Page 1 of The New Year's Party
Prologue
Olivia stumbles through the sliding glass doors back into the warm kitchen, mud smearing the linoleum as she kicks off her wet shoes. Her eyes are stinging from the cold, tears blurring everything. She blinks rapidly toward the fuzzy green numbers on the oven clock. 1:12 a.m. A hoarse, despairing laugh breaks out. It doesn’t even sound like her own voice. Only one hour into 2020 and the year feels dingy already, like the dangling streamers Phelps strung between the kitchen and the dining room, now half torn down and trampled on. Magical at the beginning of the night, sad and stupid now. Just like Olivia, who allowed herself to believe in the first flush of that early martini buzz that tonight she could finally bury the awful thing that happened five years ago when forGod’ssake, she should have known, she should haveknown.
Outside just now, lost and cold and bedraggled after her reckless flight into the dark, she’d managed to scrape together a certain kind of resolve. Alone under the stars, she had actually feltsanefor the first time in a long time. If things were over with Bennett, so be it. She would not bend the story of what happened to protect or please anyone, not even her husband; she would do right by herself, consequences be damned. But now,back in reality, back in this goddamnhouse, her inner peace is crumbling faster than she can catch the pieces.
Her chest tightens and releases in a frantic rhythm and she feels that nasty old sensation of not being able to draw in a full breath.Work, lungs, work.
Shit, shit, shit.
She gasps, crooks a finger at the bridge of her nose and stumbles forward, grabbing the edge of the nearest counter. Her body feels so strange, icy-hot, tingling with adrenaline and dread. Her stomach is a wreck too, and it’s not just from the martini, or the wine with dinner, or the champagne at midnight, or even the joint Ted handed her on the back deck...
She never should have touched that joint. She never should have done a lot of things. But when Ted put his arm around her shoulder after the midnight toast and so compassionately said, “Hey, you look like you need a breather,” and she let him guide her outside because shedidneed a break, and then he lit a joint and said, “C’mere, this will help, I promise,” Olivia had been so freaking desperate. “That’s it,” Ted encouraged, and then silly Olivia-who-never-learns took a second drag...
There’s a sound from the front of the house, drawing her attention to how eerily silent the place is. She lifts her head, half expecting Bennett to come walking in, but the streamers dividing her from the rest of the house hang motionless.
“Hello?” Olivia calls. Her voice sounds feeble and about as cracked as her heart. “Bennett?” A whooshing sound followed by a thud tells her that whoever she just heard has left out the front door. The streamers lift limply with the air current, as if an invisible presence is just on the other side. She grips the counter hard and calls out again, louder. “Hello? Anyone?”
The only response is a sick gurgle from her own stomach.
Where is everyone? They can’t all have left, can they? Maybe she should check, see if her car is still out front or ifBennett was mad enough to drive away and leave her stranded in this sorry place, this place they never should have come back to, right into the maw of the waiting monster disguised as a friend—
Nothing happened.Those were Bennett’s exact words when they faced each other on the deck after midnight, the scent of Ted’s joint still hanging in the air around her.Nothing happened, like Bennett could by act of simple declaration erase what had transpired five years ago. All the careful puzzle pieces she had put together, that she had finally arranged into a picture that madesense, nearly costing Olivia her hard-won mental health—he’d knocked them apart. With a smile on his face. Like he was doing her afavor.
It had been an out-of-body moment when Bennett stood before her in the moonlight, six feet tall, his curly hair disordered and his face sharp with happiness. She looked at him, and he was saying something to her that he clearly felt so good about, but the words were dull, as if he was speaking from far away, or to someone else...It’s all been a misunderstanding...And in the disconnect between Bennett’s joy and Olivia’s despair, in the disconnect between the two different versions of the story that could never fit into the same universe of reality, Olivia let her focus slide gently away from his face to the vague space between them where the pale mushrooms of her breath grew and dissolved in the cold of the night. To the only safe place she’d known in her thirty-five years of life: removal.
Then, with no warning, the volume in her head turned up and his words were splitting into her like an axe, demolishing her safe house, cutting right into all the soft parts of her heart she’d tried so hard to protect.
She ran. Down the deck stairs, away from the house, coat flying open over her yellow silk dress, plunging into the snowy stalks of wintering corn, like a spooked child instead of the grown woman she was supposed to be.
Coward.
That’s what she is. Under her cultivated exterior, Olivia Estelle Rhodes is a coward. She has been since she first started dating Bennett at age twenty and didn’t tell him the truth. At least that lie was forgivable, when looked at a certain way—the others were not. She should have known this party would undo her, she who wasn’t good at truth or risks. Truths that were risks.
“Oh,” she groans, leaning down and bracing her forearms on the counter, because suddenly she might throw up.
She needs a bathroom. Now. She pushes off the counter, lurching through the streamers into the dining room. The blue crepe paper whispers around her.
It’s an eerie feeling, passing into the empty dining room where the party was so alive just hours ago, the memory of the food and the laughter sitting like an uneasy film over the remains of the abandoned dinner party. The platter of salmon with only the gray skin remaining, curled up at the edges, remnants of eviscerated flesh clinging in a few spots, the serving tongs laid across the whole mess like an instrument of torture. Scattered crumbs on the white tablecloth from the dinner rolls, a long streak of purple from where Hellie’s wineglass nearly took a tumble. Knives and forks that clinked with such energy now quiet, glinting with sharpness and grease.
The living room, just beyond the dining room and a little offset through the wide arch, is equally eerie, littered with party hats from their craft, a fallen brigade of champagne glasses, the stash of sex toys Bunny was trying to sell them earlier, the bevy of dildos lying slain on the coffee table. There’s a new hole in the drywall, about the size of a fist. Olivia’s eyes catch a diamond glint on the rug—broken glass. Dark spots freckle the carpet in front of the couch. Wine? Blood? She looks away quickly, but her heart is really going now, knocking againsther chest. What the hellhappenedin here? It can’t have anything to do with her... with what she discovered... can it?
She steps carefully over the carpet with her bare feet, avoiding the glass, and arrives in the small side hallway that leads to the bedrooms, linen closet, and bathroom. There are five doors. Four closed, one open. Light spills out of the open door—a sign of life.
“Hello? Guys?” She approaches, pauses in the doorframe.
No one. It’s the bedroom Doug and Hellie were staying in, and it’s a wreck. The ceiling fan jerks unsteadily in an off-kilter circle. The closet door is open, a laundry basket filled with kids’ clothes overturned. The area rug is rolled up on one side. Hellie’s overnight bag is open too, releasing a trail of clothing and cosmetics. Olivia’s stomach squeezes. This is beyond the chaos of a messy person. The place looks ransacked. Have they been... robbed?
Olivia takes a step into the room. Adrenaline fizzes through her. She can feel her heartbeat behind her eyes. Should she do something? Call the police? Wait—is there a thief in here, right now, listening to Olivia’s every move from his hiding place? With a yelp, she kicks the closet door the rest of the way open. Yanks away the clothes on hangers with a breathless grunt, revealing...
Toy bins.
She releases a shuddering breath—she’s thinking crazy—everyone is probably fine—
“Bennett?” she says, returning to the hall. Her sense of foreboding is deepening. She feels like Goldilocks, if Goldilocks was a slasher movie. She tries the knob of the bedroom that she and Bennett were going to share with Will and Jenn. Locked. She slams her palm against the door. “Hello? Bennett? Guys? Are you in there?”
Only silence.
Are they hiding in the locked room—all of them? Like an anti-surprise party? Holding their breaths so that Olivia doesn’t know they’re all in there, muffling their laughter, waiting for her to leave?
