on YouTube.
The burner phone vibrated. Claire read Lydia’s message: I’m here.
She pressed her palms on the desktop and pushed herself up. Or at least she tried to. The muscles in her arms wouldn’t respond. Claire forced her legs to stand and nearly fell over when the entire room made a quarter-turn to the left.
The doorbell rang. Claire shoved all of Lydia’s photos and reports into her desk drawer. She took a sip of wine, then decided to take the glass with her.
Walking came with its own challenges. The wide-open spaces of the kitchen and family room presented few obstacles, but she felt like she was inside a pinball machine as she bumped against the walls in the main hallway. She finally had to take off her heels, which she’d only left on because they always took off their shoes inside the house. All of the rugs were white. The floor was bleached oak. The walls were white. Even some of the paintings were muted whites. She wasn’t living in a house. She was occupying a sanitarium.
The handles on the front doors telescoped out of her reach. She could see the outline of Lydia’s body through the frosted glass. Claire spilled her wine as she grabbed at the door handle. She felt her lips smiling, though none of this was particularly funny.
Lydia knocked on the glass.
“I’m right here.” Claire finally pulled open the door.
“Jesus Christ.” Lydia leaned in to look at Claire’s eyes. “Your pupils are the size of dimes.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Claire said, because surely a dime was larger than her entire eyeball. Or was it closer to a quarter?
Lydia came into the house without being asked. She dropped her purse by the front door. She kicked off her shoes. She looked around the entrance foyer. “What is this place?”
“I don’t know,” Claire said, because it didn’t feel like home anymore. “Did you have an affair with Paul?”
Lydia’s mouth dropped open in surprise.
“Just tell me,” Claire said, because she knew from Paul’s reports that Lydia had had a child and that Paul was paying for the girl’s education. An affair that produced a love child was so much more palatable than all the other terrible explanations for why Paul would insert himself into her sister’s life.
Lydia still had her mouth open.
“Did you?”
“Absolutely not.” Lydia looked worried. “What did you take?”
“Nembutal and Ambien with a vodka back.”
“That’s not funny.” Lydia snatched away the glass of wine. She looked for somewhere to put it in the stark entryway and settled on the floor. “Why did you ask me that about Paul?”
Claire kept the answer to herself.
“Was he cheating on you?”
Claire hadn’t framed the optics through that lens. Was it cheating to rape someone? Because, to be clear, that’s the direction in which all the dominos were falling. If Paul had truly tried to rape Lydia, then he had probably tried and succeeded with someone else, and if he had gotten away with it once, then he had probably tried again.
And hired a private detective to follow them around for the rest of their lives so that he could still exert control over them from his lair over the garage.
But was that cheating? Claire knew from her training at the crisis center that rape was about power. Paul certainly liked controlling things. So, was raping women the equivalent of turning all the cans in the pantry label-out or loading the dishwasher with mechanical precision?
“Claire?” Lydia snapped her fingers very loudly. “Look at me.”
Claire tried her best to look at her sister. She’d always thought that Lydia was the prettiest of all of them. Her face was fuller, but she’d aged more gracefully than Claire would’ve thought. She had laugh lines around her eyes. She had a beautiful, accomplished daughter. She had a boyfriend who was a recovering heroin addict who listened to talk radio while he worked on an old truck in his driveway.
Why did Paul need to know that? Why did he need to know anything about Lydia at all? Was it stalking if you hired someone else to do it? And wasn’t watching someone without their knowledge another form of rape?
Lydia asked, “Claire, what did you take?” Her voice softened. She rubbed Claire’s arms. “Sweetpea, tell me what you took.”
“Valium.” Claire suddenly wanted to cry. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had called her Sweetpea. “Some Percocet.”
“How many?”
Claire shook her head because it didn’t matter. None of this mattered. “We had a cat named Mr. Sandwich.”
Lydia was understandably