six months the boy was spending most of his weekends down at her place. Any excuse to be out of the house, his mother thought. At first.
Faith had eventually become uneasy about the amount of yardwork Ms. Angier seemed to need and how much she overpaid for it. Then she’d gifted the boy some kind of Xbox. Faith had walked down the street to talk about it; it was too expensive a gift. When no one answered the doorbell, she’d gone around to the back and let herself into the yard. She’d found her son there on a chaise lounge by the pool. He was with Roux, doing more than yard work behind her tall privacy fence.
She’d taken her son home, horrified, but too afraid to tell her husband. Ezra had begged her to do nothing, but she’d decided she had to call the police. She was going to, as soon as her husband left for work in the morning. Ezra texted Roux, and the two of them decided to make a run for it that night. They’d set off, following the road that would in the end bring her to me.
The police were still trying to backtrace all Roux’s movements. I could have helped them fill in some of the gaps, but I hadn’t. I was very good at saying very little. I’d been practicing for decades.
I don’t know, I said to most of their questions. My oldest and most favorite lie.
I’d been very clear on one point: Roux had shot me, and then, after I got the gun, she’d come at me with the poker. I’d been in fear for my life, I’d told them more than once, lying the way Roux always had, my body still and quiet and my gaze direct.
My single shot hit her in the center of her chest. Sometimes, at night, I could still hear the sound of her slight body dropping to the dingy carpet, so fast it was as if she’d gone boneless. I’d heard an odd, windy sucking noise coming from her, but only once. I crawled over just as the police were battering down the door, and her glossy eyes had looked up into mine, open and still and empty of everything.
You know what, Amy? she’d asked me right before I pulled the trigger.
I would never know what. I was fine with it.
Ezra was as cagey with the police as I was, maybe more so. He didn’t want to talk about any of it—not his relationship with Roux, not his month as a fugitive, and not the way she’d made her money. We were the most monosyllabic pair of witnesses in the history of Pensacola, I was willing to bet, but in the end it didn’t matter. The more the police dug into Roux’s past, the more filth they uncovered. She’d been plying her trade for a long, long time. They still didn’t know her real name or origin or even her exact age. Rose Angier was as fake as every other name I’d heard. The parts of her life they could track had been very, very busy, and within a few weeks they’d decided that no charges would be filed against me. Self-defense, they said. It was true enough to suit me.
“How did you know?” Faith Wheeler asked me the day she brought Ezra over to say good-bye to Maddy.
Her gaze shifted off me to the yard before I answered, making sure her son was still in sight. Maddy was clutching the boy’s shoulders now, telling him something with big, sincere eyes. I could feel Davis shifting uncomfortably beside me. I put a calming hand on his thigh.
“I don’t know. Something felt off about her,” I said.
“Thank God,” Faith said.
“You shouldn’t have gone to her place. Not by yourself,” Davis said, for about the thousandth time. Thinking about that night, what might have been, it always made him antsy. He rested his hand over mine, twining our fingers together. “I wish you’d called me.”
I smiled an apology. “I know. I should have.”
Faith was sitting up very straight, clearly wanting to say something else, but it took two false starts before she found the words. “I . . . There was . . .” She shook her head. “This is probably wrong of me. But I don’t care. I have to tell you, thank you. Thank you for—” She stopped again, shrugging helplessly, then turned her face to the window to look out at her beautiful son.
“It’s all right,”