The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,59

been hiding earlier. It changed the angles of his face, made him seem open, more vulnerable.

“Hey,” he said, eyes lightly skimming over me, then lingering on my hand with the screwdriver. “Didn’t mean to make you nervous. I just . . .” He gestured to his car. “I tried your neighbor first, but he didn’t answer, either.”

“I didn’t hear you.” I held up the screwdriver, then placed it on the entryway table. “I was just fixing something.”

His eyes changed, almost like he was trying to smile. He shifted on his feet, standing on the other side of the doorway. “When I was here earlier, Detective Rigby, she said we’d need to get permission to get closer, that the . . . the material from the scene had all been gathered already, and that’s private property. I said no, I didn’t want to bother anyone. But here I am again, and I don’t know why. Why I keep driving past, why I stopped this time . . . It’s not like he’s still here, like it means anything . . . I don’t even know where it happened, exactly, and I’m trying not to trespass, I’m just trying to feel something.”

It took until he was halfway through his rambling for me to realize he was asking for permission. That I was the one who could grant it, allowing him onto my property. I thought about calling Detective Rigby, asking if she needed to be here, but I wanted to keep things light and unofficial, make myself a tangential component—in on the information but out of the picture.

“I can show you,” I said. “If you want to see?”

He tipped his head once, then started following me down the porch steps. We walked in silence toward the edge of the property, my stride somehow matching his, though he was solidly over six feet tall, and I was only a few inches over five feet.

The crime scene tape was gone, the police done collecting the evidence, but the spot where Sean Coleman had been found had a pull to it, like a black hole. Some of the dirt had been dug out around the body. What remained was a slight dip, upturned earth patted back down unnaturally. I stopped a few yards short, and Nathan did the same.

He was staring at it like he could see something in the emptiness. Something below this level. But all I noticed was the proximity to my house behind us: the bedroom window in sight; the light inside, and a straight view down the hall.

I didn’t belong out here, sharing in the grief of this man I’d never met and didn’t know existed until mere hours ago. “Take all the time you need . . .” I said, stepping back.

He turned to face me then. “We weren’t close,” he said, rooting me in my spot. Because I understood how sometimes that makes it worse. How you’re trying to feel a connection across the absence. I’d searched for it myself inside that sad box delivered to my front porch. Would I have felt more if I’d found the spot where she had died? I didn’t even know whether it had happened in a hospital, or a hotel room, or a house. Whether she was found alone on a street somewhere—or worse.

Maybe it was the uncertainty that kept pulling me back. The guilt about all the things I didn’t know and hadn’t asked.

“My mother died earlier this year, and I didn’t even know it,” I said.

He nodded once, never breaking eye contact.

“She was cremated before I could even claim her.” The guilt, coexisting with the knowledge that it wasn’t my fault, that it was for the best that I’d cut off contact.

I knew then why I was out here with him. Why he’d seemed familiar in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was something I recognized in myself. A separate exterior that presented as a hardness in him. But I could recognize its presence, something similar to my own. A shell formed out of necessity, of loss, of survival. And in that moment, it felt like we were two surfaces reflecting, an endless hall of mirrors.

“Do you feel safe here?” he asked, talking so low I had to lean in to hear the deep timbre of his voice.

But there was too much to sift through in the question. “I used to,” I said. Now there had been someone killed within sight of my bedroom window. Now