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When I’d told Sharesa he was a needle in a haystack, I hadn’t known how fitting that expression would become.
23. BRECIA
Salt Lake Valley, Utah
1 year before
After Meghan, he deleted his MatchStrike account.
He erased his browser history. Cleared his cache. Deleted the messages he’d sent her and anyone else. Scrubbed every trace of Jimmy Carlson from the Internet that he could.
I knew it wasn’t that easy to erase yourself. Nothing on the web was ever really gone. But only if someone was looking for it.
A few weeks later, he announced to April that he was quitting his job at the IT company in Salt Lake. They’d treated him like dirt, he said. Underpaid him. Underutilized him. It was time to move on. Plus, the office manager and most of his coworkers were worthless.
April stared at him in shock. Her eyes welled up with tears as she gestured to the house around them and the living room she’d just finished decorating. I’d been there when she opened a package containing new fuzzy throw pillows a few days earlier. Emma had insisted on building a fort with them immediately.
“What are you talking about?” April asked in disbelief. “We’re finally settled in. We finally have a nice house. We have friends. The girls have friends. We talked about staying here until they graduated from high school. Why is it always like this?”
His eyes flashed with annoyance. “I’ve thought about this a lot, and I don’t expect you to understand. But since you’re not exactly paying the mortgage, I do expect you to support me.” He snorted then pointed at the throw-pillow fort Emma and Kimmie had constructed the day before. “I don’t criticize you for how you do your ‘job.’” He lifted his fingers in air quotes. “When you do it, anyway. This place looks like a mess.”
April stiffened like she’d been slapped. She quickly swiped at the tears that had escaped down her cheeks and knelt to pick up the pillows and blankets on the floor. The light in the dining room flickered once, then twice as the rage trickled through me. April, however, looked like she’d just been unplugged. He stood over her in the living room for a few minutes in silence as she cleaned up the fort, muttering something under his breath about realtor fees. Then he left the room.
I didn’t follow him.
I knew exactly why we were moving. And I knew why we would move again. And again. And again.
To be honest, I sort of felt like I’d been unplugged too. Since that night in the mountains—the night he killed her—I had stopped following him. Instead, I spent my days watching the girls play. Watching April make their lunch and give them baths and tell them stories about fairy queens and pony pals. I was too numb to do anything else.
For all my efforts, I was powerless. Powerless to stop him. Powerless to leave (I had nowhere else to go. How the hell was I going to find my way home now?). Powerless to bring Meghan back.
So I shut down and just existed, wrapping my focus around the bright spots in the void: April and the girls.
April was extra quiet for a few days after he told her he was quitting. But when he didn’t mention it again, she gradually softened and carried on like normal. I understood that she’d heard this before.
Three months later, when he abruptly announced that he’d found a new job in Idaho, she smiled weakly then went into the bedroom to lie down with the girls and Oscar for story time.
I lay down on the bed next to Emma. I savored this nightly tradition, when we shut the door and April read to the girls. Oscar glanced at me then settled down beside April and continued purring.
April told the girls the story of the fox and the hound, reading from a bent paperback Disney book tucked into the shelf by the door.
Unlike the pony pals and the fairies, this was a bittersweet book. Two friends from different worlds. You knew right from the start that it wasn’t going to end particularly well. But you kept hoping anyway.
When April got to the part about the old dog—Chief—breaking his leg during a hunt for the fox, Kimmie chimed in. “The fox didn’t want that old dog to get hurt, Mama.”
April nodded. They’d clearly had this conversation before. “That’s right, baby. The fox was just trying to get away. He was scared.”
Emma sat up in bed. “But that dog wanted to hurt the fox. He meant it.”
April hesitated. Then she nodded again. “Yes. That’s just his nature, though. He can’t help it, honey.”
I stayed at the foot of Emma’s bed as April turned off the lights and closed the girls’ bedroom door.
There were foxes, and there were hounds.
And then there were the animals who didn’t fit into the natural order of things at all. Who meant the hurt they caused every time.
24. SKYE
