“I wanted to, I swear, but Elizabeth made me promise not to—and she made me promise not to tell you. She went a little crazy, Dad. Something snapped. She started shaking me and asking what I saw, asking if I’d made eye contact with Nick, wanting to know if Nick’s eyes were open or closed. She was insane about making sure I didn’t see the body, and she kept forcing me back to my room, like I was some little kid. ‘Go to your room,’ she kept saying, so eventually I did. I came here and waited for her to bring everything down: the sleeping bags and pillows and stuff.”

My stomach turns.

“That’s when Elizabeth sent you out for prescriptions that didn’t exist. She was trying to buy time to clean it all up, and it worked, because by the time you got home, I’d zipped everything into a duffle bag to bring to Mom’s house, remember? I threw most of that stuff in a dumpster across town. I threw the rest in different dumpsters, which made me feel like a criminal, but it was an accident. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Big-time.”

Jonah had been carrying an enormous duffle bag. Laundry, I’d figured. Looking back: so much laundry. Also, looking back, he and Elizabeth were both acting odd. I thought he’d been nervous to talk about giving me and Elizabeth space. And Elizabeth—I thought she was licking her wounds from a childish affair that had met its end. I guess it did. Different co-conspirator, different end. I guess that means, too, that when she hugged my neck, Nick was already in the bushes, and she knew it, and he wasn’t her lover. He wasn’t the one.

Did she see him when she bent over the hosta that night? When she refused to let me hold her hair? She changed after that moment, but then, I suppose, a corpse jutting out from under the hydrangeas would be a sobering sight. When she stood on the diving board and gazed at me, was that an apology rather than seduction? When she dove, was it an invitation, or was it an effort to wash it all away? Baptism by swimming pool. And here I thought I was all she wanted.