was the last thing he said to me, the last words I heard as the car door slammed shut behind me and the engine started up.
It was a lie. A lie, from first to last. I was not Rowan. And nothing was ever going to be all right again.
But the thing I keep coming back to is what Maddie said to me that very first time I met her, her arms wrapped hard around me, her face buried in my top.
Don’t come here, she had said. It’s not safe.
And then, those last words, sobbed in parting, and later denied, words that I am still certain I heard, months later.
The ghosts wouldn’t like it.
I don’t believe in ghosts, Mr. Wrexham. I never have. I’m not a superstitious person.
But it was not superstition that I heard pacing the attic above me, night after night. It was not superstition that made me wake in the night, shivering, my breath white clouds in the moonlight, my room cold as an icebox. That doll’s head, rolling across the Persian rug, that was real, Mr. Wrexham. Real as you and me. Real as the writing on the walls of the attic, real as my writing to you now.
Because I know, I know that’s when I really sealed my fate with the police. It wasn’t just the fake name, and the stolen documents. It wasn’t just the fact that I was Bill’s estranged daughter, come back to exact some sort of twisted revenge on his new family. It wasn’t any of that.
It was what I told them on that first awful night, sitting there in my bloodstained clothes, shaking with shock and grief and terror. Because that first night, I broke down and told them everything that had happened. From the footsteps in the night, to the deep, seeping sense of evil I felt when I opened the attic door and stepped inside.
That, more than anything that came after, was the moment the key turned in the lock.
That was when they knew.
* * *
I’ve had a lot of time to think in here, Mr. Wrexham. A lot of time to think, and ponder, and figure things out since I started this letter to you. I told the police the truth, and the truth undid me. I know what they saw—a crazed woman, with a backstory more full of holes than a bullet-pocked signpost. They saw a woman with a motive. A woman so estranged from her family that she had come to their house under false pretenses, to enact some terrible, unhinged vengeance.
I know what I think happened. I have had a long time to put pieces together—the open window, the footsteps in the attic, the father who loved his daughter so much that it killed her, and the father who walked away from his children again and again and again.
And most of all, two pieces I never connected right up until the very end—the phone, and Maddie’s white, pleading little face, that very first day as I drove away, and her whispered, anguished the ghosts wouldn’t like it. And those two things were what did it for me with the police. My fingerprints on the phone, and my account of what Maddie had said to me, and the domino of effects her words began.
But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think, or what my theories are. It’s what the jury thinks that matters. Listen, Mr. Wrexham, I don’t need you to believe everything that I’ve told you. And I know that presenting even half of what I’ve said here would get you laughed out of court, and risk alienating the jury forever. That’s not why I told you all this.
But I tried to give just part of the story before—and it’s what got me locked up here.
I believe that the truth is what will save me, Mr. Wrexham, and the truth is that I didn’t, that I couldn’t kill my sister.
I picked you, Mr. Wrexham, because when I asked the other women in here who I should get to represent me, your name came up more than any other lawyer. Apparently you’ve got a reputation for getting even no-hopers off the hook.
And I know that’s what I am, Mr. Wrexham. I have no hope anymore.
A child is dead, and the police, and the public, and the press, they all want someone to pay. And that someone must be me.
But I didn’t kill that little girl, Mr. Wrexham. I didn’t kill Maddie.