Whatever pushed me out the back door, whatever prompted me to flee into the night, I would never forgive myself for what happened in that kitchen. The image of my daughter’s body being hauled out of the house, rolling by on a stretcher and cloaked in a body bag, would forever burn in my mind as I waited to be discovered. And it’d keep burning, burning, burning.

For days, weeks, months I waited and waited. For a DNA sample to out me as Mortimer’s killer, even though I’d been extremely careful and worn gloves. For a fingerprint to emerge and tie me to Marin’s death. Month after month, nothing. Cases closed. Funerals were held. Mourners wept. All that mattered was that I was with her when she died, and that I had found my other child in the process. Now that Vera knew I existed, I imagined her wondering who I was, thinking me dead. Had Bennett told her I was alive? It didn’t matter, because I would resurrect the truth. I had learned from watching that eventually Vera would come to me if I left the right breadcrumbs. She was clever, just like her older sister. And just like her mom.

Maybe I wasn’t the first act knife after all. My intention had never been to harm anyone, only to reconcile. I’d given up my family, my two perfect girls and my husband, to get clean. All of it, the disappearing, the endless rehab, the months of self-improvement, the sobriety, it all was for them. A fifteen-year-long journey that cost me everything. But here I was, recovering, sober, and empty-handed. My eldest was dead, and my youngest thought I was dead. No, I wasn’t the knife; I was the happy ending that the hero deserved before the final curtain fell.

Epilogue

Epilogue

Vera

NOVEMBER

The trees surrounding the Execution Estate were barren, brittle arms reaching for the gray sky. Vera Portman had sat in this same wingback chair in this same parlor countless times before, reading a book or playing a game with her siblings, Eliot and Sydney. But on this particularly cold November day, she sat here for an entirely different reason.

To say goodbye.