Page 88 of The Woman I’ve Become

I have imagined her doing that a million times. Even now I remember her laughter . . . her enthusiasm over every little thing we talked about or did together. Of course, our adventures were always a secret. Her parents couldn’t know about me. I suppose that made us all the more exciting.

Then again, there was a lot they either didn’t know or overlooked about Julia.

“I wasn’t really looking for a relationship,” I say no matter that she didn’t ask. “A man was the furthest thing from my mind after what I’d been through. But Phillip was persistent.”

She watches me now but says nothing.

“The following Sunday there was an article in the newspaper about a missing woman. The moment I saw her, I knew she was like me. I guess that’s when my secret plan started to form in the farthest recesses of my brain. Phillip’s position in the city—my God, the man knows everyone—could help when the time came. So I allowed him to sweep me off my feet. We married three months later. Manhattan society was aghast at the short courtship.”

“Even with the perfect life,” she says, “you never forgot and still went after the bad guys. Doesn’t that make you the hero.”

Not a question. More a jab. But I knew what I had to do, and I did it. “Like I told you before, it wasn’t until after Olivia was born that I really understood what I had to do. So yeah, one by one,” I acknowledge, “I took those motherfuckers out, and no one ever suspected a thing.”

“I never thought I would be saying anything like this,” Julia admits, “but that was very brave of you. You could have been killed many times over.”

I can’t decide if she’s serious or being facetious.

“It wasn’t bravery. It was desperation. I couldn’t let them get away with what they had done.”

The silence wraps around us for a moment. It’s heavy, like the cocoon trapping a moth until it’s ready to emerge as a butterfly. I wish I knew the words to say that would clear the air, but there are none. First and foremost perhaps because I am not sorry. I can’t be. Not after what she allowed to happen to me. Secondly, because I know her. Far too well.

“I was young,” Julia confesses.

I meet her gaze.

“I was scared,” she says, “as much for you as for me. But there wasn’t enough courage in me to tell the police the truth. I made up a story about being kidnapped that kept my parents off my back, and I told it over and over until I almost believed it myself.”

“Like you said before,” I allow, “I can’t just let that go and pretend it never happened. But what I can say now—looking back—is that what you did or didn’t do might not have mattered. No one could prove where Casey had taken me. Chances are he never went back to that house in Norwalk.”

“He did. I know he did. I went back looking for him. The place was cleared out.”

At least she went back. Except she was looking for him, not me. “We also know now that Duval wasn’t his real name. The police were never going to find him, even if you had come forward.”

I remind myself that this is necessary since I need her to feel uncertain about her intentions . . . about me.

Julia shakes her head. “I truly am sorry, Wendy. About what happened. I had no idea he was capable of doing what he did to you. I would never have walked away and left you there with him if I had known.”

I refuse to respond for fear I will say more than I need to at this point. Because no matter how much I would love her words to be true, they are not. “So what was the plan in all this?” I ask. They obviously had one. Both said as much.

She frowns as if she doesn’t know what I mean.

“What did you have in mind for me? I mean, how did you expect to get this past my daughter and husband?”

“Oh.”

Yeah, oh.

“I intended to tell him the truth. He’s running for public office. I’m certain he would want to work something out—quickly and quietly.”

“You could have just had me killed the way they did Eleanor,” I point out.

She stares at me for a long moment. “I didn’t come here for that. As I explained, what happened with Eleanor was not a part of this. It was an accident. The others who died by my hand . . .” She looks away a moment. “I had no choice . . .”

On that score we agree.

“What you did was not murder. It was survival,” I tell her. “What I did was not murder. It was justice.”

There are situations that sometimes force us to do the unthinkable.