It occurred to me then that, for just a few weeks, my only child had experienced what it was like to have five siblings. I hoped this experience would bond them, that they would stay in touch. I was holding the glee of having Bill back in my life in one hand and the sadness of leaving these people who felt like family in the other. It was hard to reconcile the two. But I would, I knew. Because tomorrow was a fresh start. Tomorrow was the new beginning we had hoped and prayed we would get. And now, it was only a day away.

Alice Cinematic Display

We were all on the floor in our pajamas, a fire that our Boy Scout Merit had built roaring in the fireplace, even though it wasn’t particularly cold outside.

“Your real strength,” Charlotte said to Grace, as she dipped a cookie into milk, “is in knowing exactly what people will need, at exactly the right time.”

“Even if it’s before dinner,” Iris agreed. “I have never needed a warm cookie or a glass of milk more than right now.”

“How are you feeling?” Grace asked me.

“Vindicated,” I said.

“Vindicated?”

I nodded. “I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced this, but there is this thing that happens to you when someone has told you something about yourself for a really long time. You kind of start to believe it.” I took a sip of milk. “So, for almost two decades I have believed that I somehow killed the men I loved. And now I know that isn’t true.”

Charlotte reached over and squeezed my arm. “No more Black Widow for you,” she said.

She was giving me a lot of grace tonight when she should have been blaming me, at least a little, for this situation.

“So, you two are good?” Julie asked.

My face got hot, and not from the fire.

“Maybe it’s Charlotte’s place to say it and not mine,” Grace chimed in, “but, Alice, this is a bizarre series of coincidences.”

I wanted to jump in to defend myself, but, well, they weren’t totally wrong. All eyes were on me.

Charlotte shook her head. “Look, Alice, I’ll be honest, I was panicked and frantic, and Iris didn’t have her phone, and I couldn’t find mine, and you had that crazy ‘vengeance is mine’ Bible verse on your mirror, and I’d had no idea that you were one of the people Bill had supposedly stolen money from and—”

“Wait. What?” Julie asked, sitting down on the couch. “You were one of the people who lost their money?”

I just sighed.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”