WILL

They let me into the room. Sadie is there. She sits on a chair with her back to me. Her shoulders slump forward; her head is in her hands. From the back side, she looks to be about twelve years old. Her hair is matted down to her head; her pajamas are on.

I tread lightly. “Sadie?” I gently ask because maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. Until I get a good look at her, I never know who she is. The physical characteristics don’t change. There’s always the brown hair and eyes, the same trim figure, the same complexion and nose. The change is in her demeanor, in her bearing. It’s in her posture: in the way she stands and walks. It’s in the way she talks, her word choice and pitch. It’s in her actions. If she’s aggressive or demure, a killjoy or crass, easy or high-strung. If she comes on to me or if she cowers in a corner, crying out like a little girl for her daddy every time I touch her.

My wife is a chameleon.

She looks at me. She’s wrecked. She’s got tears in her eyes, which is how I know she’s either the kid or she’s Sadie. Because Camille would never cry.

“They think I killed her, Will.”

Sadie.

Sadie’s voice is panicked when she speaks. She’s being hypersensitive as always. She rises from the chair, comes to me, attaches herself to me. Arms around my neck, getting all clingy, which ordinarily Sadie doesn’t do. But she’s desperate now, thinking I’ll do her bidding for her as I always do. But not this time.

“Oh, Sadie,” I say, stroking her hair, being amenable as always. “You’re shaking,” I say, pulling away, keeping her at an arm’s length.

I’ve got empathy down to a science. Eye contact, active listening. Ask questions, avoid judgment. I could do it in my sleep. It never hurts to cry a little, too.

“My God,” I say. I let go of her hands long enough to reach for the tissue I put in my pocket before, the one with enough menthol to make myself cry. I dab it at my eyes, put it back in my pocket, let the waterworks begin. “Berg will rue the day he did this to you. I’ve never seen you so upset,” I tell her, cupping her face in my hands, taking her in. “What did they do to you?” I ask.

Her voice is screechy when it comes. She’s panicking. I see it in her eyes. “They think I killed Morgan. That I did it because I was jealous of you and her. I’m not a killer, Will,” she says. “You know that. You have to tell them.”

“Of course, Sadie. Of course I will,” I lie, always her Johnny-on-the-spot. Always. It gets old. “I’ll tell them,” I say, though I won’t. I’m not convinced of the need to commit obstruction of justice for her, though Sadie, herself, could never kill. That’s where Camille comes in handy.

Truth be told, I like Camille more than Sadie. The first time she manifested herself for me, I thought Sadie was yanking my chain. But no. It was real. And almost too good to be true. Because I’d discovered a vivacious, untamable woman living inside my wife, one I was more smitten with than the woman I married. It was like discovering gold in a mine.

There’s a whole metamorphosis that happens. I’ve been at this long enough that I know when it’s happening. I just never know who I’ll get when the mutation takes place, if I’ll wind up with a butterfly or a frog.

“You have to believe me,” she begs.

“I do believe you, Sadie.”

“I think they’re trying to frame me,” she says. “But I have an alibi, Will. I was with you when she was killed. They’re blaming me for something I didn’t do!” she yells as I go to her, hold her pretty little head in my hands and tell her everything will be all right.

She recoils then, remembering something.

“Berg said you called him,” she says. “He said you called him and took back what you said about that night. He says you said I wasn’t with you after all. That I walked the dogs. That you didn’t know where I’d gone. You lied, Will.”

“Is that what they told you?” I ask, aghast. I let my mouth drop, my eyes go wide. I shake my head and say, “They’re lying, Sadie. They’re telling lies, trying to pit us against each other. It’s a tactic. You can’t believe anything they say.”

“Why didn’t you tell me Morgan was Erin’s sister?” she asks, changing tack. “You kept that from me. I would have understood, Will. I would have understood your need to connect with someone Erin loved if only you’d have told me. I would have supported that,” she says, and it’s laughable, really. Because I thought Sadie was smarter than this. She hasn’t put two and two together.

I didn’t need to connect with Morgan. I needed to disconnect. I didn’t know she lived on the island when we moved here. If I did, we wouldn’t have come.

Imagine my surprise when I saw her for the first time in ten years. I could have let it go, too. But Morgan couldn’t let sleeping dogs lie.

She threatened to snitch. To tell Sadie what I’d done. The picture of Erin she left for Sadie to find. I found it first, put it in the last place I expected Sadie to look. It was just my luck that she did.

Morgan was a stupid kid the night I took Erin’s life. She heard us fighting because Erin had fallen for some dick when she was off at school. She came home to break the engagement off. She tried to give me the ring back. Erin had only been gone a couple of months, but by winter break she was high and mighty already. She thought she was better than me. A sorority girl while I was still living at home, going to community college.

Morgan tried to tattle, to tell everyone she heard us fighting the night before, but no one was going to believe a ten-year-old over me. And I played the role of the distraught boyfriend quite well. I was heartbroken as could be. And no one yet knew Erin had been seeing someone new. She only told that to me.

The evidence—the storm, the icy patches on the street, the lack of visibility—was also insurmountable that night. I’d taken precautions. When they found her, there were no external signs of violence. No signs of a struggle. Asphyxiation is extremely difficult to detect. They didn’t do a tox screen either, on account of the weather conditions. No one considered that Erin might’ve died because of a shitload of Xanax in her system, because of hypoxia, because of a plastic bag strapped down over her head. The cops didn’t. They didn’t think once about the way I pulled the bag from her head when she was dead; how I moved Erin’s body to the driver’s seat, shifted the car into Drive, watched her corpse take a ride into the pond before I walked the rest of the way home, grateful for the snow that covered my tracks. No, they thought only of the icy road, of Erin’s lead foot, of the indisputable fact that she swerved off the road and into the freezing water—which was quite disputable after all. Because that’s not the way it happened.