Her resolve started to slip.
What if Will wasn’t standing there when she opened the door?
Too much time had passed. Five minutes? Ten? He wouldn’t still be out there.
What if here meant somewhere else?
Logic had failed her, so she had to rely on fate. If Will wasn’t in the hallway, she would take his absence as a sign. That it wasn’t meant to be. That she was a fool. That Angie had won. That Sara had let her win because she was too busy obsessing about what she thought she wanted rather than stopping and appreciating what she had.
Show him how you feel.
Tessa had told her to be more vulnerable. There was nothing more vulnerable than opening a door without knowing what would be on the other side.
Sara loosened her robe.
She unpinned her hair.
She opened the door.
Epilogue
Angie sat down on a wooden bench in the park. The slats were ice cold. She should’ve worn her coat, but the January weather was that weird mix of freezing in the shadows and burning hot in the sun. Angie had purposely chosen a bench shaded by the trees. She wasn’t hiding, but she didn’t want to be seen.
Her vantage offered a clear view of Anthony on the other side of the park.
Her grandson. Not for real, but technically.
He was on the swingset, surrounded by at least ten other kids. His legs were straight out, his head leaned back. He was giggling as he tried to climb higher and higher. Angie was far from an expert, but she knew that this was how a six-year-old was supposed to behave. Not sitting against the wall watching other kids have fun, but out there in the middle of it, running around, happy like the rest of them.
She hoped the boy would hold on to his happiness for a good long while. Six months had passed since Reuben Figaroa had killed himself. Anthony’s mother had almost died. He had been held by a stone-cold bitch for two days. They had moved away from Atlanta, back to Thomaston, where his mother’s people were. He was in a new school. He had to make new friends. His father was still in the news as more and more of Reuben Figaroa’s sins emerged.
But here Anthony was, kicking it on the swing. Kids were like rubber bands. They snapped back quickly. It was only when the years started to roll by that they retracted from the memories.
Was Jo still retracting?
Angie looked past the swingset. She studied the group of mothers at their usual picnic table.
Jo was sitting with them, but on the periphery. Her arm was in a sling strapped low on her waist. Angie didn’t know the prognosis, but she took it as a good sign that Jo’s hand was still attached. She also took it as a good sign that Jo had finally joined the other women. The park was a regular afternoon event. Jo had held herself apart for months, politely smiling, nodding over a newspaper or a book from several picnic tables away. That she was actually sitting at their table now, that she was looking at them, talking to them, had to be progress.
Angie hadn’t talked to her daughter since the night Delilah had tried to murder her. At least not so Jo could hear. The last thing Angie had told Jo as she dropped her off at Grady was a list of instructions. Angie had already called Denny on the way to the hospital. Ng was there too, so they had to come up with a script for Jo that would pass for credible: that Jo’s boyfriend had hurt her, that he had disappeared, that she would not give his name, that she didn’t want to press charges, that her name was Delilah Palmer.
Jo had played her part well, but she didn’t know about the other things that Angie had done, like cleaning up the mess at the crime scene, using her cop training to hide everything in plain sight. Like taking Delilah on the last, most miserable ride of her life.
Angie still shuddered if she thought too long about the things she had done to Delilah’s body. Not letting her die, because the bitch deserved that, but the cutting.
Sure, Angie was dangerous, but she wasn’t sick.
The important thing was that the ends justified the means. Jo was living proof of this. Literally—she was living. The rest of it, Angie didn’t know. Jo’s hand would hopefully heal, but some wounds stayed open no matter what balm you tried.
Angie could only guess what was going on in her daughter’s head right now. Jo would still be feeling guilty about Reuben. Guiltier still that she was relieved to have him gone. She would be worried about Anthony, the short-term damage, the long-term damage. She wouldn’t yet be worrying about herself, but she would be feeling exposed, because the entire world knew what her husband had done to her. To Anthony. To Keisha Miscavage. To other women, because in the ensuing months, victims had started coming out of the woodwork. Marcus Rippy and Reuben Figaroa had taken their show on the road, drugging and raping women across the country. There might be as many as thirty victims.
Angie wondered if Jo took some kind of comfort in knowing that Reuben never beat the women he raped. That was only something special he saved for Jo.
If you were keeping score, and Angie was the type to do just that, Keisha Miscavage was the real winner. The fact that any person with a computer could Google her gang rape had not cowed the girl. Angie had followed Keisha’s story in the news. She was back in school. She was staying clean. She was on the lecture circuit, talking to other students about assault. People believed her now, or at least more people did than not. One woman accusing a man of rape was a crazy bitch. Two women, three women, a few dozen women—they might have a point.
Anthony jumped off the swing. His feet landed wrong. He fell flat on his ass. Jo sprang to her feet, but so did Anthony. He wiped the sand off his butt. He hopped four times in a jagged line, and then he was off.
Jo didn’t sit back down until her son had settled on the rope climb. She had her hand to her chest. The other mothers were clearly teasing her about her concern. Jo smiled, but she kept her head down, wary of even this small amount of attention.
Angie wanted Jo to be more like Keisha. To go out into the world. To tell everybody to fuck off, to stand up, to be strong like her mother. To do something other than hide herself away.
Was it shyness? Was it fear?
For the last few months, Angie had been mentally composing a letter to Jo. The content wasn’t always at the forefront of her thoughts. She wasn’t obsessing over it. What happened was, she was packing up her shit to move to a new place or she was driving down the road in her new car and she would think of a line that would work in the letter:
I should’ve kept you.
I should’ve never let you go.
I loved you the moment I saw you yell at that asshole in Starbucks, because that was when I understood that you are my daughter.
Angie knew that she could never actually write the letter. Not if she wanted to give Jo her happy ending. The temptation was still there, though. Angie was selfish enough, she was cold-hearted enough, and she certainly had proven that she didn’t mind leaving a few casualties in her wake, but for now, she was content to do what she had always done: watch her daughter from afar.
Jo seemed like she was going to be okay. She was going out more. Sometimes she’d wind up at the coffee house near Anthony’s new school, where she’d sit for hours just because she could. Other times she’d go to church and sit in the back pew, hands clasped in her lap as she stared at the stained glass behind the altar. There were aunts and cousins and all sort of boisterous, happy people that Angie could not imagine having to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with. Anthony was attending a private school two counties over. They were financially secure. Jo hadn’t been on any of Reuben Figaroa’s accounts, but she was still married to him when he had taken the coward’s way out, and she had inherited all of his investments, the properties, the cars, the money.