Page 81 of She Didn't See It Coming
“Clara,” Sam says, with a warning in his voice, “go to your room, right now.”
“I hate you!” she screams again.
Sam rises from the sofa so quickly it takes Paige by surprise. Paige sees the sudden fear in the little girl’s eyes. In two strides, he’s grabbed Clara around the waist and is carrying her, kicking and screaming, toward her bedroom.
Paige has never seen Sam behave this way either. The whole scene is troubling her. Sam had been cold to her today from the moment she arrived. She thinks about slipping out. But then she remembers she promised to pick up some groceries for them. While she’s thinking this, she hears Sam slam the bedroom door, and he reappears in the living room, looking angry and exhausted.
He brushes a hand across his face. “She’s not handling this well.”
“She’s only three,” Paige says, smiling tentatively. “She’s lost her mother.”
“It’s just so fucking difficult…” He trails off. He doesn’t need to explain.
“You know I’m here to help—you don’t have to do this all on your own.”
“I know. And I’m grateful.”
They can both hear Clara crying her heart out in her bedroom. It’s setting their nerves on edge.
“Maybe you could take her with you when you go out for groceries,” Sam suggests. “I could use the break. And Clara used to love grocery shopping with Bryden.”
Paige’s immediate reaction is annoyance. What is she, a babysitting service?He could use the break.She remembers how Bryden used to complain sometimes about how she did the bulk of the household chores and the bulk of the childcare too. Paige had told Bryden she was being taken for granted. Secretly, Paige had thought it was because Bryden put up with it.
She hesitates. She doesn’t want to be taken for granted. But he looks like he’s at the end of his rope, and these are extenuating circumstances. “All right,” she agrees.
A short time later, after Clara has calmed down and Paige has prepared a shopping list, she bundles the little girl up and takes her out to get groceries. In the car, on the way to the store, Clara is quiet, and Paige is able to think.
If she’s honest with herself, she’s had feelings for Sam for a long time. And now, when she thinks about the possibility of a future with Sam, she feels warm inside. Some good could come out of the tragedy of Bryden’s death. She hopes that after a suitable interval, they can stop pretending. She hopes that she can eventually become Sam’s wife, and mother to Clara. She tells herself that Bryden would have liked that.
She thinks he cares for her, even though he sometimes seems distant. Bryden hasn’t even been dead a week. He can’t accept that he has feelings for her now, so soon. She thinks about yesterday, when he pulled her into his bedroom to make love, almost the moment he saw her. He couldn’t help himself, and neither could she. She thinks he could fall in love with her. And that’s how it should be. Because she’s already fallen in love with him.
She hadn’t meant to. She held back for the longest time, because Bryden was her best friend. And then that first time—it was like magic. It was like nothing she’d ever felt before. When she was in his arms, she felt both safe and wildly excited at the same time. She washooked. She felt guilty as hell in the beginning, but she got used to it. The guilt faded after a while.
And Clara. Her sweet goddaughter. How terrible for her to lose her mother, and in such a terrible way. But she’s so young, she probably won’t even remember. Some good must come of all this tragedy, Paige tells herself. She can love Clara almost as much as her real mother. And maybe Clara will have a sibling someday after all. There’s all that baby stuff that Bryden had packed away, while they waited for another baby to come along.
Bryden had confided in Paige about her frustration at how long it was taking for her to conceive a second child. Clara had happened so quickly. But they’d been trying for a year, and nothing. She’d had all the baby clothes and equipment stored in the den. And Bryden told her how she’d go in and look at it, every day, handling the onesies, the cute little outfits that Clara had outgrown. Finally, she decided to move it all to the storage locker in the basement so she wouldn’t have to look at it. She decided that they’d been putting too much pressure on themselves to conceive. She said she had to stop making it a priority, realize it was going to take time. Paige had helped her move everything down to the basement a few weeks ago. She thinks of that storage locker now and shudders.
She’s running this errand for Sam, but it’s just this once. She tells herself that as their relationship matures, she will make sure he doesn’t treat her the way he treated Bryden. She will not be taken for granted. She expects better than that. She’s stronger than Bryden was.
55
Refreshed after her lunch with Michael, Jayne approaches members of the IT team. “Have you guys looked into any online groups about the Bryden Frost case?”
“Yes. There’s the usual talk among the online sleuths. There’s a Facebook group we keep an eye on. There’s been a lot of posts on there about the Frost case, nothing useful. We don’t know who some of these people are. Occasionally they hide behind fake profiles.”
“Can you set me up so I can look through it myself?”
“Sure.”
Within a few minutes, an officer has Jayne on the Facebook group True Crimes in Albany NY, and she’s able to peruse all the posts about the case. She settles down to read. She starts at the beginning and reads it all.
It’s unpleasant, at times, wading through so much vitriol. People show the worst of themselves online, where they can be anonymous ifthey choose. Jayne thinks the internet has a lot to answer for. She remembers what Michael said, and imagines everyone in this online group throwing off their clothes, showing who they really are underneath. Animals.
She sits up straight when she sees the post from Karen Hennin about the eyewitness. It was posted this morning, not long after Jayne had spoken to Alice about the eyewitness.Is Karen Hennin Alice Gardner?Jayne realizes that anyone can make up a fake profile if they choose. She looks at Karen Hennin’s profile: a photo of Superwoman and the descriptionLoves dogs, cupcakes, and political biographies.Then Jayne goes back and reads every post she’s made.
It makes sense, she tells herself, that Alice would be on here, even if she has no other social media presence. She wonders if Derek is here too. And Sam. Who the fuck are all these people? Who the fuck is this Emma Porter, who claims to know someone in the police department and is spreading all this information? If that’s true, it can’t be tolerated. She can’t have people who work in the police talking to their partners or friends about how the investigation is going and having it end up on Facebook.
Something about Emma Porter troubles her. She rereads her posts, from the beginning. She is the one who really started this group off on the Bryden Frost case, back on Tuesday when she first disappeared. The excitement, the breathless tone of the posts feels familiar. She scans faster, looking for something she’d seen the first time through. Here it is.
