“You know, he changed a lot in business school. Became much more socially adept, if that makes sense. Learned how to schmooze. This was a kid who couldn’t string two words together if he was forced to make small talk. And suddenly, he was playing golf with men whose assets are about twenty times as much as mine. He toned up, got a better haircut. I guess you could say he grew into himself.” He thrummed his fingers on the desk, thinking. “It had something to do with his girlfriend at the time. I can’t remember her name—I think it was the name of some Greek goddess. But she helped him with all that. Helped him build up his company, too.”

I find his eyes. “You have no idea what her name is?”

He shakes his head, gives a helpless shrug and pauses again, as if deciding whether to voice anything else, and I lean forward, patiently, coaxing him onward. He sighs, relenting. “There were rumors, things I heard here and there. Oddness in him, in that relationship. I think he liked bringing in a third, that sort of thing.” He stutters the last phrase out like it’s a crumb stuck at the back of his throat. “But at the end of the day, I don’t know anything. The shy, weird Tom I knew was certainly not the one who would have annihilated his wife and unborn child. It’s scary to me, scary to know I grew up alongside a monster. That we could turn out so differently with the exact same genes.”

We hear a knock on the door. “That would be my next student.”

I thank him, start to make my way out. “Vera?” I turn toward him. “Nothing Tom did was your fault. I feel guilty, too, sometimes. Wonder whether I should have been in his life again. Maybe if I’d reached out, if I’d been present, none of this would have happened. But it’s not worth it to live in the maybes. It really isn’t. I hope you find some closure.” He raises his hand to say goodbye and I do, too, watching his eyes, Tom’s eyes, as I back out of his office, into the afternoon.

13

ODILIE

Ten years ago

August.

The heat in Odilie’s bedroom was sticky, suffocating, the blades of the ceiling fan lazy, too, like the blades couldn’t quite stretch far enough to make a breeze. Odilie and Peri relocated to the beach, an eroded patch of shore near the east end of town, a place that the water always threatened to swallow up. When the tide was high, the patch disappeared altogether and the girls were taken with it, human buoys on gray waves.