She tries to remain calm, in case he’s trying to trick her, but he starts telling her all the details, things that only Adam could have revealed. She begins to cry, silently, tears running down her cheeks, staring at the table in front of her. She’d finally understood, when she arrived at the cabin that night, about Adam’s drinking, that he’d started because he’d found out about his father and Amanda.
‘He’s a juvenile,’ Webb says. ‘Amanda’s murder was impulsive, not premeditated. He could be out by the time he turns eighteen.’ She looks at him then, feeling a tentative hope. ‘But you’re going to be in jail for much longer.’
Her body sags. She doesn’t know now how she withstood it, how she’d borne it without cracking. How had she ever thought that Adam could handle it? Of course he confessed. She thinks of the terrible burden of hiding the truth from everyone, hiding what they’d done from her husband, her slow realization that he might have figured it out. Her fear that Adam would get drunk and tell someone what they’d done. Her dawning realization that she had made a terrible mistake.
She looks up at him desperately. ‘I just wanted to protect my son.’
Webb says, ‘It would have been better for everyone if you’d just called 911.’
Epilogue
OLIVIA LOOKS BLANKLY out the window. The nightmare isn’t over, it has simply changed shape. Paul has been completely cleared. Adam has confessed. Olivia can’t wrap her head around it – all along, Adam was the one who had killed Amanda, and Glenda had helped him cover it up. And Olivia had had no idea.
The thought of what happened at their cabin makes her shrink in revulsion. She will never go out there again. They will have to sell it. One more piece of her old life – gone.
And Glenda has confessed to murdering Carmine. The shock of it. Olivia imagines Carmine, dead on her floor. They say she was strangled with a cord. She tries not to think of Glenda throttling Carmine from behind; it gives her a feeling of vertigo. Apparently Glenda had seen Carmine as a threat – afraid that Carmine had seen Adam and Glenda driving home in separate cars the night that Amanda was killed, afraid she’d figured it out and would tell the police. Perhaps Glenda had become completely unhinged by then, Olivia thinks. Glenda thought she was protecting her son. A mother will do almost anything to protect her son.
Olivia wonders if this surreal feeling will ever go away. She wonders how she and Paul will go on. He knows that, for a time, she thought he might be guilty. That lies between them now.
Her eyes well up. How will she cope without Glenda? She can’t bear to think of Glenda as a murderer; she will always try to think of her as just Glenda, her best friend. She already misses her more than she can bear. She must manage somehow without her.
Raleigh will plead guilty to three counts of breaking and entering and unauthorized use of a computer; because he’s a juvenile, his lawyer thinks he can get him off lightly, with community service. Raleigh has promised them that his hacking days are over. He’s said that before. She’s not sure she believes him.
Robert Pierce is delighted. As delighted as his cold, dark heart allows.
He hadn’t known about Keith Newell. He’d thought, when Paul Sharpe was arrested, that he had been the secret second lover. But it was Keith Newell his wife had been seeing, his son who had killed her. It’s good to know, finally, what happened. It’s good not to be under a cloud any longer.
Robert recognizes that he’s better off without Amanda. Things were becoming impossible between them. He’d considered killing her himself.
Robert watches Becky go out in her car. Now, he pulls on the gardening gloves, grabs the trowel, and goes to the back of the garden to dig up the buried cell phone. Everything has come to a satisfactory close, but still, he must get rid of Amanda’s phone once and for all. He hasn’t forgotten about that damn teenager, who might have looked in it. There are things on that phone that he really doesn’t want anyone else to see. Amanda was smarter than he’d thought.
He’s going to retrieve the phone and drive a couple of hours north along the river to a deserted place he knows. He’s going to wipe it clean again and toss it into the deep water of the Hudson.
Robert sinks to his knees and digs around in the earth where he buried the phone, but he doesn’t immediately find it. He digs deeper, faster, in a widening area, turning over the dirt rapidly, his breath quickening with rage. It’s not there.
Becky. She must have seen him in the garden. She was always watching him. She must have dug up the phone.
He rises to his feet, trying to control his fury, and stares across the fence at Becky’s empty house. Plotting his next move.