I stare up at the sprawling two story mansion—this monstrosity—in front of me as I step out of the car. With a wooden balcony overlooking a pond and huge glass windows, which must frame the surrounding grounds beautifully from inside, it’s a far cry from the image Justin put in my head when he’d told me about the starter home he and Elle built for themselves all those years ago.

  As I step out of the car onto the perfectly kept grounds to the front, the door to the house opens and Xavier runs out. “Cam!”

  Cameron jumps out of the car excitedly and the two boys waste no time running off around the side of the house, probably to a tennis court or an outdoor theatre, or a huge pool around the back—it wouldn’t surprise me at a place like this.

  Why did Justin downplay his home to me? Why hasn’t he ever invited me over here? Most guys would be falling over themselves to impress the woman they’re seeing by taking her back to his huge countryside home. But not Justin.

  Nothing about him says ‘money.’ Every time I’ve seen him, he’s been in work combats and a hoodie, and the Ford he drives is practically on its last legs for Christ’s sake. Everything about him screams working-class Joe. There’s a glaring disparity here and something clearly isn’t adding up.

  I realize that I’ve been standing beside my car, trying to process the fact that I apparently know nothing about the man I’ve been dating, when I see the door open again and Justin walk out slowly. His brow is raised, clearly surprised that I’ve shown up unannounced. “Ruby? What are you doing here?”

  There’s about ten feet between where we stand and I stick firmly to my spot by the car, not wanting to get any closer to him. “You lied to me.”

  He crosses his arms. “How so?”

  “Your wife, Elle. You didn’t tell me she went missing.” I keep my voice low, steady. “And that you were a suspect.”

  Justin sighs. “That?”

  “What do you mean that? Yes, that!” I yell.

  “I figured you already knew.” Justin shrugs, as though everyone in the world has been accused of murder at one point or another. “Lonerock loves to gossip.”

  He starts walking toward me, but I hold out a hand to stop him. “Don’t come near me.”

  His nonchalant attitude about this is grating on my nerves. Shouldn’t he be defending himself? Or trying to convince me that he had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance? I’ve seen people more passionately defend themselves after being accused of passing wind.

  “Nobody told me anything, Justin,” I say. “You could have told me the truth. Instead, I had to find out about this on the internet.”

  He scratches his head. “It’s a time of my life I don’t like to talk about. My wife went missing. As her husband, the blame was pointed at me. What can I say? It was hardly surprising.”

  He stops and sits on the bottom step of his porch. It’s made of solid oak with intricate carvings along the railing and I expect he probably built it himself, being a carpenter. The whole house is just picture-perfect in every way. Every detail looks like it was thoughtfully planned out. And I’ll bet the view from that balcony upstairs is something else.

  How much of this was Elle’s labor of love?

  I’m suddenly brokenhearted for this woman who built a perfect life—the picturesque house in the countryside, the husband, the baby—and never even got the chance to live it.

  “Did you do it?” I ask, not taking my eyes from his.

  “Kill my wife? No,” Justin says, unblinking. “And I’ll forgive you for asking.”

  “And what about the pictures of the girls?” I’m not letting up easily. “At the meeting, Bernice accused you of coming and going from the house in the years that it was empty.”

  Justin’s laugh is dry. “I told you, I don’t know who those girls are. And somebody seriously needs to put a stopper in that old bag’s mouth.”

  My jaw drops involuntarily.

  “What?” he asks, frowning. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  The inside of Justin’s house is just as impressive as the outside. His kitchen is nearly the same size as the whole downstairs of my house. The space is obnoxiously big for just him and Xavier, but something tells me that when he and Elle built the place, they’d had plans to fill it up.

  “I can’t believe someone killed her,” Justin says, passing me a mug of coffee. “I mean, she was truly awful but to strangle her to death? Somebody must have really hated her.”

  My stomach turns at these words. “It’s not official that she was killed, yet. That’s just what the mailman who found her told Harriet.”

  Justin walks to a window overlooking a field-sized backyard, where the boys are chasing each other around a huge wooden jungle gym.

  “They’ll all think it was me,” he says, casually. “I mean, she died just after the community meeting where she came straight out and accused me of being a murderer. Plenty of witnesses.”

  I don’t want to confirm his suspicions that, yes, his name has been thrown in the hat already—at least within Felicity’s clique—but I know Justin didn’t kill Bernice. And I don’t think he killed his wife, either.

  Justin takes a seat beside me. For a man who is probably about to have the cops come knocking on his door in a murder investigation, he looks remarkably unconcerned. I’m starting to wonder if he’s got a stash of horse tranquilizers somewhere around this ranch of his that he keeps himself topped up with daily—the man just can’t be rattled.

  “Justin, I thought you were a struggling carpenter,” I say, looking around the place. “What is all this?”

  “I’m a carpenter. I have struggles.” He shrugs.

  I narrow my eyes at him. “You told me that you and Elle built your first home together. That you spent every cent you had, that you did most the work yourselves just to be able to afford it.”

  Justin sips his coffee slowly. “That’s all true. It’s not my fault if you pictured the house differently to what it is.”

  “It’s a freaking mansion!” I yell, incredulously. “You drive around in a beat-up old car, you always have holes in your shirt and I happen to know you’re a cheap date. So, what gives?”

  Justin leans forward. “Sure, I’ll tell you. If you want to listen.”

  “I’ve got all day.” I cross my arms.

  31

  RUBY

  And he does.

  He tells me about the day he and Elle finally moved into this house. It had taken them years of saving and another four long years of building, a lot of which was a combination of their own hard work mixed with cashing in every favor they had around town.

  It was Elle’s dream home. She’d always wanted a big family, and Justin was eager to provide.

  He tells me about the positive pregnancy test that she wrapped up in gift paper and surprised him with on his birthday. And of how they brought Xavier home from the hospital to this house, where family and friends had left balloons and gifts and even casseroles to tide them over in the first few days of adjusting to parenthood.

  But this was the point in his story where his face dropped. Because in the weeks after Xavier’s birth, he’d watched as Elle had sunk deeper and deeper into a depression she’d never experienced before. She struggled to care for the baby, to nurse him, to bathe him. She’d cry and cry and Justin would try to do what he could to help, but he was away from home working during the day and there wasn’t much he could do. The doctor said she had postpartum depression, and that it was normal and would pass. She told Justin she didn’t know why she couldn’t just be happy. She had everything she’d ever wanted, but nothing about it felt right.

  It killed him to leave her each morning, seeing how much she was suffering. But keeping a house this size running isn’t cheap and he couldn’t afford to take any time off work.

  When Xavier was twelve weeks old, Elle also had to return to her job as a nurse.

  The thing was, Elle was great at putting on a show. To everyone else, she was a woman who had it all together, but at home, her depression was putting a strain on her and Justin’s relationship and they began fighting. Then one morning before he left for work, it all came to a head. Elle picked up and left for her mother’s house.

  “I must have called her ten times that morning, just trying to get through to her to tell her I was sorry. That I loved her and I didn’t want to fight. Eventually she picked up, and I talked her into leaving Xavier with her mom so we could meet for dinner to talk.”

  Justin’s coffee is sitting cold in the cup, his finger now tracing a circle around the rim. “The plan was that she would drive home to pick up some expressed milk she had in the freezer for Xavier and drop it back to her mother before meeting me for dinner. I was working that day, so I drove straight to the restaurant to meet her after I’d finished. And I’m sure you already read about the rest from there onwards.”

  It’s evident from the tortured look in Justin’s eyes that this is difficult for him to talk about. But if our relationship has any future, I need to hear this. All of it.

  “Why did the police suspect you?” I ask.

  Justin raises an eyebrow at this. “Why wouldn’t they? I was her husband. She’d just ran away to her mother’s house because we were fighting. It all added up.”

  I guess that’s true. The husband is always the first suspect in cases like this.

  “But I knew how upset she was that day. And she’d already shared with me in the weeks leading up to it that she’d considered ending her life. I tried to get her to go to therapy, but she didn’t want to. When I heard her car was found by a river, I just knew.”

  “Did you tell the police all this?” I ask.

  “Of course I did. And I was there every day alongside them, searching for her. But everything I said and did only made it look like I was trying to cover for myself. There were a lot of questions raised about why one of her tires was flat, but ultimately that led nowhere.” Justin leans back in his chair. “They were thorough with their investigation, but there was no obvious signs of an abduction, no signs of a body, and as much as they tried—there was no evidence to pin it on me.”

  Except it’s clear that in the court of public opinion, the blame has been placed firmly on Justin for Elle’s disappearance.

  “Why did you choose to have her declared legally dead?” I ask.

  “There were a lot of reasons. Emotional. Financial. But ultimately, it came down to Xavier’s future. I didn’t want him growing up always wondering if his mom would ever show up again.” Justin looks uncomfortable. “And like I said, running a house like this isn’t easy. I struggled for years on just one income after Elle was gone. I needed her life insurance payout just to keep a roof over Xavier’s head. Believe you me, getting the insurance company to pay out was damn near impossible. But we won in the end.”

  I can see how that must have looked in a small town like this. But I can also see that Justin was only doing what he needed to do for his son’s future. And my guess is that if it weren’t for how special this house is to him, he’d have long since moved away from the judging eyes of Lonerock.

  “Is that her?” I point to a photo on the wall.

  A woman of about thirty, with flowing blonde hair and gleaming white teeth smiles out from the frame while holding an infant to her shoulder.

  Justin nods. “She looked happy, right?”

  He’s right, at first glance. But I’ve become wary recently of the smiles captured in fleeting moments on film. And similar to the girls in the photos I found, Elle’s smile has a darkness behind it. When I look closer, there are dark circles under her eyes, and rather than a loving hold on her young baby, she seems uncomfortable in that way people tend to look when they hold someone else’s baby for the first time.

  But a nagging question clenches my gut as I look at Elle’s face. How could a beautiful woman like that, who seemed to have everything most others could only ever dream of having—the loving husband, the healthy baby, the huge house, and a stable career on top of it all—have ended up so desperately unhappy that she pulled over on the side of the road, walked to the river below and took her own life without so much as leaving a note?

  32

  MORY

  I’m officially seventeen! Today is my birthday, and also the day Hutch and I go on our first date.

  I want to say that seventeen feels different in some way to sixteen, but the only difference I can see so far is that I woke up with a giant pimple on my cheek that wasn’t there yesterday. But I’m not going to let that get me down because today marks one year until I’m officially an adult. I have no idea what exactly my plans are for adulthood, but I do know they will not involve living in Lonerock.

  And yes, I know the love of my life lives here, but even he hates this town. Sometimes I fantasize about us running away together and getting our own place so we can spend every hour of the day with each other.

  But while we’re still in the soul-sucking pit that is Lonerock, that’s not going to happen. Especially while I’m still only seventeen.

  I already hated this town enough but since Mrs. Fisher next door was killed, I can’t even relax. I lie in bed at night and wonder who that woman pissed off so much they wanted to kill her. And the thought of her body lying there for two weeks, right next to our house while we walked around thinking everything was totally normal really freaks me out. The mailman’s son goes to my school and he’s been telling everyone that her body was so badly decayed when his dad found her that there were maggots crawling on her. He’d suspected she’d been strangled because he saw marks around her neck.

  It turns out he was right and apparently the cops have now launched a murder investigation. They’ve been to every house in the neighborhood asking people if they saw anything suspicious. As far as I know, they haven’t got any leads yet.

  Of course, everyone suspects my mom’s boyfriend. But my mom is totally sure it wasn’t him, and I’m pretty sure she’s right. I mean, he could have easily done it. He’s definitely strong enough to have strangled Bernice to death. She looked kind of skinny and frail and I’m pretty sure even Cameron would have been able to overpower her. But still, I don’t think it was Justin.

  I think my mom took Bernice’s death hard though, not only because people are pointing the finger at Justin, but also because she’d been arguing with her ever since we got here and she regrets the mean things she’d said about her.

  But I don’t really understand why everyone is suddenly pretending to feel so sorry for the woman now that she’s dead, when they all hated her right up until then. My mom dragged us along to the funeral because she was worried nobody would turn up, but there were a couple of dozen people there, mostly neighbors, because I think all her family are already dead. And the people who stood up to talk seemed as though they had to stretch their minds to come up with anything at all positive to say. They all said things like ‘Bernice always watched over her community’ and ‘she took a passionate interest in the lives of others.’

  Kind of like a bunch of gazelles at a lion’s funeral saying ‘he was a die-hard athlete’ or ‘he pursued his passion with an unstoppable hunger.’ It’s all just so phony.

  And although she would never say it out loud, I think Mom is secretly happy that Bernice is gone, because now she doesn’t have to worry about her complaining over every little thing she does. At the very least, the murder has given everyone in Lonerock something to talk about other than another store in town closing down or the weather.

  “You look amazing!” My mom’s eyes go wide as I walk into the kitchen.

  I’ve put in effort for my date tonight, straightening my hair and picking out a dress, but I’m never really happy with what I see in the mirror.

  “Meh,” I reply. “I’m no model, that’s for sure.”

  “I’ve told you before, Mory, don’t ever compare yourself to pictures you see in adverts and online. It’s all airbrushed, filtered and fake.”

  I put my hand to my cheek. “Hold on, are you trying to tell me that television and media portray images that aren’t exactly real? You’re willing to go on record with that?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Well, I think you look great, anyway.”

  “Wish I could say the same, Mom.” I grimace.

  She’s wearing a decades old Rolling Stones T-shirt, her hair has fallen half out of the lopsided bun on her head and she’s on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor.

  “Well, you try looking like a beauty queen while cleaning the house.”

  “No thanks.” I sidestep her and check my phone as it chimes with a message.

  Happy Birthday. Can’t stop thinking about you.

  I smile and send back a kissy face.

  “I’ll take it by the grin on your face that’s Hutch,” Mom teases. “What time is he picking you up?”

  “Five.”

  “And what time is he dropping you home?”

  “Dunno,” I say. “And I’m not a child anymore, Mom. I have my own house key, and you don’t have to wait up for me.”

  She frowns. “I know that, Mory. And I’m not babying you. I think Hutch is a responsible young man and I trust him to keep you safe.”

  “Good.” I cross my arms.

  “And…” She just can’t seem to help herself. “Another form of safety you might be thinking about is⁠—”

  “Mom, it’s just dinner,” I interrupt her. “Maybe a movie. That’s it. I appreciate the thought, but I really don’t need the talk.”

  “Okay, okay.” Mom holds up her pink-gloved hands in defeat. “Just trying to do my job.”

  I’m sure she thinks I’m just attempting to avoid an awkward conversation, but she really doesn’t need to worry. Hutch and I aren’t like that with each other, even if my promiscuous mother and father were at our age. A small amount of bile suddenly rises up my throat. Ugh. What a disgusting thought.