She let the cash drop to the floor and it fell like leaves. It was too late for Selena’s problems to just go away. They were, of course, just beginning. Graham issued a groan from the floor. She fought the urge to go over and kick him hard in the gut. She didn’t have the strength anyway.
Distantly, Selena heard sirens. She wondered if Pearl heard them, too.
“Maybe it was about money, at first,” said Pearl. She sat on the chair across from Selena. “Maybe it was about revenge. Or both. I looked for a way into your life. And I found it.”
Selena pushed herself up, pain rocketing up her neck, down her arms, her back.
“I thought your life was perfect,” Pearl went on. “But it’s not.”
“Far from it,” Selena said.
“Your husband is a bad man, Selena. I didn’t know how bad he was until I started following him. He’s a monster.”
Selena’s head started to clear, the situation coming back into focus. She had so many questions. How had she found her way in? When? Was it Pearl who had been texting Graham? What did Pearl know about Graham that even Selena didn’t know? It all came out in a tumble.
But the sirens were growing louder, and Pearl didn’t answer. She rose and started backing toward the door.
Selena wanted to reach for her, ask her to stay. But she couldn’t. They weren’t friends; they couldn’t be now. Maybe Pearl was right, maybe they never could have been anything to each other but reminders of how flawed life was, how imperfect, how painful.
“Did he kill Jacqueline Carson? Or did you?” Selena managed.
“I’ve never hurt anyone,” said Pearl. “Not like that.”
It was an echo of what Graham had said, both of them qualifying how much pain they were willing to inflict upon others.
“I saw him,” Pearl said. Selena didn’t know who to believe, what to believe. Who hurt who? Who killed who? These were not questions she wanted to be having about her life. “I know what he did.”
“No.” The word came out weak and breathy. It was a single syllable of protest—to all of it.
So many questions. She wanted to know what the other woman had seen, how. She wanted to know everything that Pearl knew. But she barely had a voice. Or maybe, really, she didn’t want to know.
The sirens grew louder. Selena’s phone rang and rang. Graham was still and silent on the ground. Maybe he was dead.
Pearl seemed small, sad, apart from Selena, apart from the world. A butterfly. Beautiful, but elusive. A flap of her wings and the world shook. A black butterfly.
“My mother,” said Selena. The edges of the world felt fuzzy and gray. And Pearl was backing away. “My father. They told me everything that happened to you. Everything you did. I know you. I see you. All of it.”
Pearl looked at her, a smile on her lips, something like kindness—or was it pity—in her eyes. There was a connection there. She’d felt it the moment they met on the train. It was true; it ran deep. But it was also dark, flawed, not sustainable in the real world.
Pearl looked over her shoulder toward the sound of the sirens, then back to Selena.
“Whatever happens next,” Pearl whispered, “the worst of your problems is about to go away. For good.”
Selena closed her eyes. She thought for just a moment.
“What about Geneva?”
But when she opened her eyes again, the room was filling with light and shouting voices.
And Pearl was gone.
FORTY-TWO
Selena
She lay in the back of the ambulance, her house alit in flashing red. She counted—two other ambulances, four police cars, two unmarked sedans. There were twenty men and women, at least, cops and paramedics, moving about her lawn and house, calm in their work. Outside the cordoned area, neighbors collected in their pajamas—arms folded, faces worried. A crowd gathered around her house in the middle of the night, a chorus, an audience to the destruction of everything she’d built and thought was hers. But she felt lifted out, apart from it all. Maybe it was the meds they gave her.
Detective Grady Crowe sat across from her, quiet, gaze intense.
Her body ached. Her jaw, where he’d hit her so mercilessly. Her throat, where Graham tried to strangle her and nearly succeeded. Her shoulders, her back, her hips. Her heart. She pulled the blanket they’d given her tight around her shoulders.
She watched as Graham was wheeled out in a stretcher, flanked by two police officers.