie in which we are the only star that matters. And so you recognized that you are trying to justify what you’ve become, all the while knowing that at the end of the day, you don’t really care.
You watch Myron take the phone call.
You have the gun. You have the plan.
Before the sun rises again, it will be over for Myron Bolitar.
