Chapter 6

The DNA results came on day seventeen.

My court attorney called me at Tessa's aunt's house and read them out loud twice. Twenty-three markers. Statistical certainty. I sat on the back steps with the phone against my ear and cried in a way I had not allowed myself to cry in two years, ugly and loud, with my hand over my mouth.

It didn't end it. Grant's lawyer filed a motion that afternoon attaching a death certificate - my death certificate, forged on county letterhead, signed by a doctor who had retired to Florida - and a claim that the sample had been contaminated. He didn't need to win. He needed the calendar. Every week he stayed in possession, he had another $40,000 of estate money and one more chance to have me declared incompetent before the estate was sold to a buyer in Manhattan.

That night, Milo and I went into the boathouse.

The fog was so thick off the water that the string lights on the terrace looked like bruises. I knew every squeak of that building. I knew which floorboard to step over and which hinge to lift. Milo went to the workbench with a screwdriver and felt along the underside until he found the little cigar box taped behind the drawer rail.

Inside was a dictation recorder the size of a paperback, waterproof, gray, with a dead display and a full memory card.

We listened in the dark with one earbud each.

Grant's voice first, so close it sounded like he was standing in the room. "You're sure."

Then my sister. "I already paid the man. Cut it. And don't tell me what happens after."

The tape snagged. The display flickered and went dark.

Milo whispered, "That's her. My God. He told me it was him."

I held the recorder against my chest with both hands. It was not proof in a courtroom yet. It was a piece of machinery with a timestamp and a woman's voice on it, and forty seconds of it, and I could already feel the whole two years tilting under my feet.

Out the sea gate window, headlights swept across the boathouse roof and stopped.

We lay flat behind the fuel drums while Grant Harrow walked in alone, stood in the middle of his own dark boathouse and listened to the fog, and then said, out loud, to nobody, "Where the hell is that tape."