Megan MIRANDA - The Perfect Stranger

Except I did. I was holding my breath, waiting for more.

“I couldn’t really recover from that,” he continued. “Not in the same small town I’d grown up in. So I asked for a transfer, and here I am, and I’m doing the same damn thing, only worse.”

The rain slid down the side of his face, and there was something so heartbreaking about him standing in front of me, confessing.

Here’s something else they don’t teach you in school: Sometimes you just have to make a choice and go with your gut. To stake everything on it and be willing to fall alongside it.

“I think Emmy knew Bethany,” I whispered.

He tilted his head, didn’t come closer. “What are you doing?”

“Helping you,” I said. It’s what we did in the field with the cops. We worked toward the same goal.

“And why do you think that?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest.

“Everything’s tied together somehow. I found an old picture, I think of Bethany.”

“Where?” he asked. When I shook my head, he said, “I need to see it.”

I felt the pull of the trunk outside, the information closed up tight, in the dark. It would be so easy to lift the lid and turn it all over to Kyle right now. To absolve myself of it. But without Emmy, all evidence threads went straight from me to Bethany. “I’m not giving you any more evidence that can be twisted around on me right now.”

He shifted his lower jaw, then shook his head. He pulled open the nearest kitchen drawer, and it made me jump. He rifled through it, slammed it shut, then opened the next, and the next, my heart jumping in time to the rhythm.

I lunged for him, grabbed his arm. “Stop,” I said. “Stop!”

He spun around, my hand still on his arm, and I could feel the muscle, the nerve, twitching with restraint. “When did you find the picture, Leah?” he asked.

“Right before you searched my house,” I said.

He shook off my arm. “And you’re just now telling me?”

I leaned toward him, the words coming out more desperately than I wanted. “But I’m telling you, Kyle.” It was a risk, couldn’t he see? I knew the gut instincts that I confessed could be used against me. I had been betrayed. And here I was doing the same thing, over and over, naively hoping the outcome might be different this time.

“You’re telling me, but you won’t show me,” he said, as if this alone were a new piece of evidence stacked against me.

But he couldn’t have it. Not until I had proof she existed. Otherwise everything circled back to me: Bethany’s picture, the bleach under the house, James Finley.

I needed proof.

There was one person. One person I knew could vouch for her, 100 percent. Who saw her in the flesh, who knew her as Emmy. Who watched as she took a very real knife to her boyfriend’s arm.

If it got that far, to my arrest, I wondered if Paige would stand up for me. If the police called her up, asking, I wondered if she’d say, Oh yes, I know who you’re talking about. I know the girl named Emmy . Or if she’d see an opportunity and seize it. Say, No, no, there was never any other girl at all. It was all Leah. It was always Leah. And quietly watch as I was locked away – a small thrill as she stared into my eyes to be sure I knew that she was the one who had done it.

I had to hope there was someone else. Someone more who had seen her, who knew.

“I still don’t know if you’re playing me,” he said, but he wasn’t asking. As if he didn’t want to have to know.

“I can’t tell if you’re playing me, either,” I said. “You show up in the middle of the night, and here I am, spilling my fucking guts, telling you things that make me look bad. So tell me, Kyle, who’s playing whom here?”

He stepped closer, spoke softer. “This case rests in your hands, you know that, right? My case.”

I nodded. “I do. I know that.”

“Okay,” he said. And he nodded to me, to himself, and he said, “I’m worried you’re going to ruin me.” And then he kissed me. Right there, in front of those big open glass windows, for whoever wanted to watch. He pulled my shirt over my head in one quick motion, scraped his teeth against my shoulder as he lifted me onto the counter, and I was lost.

She arrived without warning, as one disappears. My sister. But before I knew it was her, when I first stood at the sliding glass doors and saw the blue car at the edge of the road, I thought: Emmy. She’s come back to apologize, to clear things up, to make sure I’m not here to take the fall.

A terrible hope cut short when the car paused at the driveway entrance, as if she wasn’t sure after all. Then the unfamiliar car edged its way slowly up the drive, parking behind Kyle’s car.

I knew it was Rebecca from the way she threw the driver’s-side door open, in a practiced, familiar move. “It’s my sister,” I said.

Kyle cursed behind me, his jaw set, not looking directly at me. He threw on his shirt, ran his hand through his hair. There would be no sneaking out the window or the back door, since the car was parked directly behind his and she was already squinting at it.

“She’s a doctor, not a reporter, calm down,” I said. But Kyle seemed incapable of calming down. Like he could map out the beginning of the end as well, and this was its starting point. “She’s probably just here because my mom sent her. We’re not that close.”

“Still, I need to go,” he said.

I saw her pulling her shoes out of the muddy earth as she walked up the path. She smoothed her hair back and looked up at the house. Rebecca’s hair was not blond by birth, but it had been that way since we were teenagers. It was always cut exactly to her shoulders, and I sometimes imagined she took scissors to it every morning, every time it encroached on her back. Always smoothed down and tucked motionless behind her ears. She paused at the bottom of the steps, taking a deep breath.

I opened the sliding doors, met her out on the front porch.

She dropped her bag on the first wooden step. “Surprise,” she said, and she half-grinned.

“Hi,” I said. Then I walked down the steps and picked up her bag. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

She looked me over; made herself smile. “Did I wake you?”

I looked over my shoulder briefly, lowered my voice. “No, I just have company.”

She raised her eyebrows, peered over my shoulder as well. “And so early on a Saturday?”

Kyle stepped out onto the porch, as if on cue, and raised his hand at her in greeting.

I didn’t introduce him. Let her eyes wander from him to me.

I cleared my throat. “Can you move your car?”

She made a sound that could’ve been laughter but also could’ve been disgust. Sometimes with Rebecca it was hard to tell the difference.

“No problem.”

As she repositioned her car behind mine, Kyle stood beside me, waiting. And when Rebecca exited the car, he seemed unsure of what to do, how to extricate himself from us in front of her. He leaned over and wordlessly placed his lips on my cheekbone before striding toward his car. He greeted her as he passed, said something like Good morning or Have a nice visit, and Rebecca did one of her noncommittal moves: a tip of the head, both agreeable and dismissive.

Standing together on the porch, we watched him go. “The latest?” she asked when his car turned out of sight.

I shrugged.

She laughed.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked, which came out defensive when I’d meant to come out on the offensive.

Rebecca was perpetually single, perpetually driven, single-mindedly focused. “Nothing, just didn’t realize you had time for this in between a police investigation and your missing roommate.”