Page 48 of You Know Why

“I think that sounds like a great idea.”

We feed the kids. We decide it’s best if they don’t see their mother like this. If she takes a turn for the worse, we’ll let them in, but for now, it will be better this way.

When they let us back in, Margot slips to her sister’s side. She leans down and whispers in her ear. After a few moments, Brooklyn visibly relaxes. They stay like this, symbiotic, until Margot takes her sister’s hand and squeezes it, then stands up, rubbing a crick in her back.

“I think she’s asleep.”

“She is,” the nurse says, pleased. “Go get some rest yourselves, okay? It’s going to be a long few days as she starts recovering.”

“She will recover,” Margot says to me in the hall. “I know it.”

Their relationship is awe inspiring. Margot is the sister whisperer.

I didn’t always get along with my little sister. We certainly weren’t as close as Brooklyn and Margot seem to be. She was younger, a pest, an entitled beauty. Our parents cut her slack in infuriating ways, letting her do things I was forbidden to at her age. Her relationship with Andrew was all-consuming for all of us from the moment they got together. But she was my baby sister, and all I wanted was to protect her. To keep her safe, to keep her from harm. She spent a lot of time pushing me away. She was stubborn, and independent, and wanted to forge her own path.

And of course, her and Andrew’s love was a reinvention of the emotion. They were the only two such lovers who’d ever existed in the universe. She was so young when she fell for him; the emotions of a teenager are so oversize. They’ve never experienced them before; they don’t have any reference points. First loves are always overwhelming. Once, after an argument with our parents about how sanctified their love was, how they were going to be together forever, I slid my battered copy of Romeo and Juliet under her door so she could see it wasn’t anything special, what she was experiencing. They weren’t the first. They certainly wouldn’t be the last.

That pissed her off to no end.

So yes, our teenage relationship was a bit fractious. Maybe I was a little jealous of her—I mean, can you blame me? I only wanted the best for her. I encouraged her to focus on her studies, to work on having agency, a life away from Andrew. When he left her to go to the Air Force Academy, she practically shriveled up. He was a drug to her, and in her withdrawal, she perhaps started to understand the cost of her obsession. That she’d lost all her friends. That her family barely knew her anymore. That she’d made herself Andrew’s second skin, a malleable and compliant vassal. It made her physically sick, which was difficult for our whole family.

And him—he encouraged her slavish devotion by giving it back to her in spades, both in the form of love, and in the form of hurt.

You know that song, about showering the people you love? James Taylor, I think. Well, she showered him, that’s for sure. It was fun for him at the start, to have all that adulation. But she loved him too much. Too hard. Cloying. Overwhelming. He couldn’t deal with the pressure. It drove him away. That’s why he went almost all the way across the country for college.

You know how no one in a relationship loves the other as much at the same time. Andrew never loved Chloe like she loved him. He loved her, don’t get me wrong, but he hated her, too. She was just too much for him.

In the end, he didn’t love her anymore—who could? Her obsession drove him mad, and then she got pregnant, and that’s when he was well and truly trapped. He knew once there was a child involved, he would never be rid of her.

When I saw her body lying so still, when I realized what happened, how she’d been punished for her devotion, I knew he would have to be stopped one day. Because he’s the kind of guy who will attach himself to a woman and love her to death. He will love and mate and even marry, but when he’s had enough . . . she is in trouble.

If Chloe had listened to me, she wouldn’t have died. It’s as simple as that. Now, as I hold vigil for Andrew’s new wife, all I want to do is make sure Brooklyn is safe from him, too.

Never Saw It Coming

Theresa

Theresa wakes with a start from a deep sleep. She was dreaming about owls. They lined the branches of the trees behind her house, hundreds of them, all staring with their yellow eyes. It was a nightmare, she knows that, but can’t put her finger on what, exactly, was so terrifying about it that her heart is pounding and she’s short of breath. She loves owls. She is a nature freak. There should be nothing scary about this visitation. And yet. It is a warning, she knows. A portent.

There will be no more sleep tonight. She never used to have insomnia; it started in her mid-forties—“Perimenopause,” her doctor said. “We can start you on HRT and add some melatonin.” But none of that had worked, so here she is, fifty-five, on the other side of it all and still not sleeping well.

She checks her phone. There’s an email from Drake with the subject line “Vid Attached.”

Man, he does have the juice now.

She hits play and watches with a practiced eye. The clips have already been sanitized, so she doesn’t have to fast-forward and rewind, looking carefully—each one is of a different angle of Andrew Locke moving through the airport, all of them stitched together, with clear time stamps at the bottom.

She watches, spellbound.

It is definitely him. Even with the beard, he’s easily recognizable to her. He moves with the grace of an athlete and the bearing of a soldier. He might as well be a panther stalking through the crowds, the way people unknowingly give him a wide berth. Like they’re both positive magnets, one shoving the other away.

Except . . . there is another person who seems to be in every shot.

She backs it up and looks again. Tall. Curly hair, blond, like an aging surfer.

But she can’t see his face. He’s wearing a ball cap and a surgical mask, keeping his chin down low.

She calls Drake. He answers sleepily. “What’s up?”