Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,32

parents were worthless. I had no one.

I thrummed my fingers lightly on the keyboard. Did I dare look up Trey? In for a penny, in for a pound. Before I could stop myself, I clicked on his Instagram profile. Oh damn. I knew right away I shouldn’t have done it. Trey stood beneath a sign that read GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER. The last year had only increased his physical beauty. That tousled blond hair. The eyes that were sometimes hazel, often green. The smile that was always there and that could melt me in two seconds. He looked so happy. So secure in his future. I realized in that moment, staring at his beautiful face, that I hated him. It was a good feeling. Almost healing, that hatred. Did Trey ever think about Emily Maxwell? Did he even know her name? I doubted it. I had the feeling only one of us had a conscience.

There was a picture of Trey with his family. The four of them stood in front of a broad, glittering Christmas tree. I remembered how they’d hunt and hunt for the perfect tree to fill the corner of their huge living room each year. Seeing his parents’ smiling faces, seeing his younger sister Becky with her arm around Trey’s waist, her head against his shoulder, was almost more than I could bear. I’d thought of his family as mine. The normal, happy, healthy family I’d yearned for. I’d called his mother “Mom.” I’d embraced Becky as the sister I’d never had. I’d lost them when I lost everything else.

There was one more person I still wanted to search for, though the thought of actually finding her scared me: Emily Maxwell. But Google turned up only a couple of hits, all of them related to the old news articles about the accident. Maxwell was taken to Rex Hospital, where she remains in a coma. The driver, twenty-one-year-old Morgan Christopher, was charged with driving while intoxicated.

I pressed my fist against my mouth as I read the article. Only two people knew the truth about what happened that night. Only one of us tried to tell it.

Emily’s coma lasted two months, and when she woke up, she was paralyzed. That was all I knew. All I’d been told. I was terrified to know more, and yet I needed to. I needed to know that somehow, in spite of what happened to her, she was okay. I was the sort of person who winced when I killed a fly. Who carried spiders outside instead of squashing them. I would never get over what happened to Emily Maxwell. But I could find no other information on her. No Facebook or Instagram or Twitter accounts—at least not accounts that were open to the public.

I finally left Google and returned with a vengeance to the restoration site I’d been studying. I could find no “lesson,” no Web site that told me step-by-step, “this is how you restore a mural.” And every site I found seemed to describe different restoration methods or offer contradictory information. Restoration was not something you learned how to do on the Internet. I read until my eyes blurred and my stomach growled with hunger. By the time I shut the computer, I was more confused than ever about where to begin on the mural.

In the kitchen pantry, I found a box of Cheerios and was lifting it from the shelf when I noticed pencil markings on the pantry’s doorjamb. I stepped closer. The markings were a height chart, and I bent over to see the lowest line. “Lisa, age 7.” There was another mark for every age, up until she hit nineteen when I assumed she had stopped growing. I remembered seeing a similar height chart in a friend’s house when I was a teenager and I felt the same envy now as I had then. This was a family that cared enough to record a child’s height, a child’s life passages. I was willing to bet this pantry had been painted numerous times over the last four decades, but the doorjamb with the pencil markings had been preserved. Treasured by Jesse Williams and his wife. Maybe by Lisa herself. The house suddenly felt like someone’s home to me. I’d been thinking of it as more of a museum, clean and a bit sterile, filled with incredibly valuable artwork. The height chart, like the handprints in the front sidewalk, told me something different. A family had lived and loved