cooked or resting her on her hip while she did laundry. When Rick came along, Dee would drape herself across them like a blanket, her feet in Rick’s lap and her head in Lydia’s. Rick and Lydia would look at each other and smile because they had such a perfect little girl between them. And Lydia would feel such relief because the only time she truly knew that Dee was safe was when she was close enough to count her daughter’s breaths.
She put her head in her hands. She closed her eyes. She gave in to the images of Eleanor Kilpatrick that were burned into every fold of her brain. The way the mother had screamed with such damaged intensity. Her haunted expression. The X she had drawn over the left side of her abdomen.
Eleanor was obviously right-handed. She had to reach across her belly to draw the X. She hadn’t chosen that exact spot by coincidence.
Lydia looked across Broad Street. Claire was sitting outside the Starbucks where she’d left her. Her posture was ramrod straight as she stared into empty space. She had the dazed look of a catatonic. There was an unnerving stillness about her. She had always been so hard to read, but right now, she was impenetrable.
Lydia stood up. The thirty yards between them wasn’t going to help her magically divine Claire’s thoughts. She walked back across Broad, lingering at the median though there was no traffic. Georgia had beaten Auburn last night. The town was sleeping off the win. The sidewalks were sticky from spilled beer. Trash littered the streets.
Claire didn’t look up when Lydia sat down at the table, but she asked, “Does it look different?”
“It looks like an outdoor shopping mall,” she said, because the campus had turned from that of a quaint southern university into a sprawling corporate behemoth. “It’s almost suburban.”
“The only thing that’s really changed is the length of the khaki shorts.”
“Didn’t the Taco Stand used to be here?”
“We parked right in front of it.” Claire indicated the direction with a tilt of her head.
Lydia craned her neck. She saw more tables and chairs crisscrossing the sidewalk. No one was sitting outside because it was too cold. There was a woman standing with a broom and dustpan, but instead of sweeping up the debris left over from the night before, she was checking her phone.
Claire said, “He never asked me for anything weird.”
Lydia turned back to her sister.
“I remember when I first saw the movie on his computer—just the beginning of it with the girl chained up—I had this strange feeling, almost like a betrayal, because I wanted to know why he didn’t bring it to me.” She watched a jogger slowly cross the street. “I thought, If that’s what he’s into, chaining people up and leather and blindfolds and that kind of thing, even though I’m not particularly into it, why didn’t he ask me to give it a try?” She looked at Lydia like she expected an answer.
Lydia could only shrug.
“I probably would’ve said yes.” Claire shook her head as if to contradict herself. “I mean, if that’s what he really wanted, then I would’ve tried it, right? Because that’s what you do. And Paul knew that. He knew that I would’ve tried.”
Lydia shrugged again, but she had no idea.
“He never asked me to dress up like a maid or pretend to be a schoolgirl or whatever else it is you hear about. He never even asked for anal, and every man asks for anal eventually.”
Lydia glanced around, hoping no one could hear.
“She was younger than me,” Claire continued. “The first woman—when I saw her, I had this split-second thought that she was younger than me, and that hurt, because I’m not young anymore. That’s the one thing I couldn’t give him.”
Lydia sat back in her chair. There was nothing she could do but let Claire talk.
“I wasn’t in love with him when I married him. I mean, I loved him, but it wasn’t …” She waved the emotions away with her hand. “We were married for less than a year, and Christmas was coming up. Paul was working on his masters and I was answering phones for a law office and I just thought, I’m out of here. Being married felt so pointless. So tedious. Mom and Dad were so full of life before Julia. They were such passionate, interesting people. Do you remember that? How they were before?”
Lydia smiled, because Claire had somehow unlocked the memories