Page 48 of Home Is Where the Bodies Are

“Can I go with Lucas to search for Emma?”

Brian lets out a heavy sigh. What will we tell our children when she never returns? Will we keep searching? Will we pretend to have hope when we know there is none? There’s no right answer. Because you can’t give a correct answer to a wrong question.

“Yeah, but be careful and make sure you’re home for lunch,” he says.

“Thanks, Dad.” Her footsteps pound down the hallway, growing quieter as she moves through the house. The front door slams closed, startling me.

“Should we really have Beth out looking for...?” I can’t say her name out loud.

“It’d be odd if we didn’t let her help. Don’t you think that would raise suspicions?” He looks at me, staring into my eyes, and I wonder how I look to him. His thumb slides back and forth, grazing over the top of my hand. His touch used to be comforting but now it feels like a needle dragging across my skin, perforating it.

“I don’t know. It just feels wrong having her search for someone she’ll never find.”

He presses his lips together. “I know. But there’s nothing we can do now.”

“We could tell Susan and Eddie the truth.”

“We can’t. It’s too late. We got rid of her body. That’s a felony,” he explains, but he doesn’t explain enough, like why we had to hide it in the first place.

“I still don’t understand. Why couldn’t we just call the police?”

Brian exhales deeply, and I think maybe he just might exhale the truth too. “Laura, please stop asking me that.”

His eyes search mine, but there’s nothing for him to find. I’m not the one hiding secrets—well, at least not from him... yet.

“Can’t you just tell me? I know you said it’s better that I don’t know. But that can’t be true.” My mouth is so dry it feels like I swallowed sand. But maybe that’s how guilt tastes when you have to swallow it—grainy, flavorless, bitter.

“I can’t. You just have to trust me. We did the right thing for us.”

If you have to qualifyrightwith a pronoun, then it’s not right.

“You do believe me?” he asks.

I pull my hand from his. “I don’t have a choice.”

His brows knit together and a sliver of his green eyes disappear behind his lids. We’ve both done a bad thing. It binds us to one another, more than any other connection we’ve ever had—more than this house we built together, more than our marriage, and more than our children. He and I share the darkest of secrets.

“Brian, when you love someone as much as I love you, you believe them. You always believe them,” I say.

He smiles warmly, and his thumb grazes over my hand again. It feels like a razor blade, but I don’t wince.

It doesn’t matter if I trust him. It only matters that he thinks I trust him.

TWENTY-SIX

MICHAEL

On the way home, we stopped at the clinic for Nicole to get her methadone treatment. She’s apparently supposed to go every day, but she’s been going every other day or every two days, trying to get clean faster. It clearly isn’t working, because there are no shortcuts in life. Nicole hasn’t learned that yet, and I’m not so sure she ever will.

“You promise you won’t tell Beth?” she says again as I park the car in front of the garage.

“Yeah,” I say, but I don’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe I should tell Beth, though arguably it’s none of my business and it’s not Beth’s either.

“Thanks,” she says, sliding out of the car.

“Wait, why don’t you want Beth to know?” I ask.

“Because she’d probably kill me.”

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