Page 62 of Little Secrets
“We need to be here for Frances when she gets back.” Marin’s brain is going in a hundred different directions. “Let’s plan to meet. She might need help planning his funeral—”
She stops speaking, and gasps as the horror of her words hits her. Her scattered thoughts narrow into one. Just one. And then the flood is unleashed.
The sobs she lets loose are so fast and furious, she can hardly breathe, and it feels like her stomach is convulsing. The phone slipsout of her fingers and lands on the carpet beside her. She cries harder than she ever has in her life, because Frances’s terrible news feels like her terrible news, and Simon’s and Lila’s terrible news, because it’s the thing they dread learning the most from the moment they understand their child is missing. The pain is so intense, it feels like she’s cracking into pieces.
On the other end of the line, Simon is crying as hard as she is. Because the only thing worse than not knowing is… knowing.
“Marin? Are you there?” she hears Simon say, but she can’t speak to him. She can’t do this, she can’t process, she can’t deal. It’s all too much.
She disconnects the call without saying goodbye. Simon will understand. He will not call back today.
She scrambles to her feet and runs to the bathroom, where the faucet is still going, steam coming up from the tub like a hot spring. She makes it to the toilet just in time to vomit her Four Seasons breakfast into it.
She strips off her clothes and sinks into the near-scalding hot water. The heats attacks her skin like a million pinpricks, but she welcomes it, welcomes the pain. She wants her skin to sear off, she wants to shed everything that hurts, she wants to be someone else, anyone else, because anything is better than being this, than feeling this.
She aches for Frances. Thomas was only twenty-four. An adult, yes, but a young one, and the exact same age as Derek’s mistress.
She sits up straight, then bolts out of the bathtub, not bothering to wrap a towel around herself. She drips water all over the tile, and then the carpet, as she reaches for her phone to text Sal.
Call it off. With J.
Sal replies immediately.You sure? You won’t get a refund.
Call it off, she texts again.Right now. I’m serious.
I’ll tell him, Sal says, and though Marin can’t hear his voice or see his face, she senses relief in his words.
It should never have gone this far. This only confirms why she and Sal can never be together. They are not good for each other. He is the id to her ego, the devil to her angel, the magnetic force that steers her moral compass in the wrong direction.
She may hate McKenzie Li, but McKenzie Li is someone’s child. Somebody loves her. Somebody will cry for her when she’s dead. And Marin can’t do to someone what has just been done to Frances, and what might one day be done to her.
She returns to the bathroom and sinks back into the tub. It’s completely full, which means there’s more than enough water to drown herself.
Chapter 22
Of course, Marin won’t do it.
But she thinks about it. She thinks about it all the time. She just doesn’t say it out loud, because the last time she let it slip, Derek panicked and put her in the hospital again, where she was stuck for two days until they were sure she wasn’t going to hurt herself.
She can’t blame Derek, or the doctors. She had attempted suicide before, after all. A month after Sebastian went missing, when the FBI informed them that the search was going nowhere, she had swallowed a bottle of benzodiazepines with a bottle of wine. She doesn’t remember Derek finding her, trying to revive her, the paramedics, the ambulance ride, the stomach pump. She only remembers waking up early the next morning in a hospital room, Derek slumped in a chair in a corner, trickles of light coming in through the window blinds. Her first coherent thought was,Shit, it didn’t work.
A few months ago, there were news reports of a child’s body found in the woods beside the dismembered remains of a young woman who wasn’t his mother. Marin was at work when she read the article, but when she got home, she started drinking immediately and waited for the phone to ring. She was certain the FBI would call to confirm that it was Sebastian. It wasn’t, thank god. But by thetime the deceased’s identities were released, she had finished an entire bottle of merlot and was digging through the bathroom cabinet on Derek’s side of the vanity. She found what she was looking for—a brand-new package of razor blades meant for her husband’s Merkur safety razor, hidden under a pile of old rags—and was just about to tear it open when Derek came home.
He walked into the bathroom just as she was shoving the pack of razors back into the cabinet. If he noticed she was drunk, he didn’t comment on it; all he did was ask her if she was okay. He’d seen the same news reports she had. His day had been rough, as well. They spoke for a few minutes, their shared horror at the news reports briefly uniting them after months of disconnect.
Derek had saved Marin a second time that night. He just didn’t know it.
This is her life now. It’s made up of good moments, terrible moments, and all the numbness in between.
Her skin is pink like a newborn baby’s when she gets out of the bath thirty minutes later. After wrapping herself in a terrycloth robe, she makes the call she’s been dreading, the one she’d rather do anything else than make.
She exhales when it goes straight to voice mail, as she anticipated it would. She isn’t sure she can stay strong speaking to Frances right now. Marin leaves a message, asking her to call back whenever she feels up to it.
“I love you,” Marin says into the dead air of Frances’s voice mail. “I’m here for you, for whatever you need, day or night. I’m so sorry, Frances. I am so, so sorry.”
She ends the call, feeling as helpless as she’s ever felt. But offering support is all she can do. It’s all anyone can do. Nobody could possibly understand the unique cocktail of emotions that Frances is feeling right now, that probably change minute to minute. Nobody knows what she truly needs. There’s no how-to manual for this shit.
Marin tosses her phone onto the bed. The razor blades are still buried under the rags in the cabinet. She could get back into the tub. She could.
