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Back 3 a.m.
Chapters (67)
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

She doesn't respond.

Sullivan sees blood. This is the woman who framed him for murder. He has every right to be furious. He has every right to want to physically harm her, which he looks as though he might do any second. I step between them.

“How could you do it?” he screams. “How could you kill your own daughter?”

“Kill? Who? Jessie?”

“You murdered Jessie and framed me for it!”

Kim's head whips left, then right. “She's . . . Jessie's dead?”

Sullivan looks at me. Back to Kim. Stares at her. Through her.

“Are you saying that you didn't kill her?”

“NO! I didn't even . . . No . . . I would never . . . I mean she was a terrible person . . . psychotic . . . but I would never hurt her. Never . . . Oh, my God, she's dead . . . how? WHEN?”

I knew that she didn't kill her, but I find it hard to believe she didn’t know her daughter was dead.

“You really didn't know she was dead?” I ask.

“No.”

“Really?” asks Ray, her first words in over twenty minutes. “Did you know about the President's arrest?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess I heard about that.” She looks at Sullivan. “But I didn't want to believe it. I started reading an article about it in the paper a few days ago, but I had to stop.”

I could see it in her eyes, still to this day. I'm not sure how Sullivan had felt about her, but she had loved him.

“But you'd seen her since she was sixteen.” I say. It isn't a question.

“Yeah, once,” she admits reluctantly. “She came by about two years ago asking for money. No 'Hi', no 'Sorry I ran away without telling you three years ago', just 'Got any money?'”

“Did you give her any?”

She shakes her head. “That girl ruined my life. Started doing meth when she was twelve, having sex by thirteen. Cost me my marriage and hundreds of thousands of dollars in rehab. They foreclosed on my house. I lost everything. I didn't give that lying slut a dime. Best thing that ever happened to me was her leaving that day.”

“Why didn't you call and get her removed from the Missing Persons database?”

She shrugs. “Never thought to, I guess.”

“You could have told me,” interjects Sullivan.

“Told you what?”

“That Jessie was mine.”

“Yours?”

“My daughter.”

“Jessie's not your daughter.”

“According to the DNA test she showed me, I am.”

Kim scoffs. “Jessie was a pathological liar. Pathological. She started making her own fake report cards on the computer when she was seven. They were perfect. Her teacher couldn't even tell the difference. She forged a sixty thousand dollar check when she was eleven. She made fake IDs for everybody at the high school when she was fourteen.”

That would account for all her fake identities. I'm sure she'd had help along the way, but if she had one foot in the world, it would have been far more accessible.