Then I noticed something else.
A tiny red light was blinking on the top edge of the black phone.
Blinking. On and off.
Recording.
Somebody was recording us. Right now.
I held it up.
“Who’s listening?” I said.
Brad’s face changed.
“Put it down.”
“No.”
“Emily, put it down.”
“Why?”
“Because if they’re listening,” Brad said, “they know we’re talking about them.”
“Who?”
He looked toward the bedroom window.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to remember for six months,” he said.
A car engine started outside.
We all froze.
I ran to the window.
There was a dark sedan parked across the street, in front of the Petersons’ house. An old one. Dark green, boxy, with tinted windows and a dent in the front fender. The engine was running. The windshield wipers were going.
I’d seen that car before. I was sure of it. In my rearview mirror. Parked outside Westbrook Elementary. At the end of the grocery store parking lot.
As I watched, it pulled away from the curb and drove off slowly down our street.
Chloe whispered, “He knows.”
I turned around.
“Who, Chloe?”
She opened the brown envelope one more time.
There was one last photograph inside. A glossy four-by-six print.
She handed it to me.
I looked down at it.
It was a picture of me.
Asleep.
In this bed. In this bedroom. Lying on my side with my hand under my cheek and my hair across the pillow.
It had been taken from the corner of the room near the closet.
From about six feet away.
My blood ran cold.
“When was this taken?”
Chloe shook her head.
“Brad found it in his briefcase last week. He doesn’t know how it got there.”
There was a little orange timestamp printed in the bottom corner. The kind old digital cameras used to put on photos.
10/14 2:13 AM.
I knew that date.
October fourteenth. The night Brad told me he was working late. The night he never came home. The night I slept alone and lay awake until almost three.
The night I decided I’d stopped loving him.
I’d fallen asleep around two.
At two-thirteen, someone had been standing in my bedroom.
I turned the photograph over.
There were four words written on the back, in black ink.
She remembers everything now.
My hands started shaking so hard the picture rattled.
“Who wrote this?”
Brad took it from me. He stared at the handwriting.
Tall, narrow capital letters. The way architects write.
“I did,” he whispered.
I stared at him.
“You?”
He nodded slowly.
“That’s my handwriting,” he said. “But I didn’t write it. I wasn’t here. I was at the office that night with Chloe and the lawyer until four in the morning. I know I wasn’t here.” He looked at me. His hand was shaking. “But that’s my handwriting, Em.”
Then the bedroom door slammed shut behind us.
All three of us jumped.
It was the wind. I’d left the front door open downstairs, and the wind had blown straight up the stairwell. That was all.
But my heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t hear anything else.
The black phone vibrated in my hand.
A new message appeared on the screen.
No number. No name.
Just six words.
Ask Chloe what happened that night.
I turned slowly toward her.
She was crying.
“Chloe?” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“What happened that night? April twelfth. What happened?”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she said. “I promised him.”
“Tell me now.”
She looked at Brad. Then back at me.
“The night of the accident,” she said. Her voice broke. “I wasn’t just the one who called 911.”
She took a breath.
“I was in the car,” she said.
Brad took a step backward. He hit the doorframe.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You told me you weren’t there. You told me you were driving behind me. You told me you just saw it happen.”
“I lied,” Chloe said.
“Why?” I said.
Chloe looked at me with tears running down her face.
“Because I was in the passenger seat,” she said. “Because I was holding the documents in my lap. And because I saw who forced us off the road, and Brad doesn’t remember, and I didn’t want him to have to know.”
“Who?” I said.
She looked toward the bedroom window.
“Someone was following us,” she said. “For miles. In a green car. They came up beside us on Route 9 and turned the wheel into us. On purpose.”
“Who, Chloe?”
She hesitated.
Then she said a name.
And the moment I heard it, I understood why Brad had looked so terrified on that staircase.
It was the name of someone who’d been dead for eight years.
My father.
My father’s name hung in the bedroom like a ghost.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered.
Chloe shook her head.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“My father died eight years ago,” I said. “Of a heart attack. In his garden. I was there. I held his hand in the ambulance.”
“I know.”
“Then why did you say his name?”
“Because that’s what Brad said,” Chloe said. “That night. Lying in the ditch. Over and over. Before the ambulance came. It was Emily’s dad. It was Emily’s dad’s car.”
I turned toward my husband.
He was staring at the floor.
“Brad?”
He finally looked up at me.
“I thought your father was following us,” he said quietly. “I remember that much. It’s one of the only things I remember about that night. I thought I saw his car in the rearview mirror.”
“Why?”
“Because it was his car, Em,” Brad said. “Or one exactly like it. The old green Buick.”
My heart pounded.
My father had driven a green 1994 Buick LeSabre for twenty years. He’d loved that car. He’d kept it spotless. He used to wash it every Sunday in the driveway with a bucket and a sponge, singing Johnny Cash.
When Brad and I first started dating, the very first time he came to my parents’ house for dinner, he saw that car in the driveway and stopped dead.
“My dad had that exact car,” he’d said. “Same year. Same color. Same dent in the fender. My brother and I used to sit on the hood and…”
Then he’d stopped talking. And changed the subject.
I never knew what he meant.
“The person following you,” I said slowly, “wasn’t my father.”
“No,” Chloe said.
“Then who was it?”
Chloe looked at Brad.
“His brother,” she said.
I stared at her.
“Brad doesn’t have a brother,” I said.
Brad sat down slowly on the edge of our bed.
He put his face in his hands.
“I did,” he said.
The room went completely silent.
“His name was Daniel,” Brad said into his hands. “We were twins.”
I’d been married to this man for eleven years. I’d met his mother. I’d been to his father’s funeral last year. I’d heard every story about his childhood a hundred times.
I had never once heard the name Daniel.
“Why have you never told me?” I whispered.
Brad lowered his hands.
“Because Daniel died when we were seventeen,” he said. “That’s what my parents told me. That’s what I’ve believed for twenty-seven years.”
Chloe reached into the envelope one more time. She took out an old, faded photograph and laid it on the bed between us.
Two teenage boys stood in a driveway next to a green Buick LeSabre with a dent in the front fender. They were both grinning. Both wearing jeans and white T-shirts. Arms slung over each other’s shoulders.
One of them was Brad. Seventeen years old, with a bad haircut and braces.
The other one had the same face.
Exactly the same face. The same eyes. The same jaw. The same crooked smile.
But something about it made my stomach tighten. Something harder around the eyes.
“He didn’t die,” Chloe said quietly.
Brad looked up at her.
“That’s what we were told,” he said.
“No,” Chloe said. “He disappeared. Your father told everyone he died because he didn’t want to admit what really happened.”
“What really happened?” I said.
Brad shook his head slowly.
“There was a fight,” he said. “The summer we were seventeen. Daniel and my dad. In the garage. I don’t know what it was about. I just heard yelling. Then Daniel took the Buick and drove off. And three days later, my dad sat me and my mom down at the kitchen table and said Daniel had been killed in a car accident in Pennsylvania. He said there’d been a private funeral. He said we were never to talk about Daniel again.” Brad’s voice cracked. “So I didn’t. Not for twenty-seven years. Not even to you.”
“And he came back?” I said.
“Six months ago,” Chloe said. “Right after Brad’s father died.”
Then Chloe told me the rest.
She told it slowly, sitting on the edge of our bed with the rain running down the windows, while Brad sat with his head in his hands and nodded at the parts he remembered.
When Brad’s father died last fall, his will left everything to Brad. The house. The savings. Hale Lumber, the family business, which had been sold a few years earlier for a lot of money.
Three months after the funeral, in February, a lawyer contacted Brad. He represented someone named Daniel Hale. He had a second will. A handwritten one, dated two years before Brad’s father died, leaving half of everything to Daniel.
It was a forgery. Brad was almost sure. But he couldn’t prove it.
Then, going through his father’s things in March, Brad found the proof. A box of letters in the attic. Letters Daniel had written to their father over twenty-seven years. Asking for money. Threatening him. And a signed statement their father had made to his own lawyer, years ago, saying he’d never write Daniel into a will no matter what, and explaining why.
The documents.
“He was going to give them to the police,” Chloe said. “On April twelfth. That’s where we were going. To meet a detective. I was holding the box in my lap.”
And Daniel had followed them. In the old green Buick he’d driven away in at seventeen and kept for twenty-seven years. And on a dark curve on Route 9, he’d pulled up beside them and turned his wheel into theirs.
“I was trapped in the car,” Chloe said. “Brad was unconscious. I was screaming. And Daniel walked down into the ditch in the rain and looked at us through the broken window. And he took the box of documents off my lap. And he walked away.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“I did,” Chloe said. “I told them everything. But Brad didn’t remember any of it. And I was having an affair with him. And there was no other car at the scene. And no documents.” She shook her head. “They thought I was lying. To cover for Brad crashing the car. They wrote it up as a single-car accident.”
“But the documents,” I said. “The first envelope.”
“Copies,” Brad said quietly. “I’d made copies. In March. And then I forgot I’d made them.” He almost laughed. “For six months, I forgot. Then two weeks ago, I found them. In my own desk drawer at the office, under a stack of blueprints. With a note in my handwriting on top. DON’T LOSE THESE AGAIN.”
“So he had Chloe mail them,” I said, “to a lawyer.”
“Mr. Levin,” Brad said. “Our family’s old lawyer. For safekeeping. And then Daniel found out.”
Everything suddenly connected.
The black phone, planted under Brad’s pillow so we’d think someone could get inside the house anytime they wanted. Because someone could.
The photograph of me asleep at two-thirteen in the morning, so I’d feel watched in my own bed.
The voicemail in my voice. Brad said Daniel had always been good at voices when they were kids. He’d imitate their teachers, their father, the guy on the news. These days, Chloe said, you could fake anybody’s voice with a computer and a few minutes of recording. And I’d left plenty of voicemails on Brad’s old phone, which had gone missing from the wrecked car.
