she just moved back to the city, so…it was nice to catch up. Her husband’s job transferred him here.”
“That’s good, that’s good. You tell her I said hi.”
“Yeah, definitely.” What would happen if I just blurted it out: So Sarah claimed that I wasn’t at the concert the night Edie died. Isn’t that insane?
I went with the smaller, sillier revelation instead. “We spent a lot of time reminiscing about the old days. I didn’t remember that she’d had that weird freak-out where she was insisting Edie hadn’t committed suicide.”
“Ah, that’s right.” He sang: “Paranoia, paranoia, everybody’s coming for Edie.”
“It was the least suspicious suicide of all time, right? Gun near her hand, suicide note on her computer.” I drummed my nails against the counter. “But I have to say, hearing it now, all these years later…I mean, maybe I’m just glorifying our youth, but it did kinda feel like, ‘Yeah, why would Edie kill herself?’ ”
“I mean, I always thought that was bullshit.” He said it quickly, casually, like he’d been waiting for the chance to tell someone.
I froze. “What do you mean?”
“The suicide thing. I told the cops that, too, that just a few days before her death she looked me in the eye and told me she wanted to live to be an old lady.”
I had to grab the edge of the counter to steady myself. “Wait, what?”
“I can’t—it’s a long story. But, dude, people don’t just up and kill themselves out of the blue. They think suicidal thoughts and they get their affairs in order and they tell people about their plan and then maybe, maybe, after one or two false starts, they do it. That wasn’t Edie.”
I was silent, my mouth hanging open, so he went on. “I don’t want to go into it, but she had, like, a health scare that I helped her through, and she came out of it basically determined to live forever. She talked about how there was still so much she wanted to do, it was like she was begging the universe to let her make it.” A thump, like he was doing something else as he soliloquized. “Not that Edie believed in that shit, at least as far as I know.”
“And you told the cops this?” I finally said.
“Hell, yeah, I did. But they didn’t listen. I think at first they thought if anything, I was somehow involved and trying to pass off the blame. It was scary enough getting arrested in the middle of all that. Possession of an unlicensed firearm, a Class A felony, punishable by up to a year in jail: I must’ve heard it a hundred times.”
“I forgot about that. You took a plea deal, right?”
“Yeah, pretty lucky to be a white kid with no priors. Fifty hours of community service and a thousand-dollar fine. I was such a dummy, keeping that thing there. But yeah, I think the detectives thought something was going on between Edie and me after I was the one she dragged to the ER with her.”
The ER? I started to interrupt, but he barreled over me.
“Which is a whole ’nother story. They tried to spin it into another reason she committed suicide, but believe me, they’re wrong, nothing about that whole shebang would make her kill herself.”
Another few clunks. What was he doing?
“What was the health scare?” I asked.
“Nah, it was embarrassing for her, I don’t wanna go into it.”
“Did anyone else know about it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“What makes you so sure it wouldn’t have made her suicidal?”
“I don’t wanna play twenty questions, Lindsay. Suffice it to say that out of respect for the dead, I don’t want to talk about it, but if you’d like to trust me, I can say with one-hundred-percent certainty that she was not a suicidal girl.”
We both sat with that for a second.
“So you think someone killed her?”
“I mean, seems like the only other option.”
“Who, then?”
“Fuck if I know. She’d pissed off a lot of people in that building.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I have no idea who did it. But she was always shucking people off. I said shucking.” He chuckled to himself, tsh-sh-sh. “Didn’t y’all ever notice that about her? She spent her whole life in Manhattan, but it was like she didn’t exist—no friends from her past, no stories of crazy high school nights or friends from way back—and then, uh, she was the center of everything, and then she’d be gone again, leaving a bombed-out group in her