The Perfect Getaway, page 19
I couldn’t speak. I stared at her, shock overwhelming me. How could this have happened? The records were sealed by the adoption agency. I was never supposed to have been able to be found. I felt as though I was going to be sick. The world around me began to spin as I tried to piece together my thoughts. It felt like I’d been placed on one of those rides at the fair that suck you to their walls because of the speed of their rotations—so quickly shifting from anger over a nonexistent affair to confusion and sadness over finding out the truth.
She let out a loud, obnoxious sigh. “Anyway, I know you weren’t expecting this. Obviously, it’s shocking. But I wanted to get to know you. I was kind of…stalking you a bit, I guess. Not in a threatening way. I just followed you around to get to know you and figure out how to approach you.” She laughed under her breath, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. “This sounds terrible. I’ve rehearsed it a million times, and it’s still coming out a jumbled mess.” She tossed the hair over her shoulders, inhaling deeply. “One of the times I followed you, I met Andy. He thought I was just a girl in a bar, and he asked for my number. And…it was my in, I guess. I realized that was the perfect way to get to know you, to get closer to you… I wanted to feel like your friend. And now I do, but it feels dishonest. I don’t want to keep lying or let this go on for much longer. I’ve wanted to talk to you and Brad about this so many—”
“No.” Her words hit me, shocking me back to reality. “No, Emily. You can’t say anything. Not to anyone.”
The crease between her brows deepened. “I just want to know my parents, Laura. My real parents. I don’t need an explanation. I hold no grudges.” She held her hands up to show she was sincere.
“Emily, listen to me, I need to break this news to Brad myself. When you were put up for adoption…” My voice broke. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Can you just give me some time to process everything?” Panic filled me. Had she mentioned this to Andy? Would he mention it to Brad? “You haven’t told anyone, have you?”
Her mouth twisted, and she glanced away. “No. I wanted to tell you first. You were the easiest to approach.” She reached for my hand, and I recoiled from her without thinking. “You’ve been so nice to me.”
I reached forward, pulling her into a hug. I didn’t know how to feel, how to react. Was this really my daughter standing in front of me? The daughter I’d given up? The daughter I never thought I’d see again when I placed her into the arms of strangers while I sat crying alone in a hospital bed? I rubbed her back, releasing a sob. “I can’t believe it’s you.”
Emily started to cry, too, and I felt her shoulders shaking in my arms. “I’ve dreamed about you my whole life. I want to know so much.”
I pulled back. In the distance, a door shut, a seagull cawed overhead, and the ocean waves continued to roar. Nothing else mattered. I couldn’t focus on anything except my own panic. This would change everything. “I want to tell you everything,” I swore, wiping my eyes. “And I promise I will. But can you do me one favor?”
She nodded, swiping a finger across both her cheeks as she laughed through her tears. “Anything.”
“Can you wait until we get back home before you mention this to anyone? I want to break the news to Brad gently. He’s…he’s not good with surprises.”
“Imagine that, neither am I. It runs in the family, I guess,” she said, a bright smile on her face. She pulled me into another hug, and I gave in, waiting for a response.
“So, we’ll just talk to him once we’re back home, okay?”
She nodded, her chin bumping my shoulder. “I just can’t believe it’s you.”
I couldn’t believe it was her, either. I couldn’t believe everything was going to fall apart. “Emily, I need you to tell me you understand.” I pulled away from her, gripping her shoulders. “I need you to promise me you won’t tell anyone anything. You have to keep pretending nothing’s changed between us until I can tell Brad when we get back home.”
Her glowing expression began to fade, and she nodded, her chin quivering. “I understand.”
“No one can know until I’m ready to deal with this.” I shook my head, anger swelling in my belly at being forced to face the truth of what I’d done.
“I’m sorry, Laura—”
“You don’t need to apologize. I understand why you did what you did, but you need to realize I had my reasons, and this wasn’t planned. I have to process this… It’s a lot, Emily. And what about Andy? What are you going to tell him?”
“Wh-what about him?” She blinked.
“This is going to break his heart. He’s in love with you, don’t you see that? To find out you’ve used him to get to us? How do you think he’s going to react to that?”
“I guess I didn’t think—”
“Well, you need to,” I said. I wasn’t being fair to her, I knew. But my privacy had been violated. And I felt trapped here on the island with no choice but to face it. It was unfair. I’d made the decision. I hadn’t wanted to know Emily, but she hadn’t respected that. “You need to think things through. What you do matters. Your choices hurt people.” I sighed. “I’m sorry for being so harsh, but you have to think…” I trailed off. “I need to go back inside. I can’t do this right now.”
“Laura, wait—”
“Please just…please give me some time, okay?” I looked back at her as I pulled the door open. “It’s really good to meet you, and I’m glad you had a good life, but I need a minute.” I walked through the door, my heart breaking at what I’d said. It wasn’t fair. Not to her. Not to me.
My words echoed in my head. What you do matters. Your choices hurt people. Was I talking to Emily? Or myself?
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Nick
PRESENT DAY
As she told the story, the room was eerily quiet. When she finished, I shook my head. “So…when you came to me because you said Emily was dangerous? That you thought she knew secrets about us…”
She nodded. “It was because I already knew that she did, but I had no idea how to tell you.”
“So…” I looked to Andy, who was watching me closely, then back to Laura. I’d been right all along. How was Andy okay with this? “Now you’re hiding from the police? You can’t plan to stay here, what, forever?”
“What? No, I’m not hiding from the police—”
“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You killed Emily because of what she knew?” I looked at Andy again, trying to read the expression on his face. “Because she was threatening to tell Brad about the baby?”
Laura shook her head, swiping a hand across the back of her neck and wiping the sweat on her shorts. “No. You have it all wrong. I didn’t kill Emily. I didn’t know she was dead until we all woke up. I would’ve never… She was our daughter, Nick.” She put her hands over her face, and I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but watch. “She was our daughter, and she was going to tell Brad. She thought Brad was her father. I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do, but I would’ve never done that.”
“Had you told him about…” I trailed off, wondering what exactly Andy knew.
“No,” she said quickly. “No. Everything we did that summer, our relationship, the baby, the adoption… I put it all behind me just like I said I would. Brad was gone to Haiti for two years, and when he came home, I just moved on from what we’d gone through. We both agreed to never talk about it again…”
She was right. We had agreed, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake. It didn’t mean I hadn’t wondered if it was the right decision. She was still dating Brad when the affair had happened between us, but the start-up of his company—bringing clean water to Haiti—had sent him overseas for two years. He promised he’d come home whenever he could, but he didn’t return a single time. I’d never thought of Laura as being someone I could develop feelings for in that way, but as Brad’s absence weighed on her, we spent more and more time together. We ended up moving in together for one of the last semesters of college when my roommate’s fiancée moved in and I needed a place to crash, and the relationship went from there. I never knew what it was, or what it meant—she’d always been my best friend, but those feelings were new and unexplored. All I knew was that I didn’t want it to end.
And the feelings didn’t. But when we found out she was pregnant, I was ready to propose. I’d bought the ring. I didn’t care that she was still technically in a relationship. I loved her, and I thought she felt the same.
Instead of a proposal, the night I’d taken her out for dinner, she asked me if I would sign over my rights in an adoption. She didn’t want the baby. She said what we’d done had been a mistake. She said I should move out.
It was then I realized that what had felt so real to me was never more than something to pass the time for her until Brad returned. So, I moved out the next month, signed over my rights, and never looked back.
The year that followed, we were the most distant we’d ever been. When she married Brad, she asked that I come. That I serve as her man of honor. Like the dutiful best friend I’d always been, I did as I was told, fighting back heartbreak every step of the way.
I never knew anything about the baby, except that it existed somewhere. Somewhere in an alternate reality where Laura loved me back, I imagined our life from time to time.
But in this time, in this reality, she was just my best friend, and I had to accept that.
“So, you didn’t kill her?”
“Of course not.”
“But…but did you tell her about me?” I looked at Andy. “Did you know?”
Andy shook his head. “I didn’t know any of this until Laura told me who Emily was. I knew you had feelings for Laura, but I never knew you’d had an affair, let alone a child.”
“So,” I blinked, trying to process. “She really was our daughter?”
Laura nodded, and I caught the reflection of the moonlight on a tear as it cascaded down her cheek.
I put a hand over my mouth, anger, confusion, and outright sadness filling me. I had to know the answer, no matter how much it pained me. “But if you didn’t kill her, who did?”
Chapter Forty
Andy
“I saw you two together the night that Emily died. I was walking along the beach, looking for her, and I saw something move in the clump of palm trees not far from our huts. When I got closer, I realized it was you. Both of you.” I spoke the words, letting them wash over Nick. He’d lied to me about his feelings for Laura, about so much, but I wanted him to know I knew the truth. All of it. “When I realized what was happening, I ran away. I was shocked, to say the least. I planned to ask you about it, to confront you. I wanted Brad to know the truth about what his friend was doing, about what his wife had done. But I wanted to talk to you first. I made it down to the shoreline, still trying to process what I’d seen, and that was when I saw him.” I paused, wishing it had been anyone but him. Anyone but my best friend. “I thought I’d seen him in the same cluster of trees where I’d seen you two, but I convinced myself it was just you, Nick. But when I walked away, I saw him again. Up near the huts. Brad was walking back from the same direction I’d been. He had to have seen you; I knew it right away. But it was right at that time I saw Emily’s body. I forgot about everything else.”
“Hang on—Brad?”
“When I got back to the hut, he was in bed. I had no idea he’d been awake,” Laura said. “But then Andy showed me the footage—”
“Footage?” Nick asked.
“After everything had happened, when they brought Emily’s body back here, Manu began looking through footage. They have cameras around the pavilion and in between the clusters of huts, but they can’t see everything. Manu showed me a glimpse, just about a two second shot of Brad walking near where you and Nick were. There’s no way he would’ve missed you. About ten minutes before that, Emily was walking in the opposite direction from down past the huts. It looked like she was coming back home from down the beach. They were the only ones awake and on the beach that night besides the three of us. They must’ve run into each other at some point. But, even knowing all of that, at the time, it didn’t make sense. Brad would have no reason to want to hurt Emily.”
“At least, that was what he thought,” Laura said, and I could hear the pain in her voice.
“When Brad and I went out drinking, I told him about you two. I had to. I asked him if he’d seen it, and he said yes. He was bitter about it, obviously, but he said that he’d suspected for a long time.”
“What?” Nick asked.
“When I asked him why he hadn’t done something about it, he said sometimes you just have to get the timing exactly right. He said he was going to take care of it. I didn’t know what he meant, but then he said that I was better off without Emily. He said whoever had killed her had probably done me a favor because women do nothing but cause problems.” Andy wiped a stray tear. “I’ve never seen him so cold. It was like I was talking to someone I didn’t even know.”
“What the hell?” Nick asked.
“I ran into Laura the morning of her jog and confronted her about the two of you. I was mad. Mad about Emily, mad that you’d hurt Brad. But when I told her that Brad knew, and that he’d seen you that night, she argued. She said he was asleep that night and he couldn’t have seen.”
“I didn’t believe him. I thought he was lying to get me to tell Brad the truth,” Laura confirmed.
“When I took her to show her the tape Manu had shown me, he asked me not to tell anyone else. Not until the police came. He didn’t want anyone to think he was suspicious of them. Especially if Brad was guilty. But when we watched the tapes again, we noticed that Emily never made it down to the pavilion, but we knew Brad made it back to the hut, because he was there when Laura got home. So, her path was intercepted somehow, or by someone.”
“Brad had to have run into Emily when we were together,” Laura said, her head hung down. “It was just a matter of minutes after Brad was caught on tape that Andy found her body.”
“What?” Nick stood, shaking his head. “But that still doesn’t make sense. He wouldn’t—you can’t honestly think—why? Why would he…”
“We think Emily must’ve said something to him then, despite Laura’s request that she wait. She was upset, he was upset. We think Emily must’ve told Brad that he was her father, and because he didn’t know anything about Laura giving up a child that belonged to him, and because he could’ve done the math to realize she couldn’t have been his, he must’ve put it all together.”
“He killed her to keep our secret?” Nick spun back around, staring at Laura.
“To keep his own. He had to have known that it coming out would ruin our marriage. Maybe he was never planning to say anything about our affair. Maybe he was happy not knowing. Not confirming,” she said.
“Once we realized that, I worried Laura wasn’t safe. So, Manu offered to give her a place to hide in his office until the police could get here,” I said. “I was trying to do the right thing and keep her safe. I’m sorry I worried you, but if I told you, it was a risk that Brad would find out. The safest thing for all of us was to keep pretending like I didn’t know anything.”
“You thought Brad would…do the same to you?” Nick asked, the question directed at Laura.
“I had no idea what he would do. What he was capable of. I never thought he could hurt anyone, but he has. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It was just the five of us on the beach that night. We know neither of us hurt her. Andy was on the camera walking that direction after Brad. That only leaves the possibility that Emily jumped in the water herself, or Brad hurt her. Given what we know, and based on what Brad said to Andy, only one of those options sounds likely.”
“I didn’t tell you about the bracelet,” I said. “I hadn’t had the chance.” Laura looked over at me, frowning.
“Bracelet?”
“They searched your hut today, said that they needed clothes of yours to complete the canine search, and Brad gave them permission.” I looked out the window, feeling sick to my stomach. “They found Emily’s bracelet under Brad’s side of the bed. A gold one her mother gave her. She never took it off. It must’ve slipped off when—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. “I meant to tell you when I saw you, but we were interrupted.”
“Oh, my God,” Laura said, shaking her head with both hands over her mouth and nose.
“I’m just glad we know the truth. It takes some of the guilt away, you know? We did the right thing.”
“Oh my God,” Nick repeated, covering his mouth. “This is insane.”
Laura breathed out a sob. “I can’t believe he really did it. I’d held out hope that we were wrong.”
I nodded, unable to move. “Me too,” I said stiffly.
Laura sighed. “So, you see, I had to make a choice when I realized what happened. One of us had to make it back for our girls, and if he was going to jail, I just couldn’t risk him hurting me first.” She breathed heavily. “Maybe I sound ridiculous.”
Nick moved beside her, pulling her to him. He kissed her head, and I turned away, giving them a moment’s privacy. “You don’t sound ridiculous. I’m so glad you’re okay.”
After a bit, I heard him speak again. “But what about Megan? Did Brad hurt her? Could he have?”
I spun back around. “Megan’s safe, too. She’s been hiding out with Laura. I went back to my hut to put on sunscreen, and I saw her running away from your place and confronted her. I was worried something had happened. When she told me you were worried she’d done something to Laura, I had to tell her Laura was okay. She was so upset. She asked if I could help her hide, too.”
