Page 1 of Thicker Than Water
Chapter OneJULIA
We don’t talk about the wallpaper. Not its age: thirty years, hung there by Sienna and Jason’s mother when they were still in grade school. Not its condition: faded in places, peeling in others. Not even its pattern: fist-sized splotches of blood.
“It’snotblood,” Sienna said the one time I mentioned it, two weeks into my marriage to her brother. Her eyes tightened with irritation, and that was enough for me to clamp my reply between my teeth.
She was right, though; it isn’t blood. It’s roosters. Dark red roosters with bulbous chests and feathery combs, stamped onto gauze-white paper that lines the family room walls. I’ve lived here, in Jason and Sienna’s childhood home, for fifteen years—a little longer than Aiden’s been alive—and still, as I look around, I don’t see roosters; I see wounds.
“Our mom loved roosters,” Jason said, shrugging, that single time I brought it up. Unlike Sienna, he wasn’t irritated, just sad, likeI’d offended the woman I never got to meet. “I can’t imagine taking it down.”
So we didn’t. Sadness, irritation—those aren’t emotions I want to inspire. But I’ve tried to cover the paper as best I can, hanging my favorite photographs on the walls: Jason, Sienna, and me on the courthouse steps the day Jason and I got married; Aiden cheering on Jason’s shoulders at a Red Sox game; Sienna and me doubled over with laughter in front of the ocean.
Still, behind and around it all—blood.
“Jules, are you listening?” Sienna asks now. “These people think a woman did it.”
Itbeing murder. The reason I’m watching the walls instead of the news. On Friday night, someone stabbed Jason’s boss, Gavin Reed, then smothered him, before sewing up his lips like a rip in a seam.
“Only a woman has that much anger,” Gavin’s neighbor tells the reporter, averting her gaze. Just before the camera cuts away, it catches her swallowing, and in that swallow, there are words left unsaid. I recognize it immediately, her stuffed-down silence.
Another neighbor, a man this time, agrees the murderer was female. He chuckles before launching his opinion: “Everyone’s still all ‘Me Too’ these days. He probably called her ‘sweetheart’ or something.”
Sienna scowls at the TV. “Fucker.”
Gavin’s murder has been the lead story in Connecticut ever since his body was discovered two days ago. Like these neighbors, people have been quick to theorize, desperate to make sense of it—how a successful, respected businessman can turn up dead.
And not just dead. Sewn.
“We’re breaking the rules,” I say.
Movie Night is for movies,notTV, not even the made-for-TV movies we like to dub with our own script. (Sienna’s specialty isturning crime stories into sitcoms; I like making every character Swedish.) But when we turned on the TV and heard Gavin’s name, Sienna stiffened, and my eyes drifted, the roosters snagging my gaze.
“Shh!” Sienna says.
The reporter is reminding viewers of the facts of this case. Gavin Reed’s body was found in the backyard of his lake house. He was forty years old, owner of Integrity Plus Home Services, a home improvement company he took over after his father’s death six years ago. Gavin was last seen leaving a regional sales conference (Jason’s conference, I reflexively think) on Friday. But on Sunday, a kayaker on the lake spotted Gavin, prone and unresponsive on his lawn, his clothes still drenched from the sobbing, furious rainstorm that began late Friday night and continued until Sunday morning, washing away the killer’s DNA.
There was a cut, three inches long, across Gavin’s abdomen, and he’d been suffocated, but without fibers in his lungs, it seems likely that someone did it with their bare hands. Gavin had been drunk—his blood alcohol level over twice the legal limit—something that might have made him easier to take down. But those aren’t the details anyone cares about. It’s Gavin’s lips they keep coming back to.
“He was sewn up!” The news is back to the interview with the male neighbor. “Clearly the work of a woman! I don’t think I know a single man who even owns a needle and thread. Let alone knows how to work ’em.”
“Seriously, fuck that guy,” Sienna says. “Jason’s known how to sew since he was twelve. Our mom taught him so he could sew on his boy scout badges himself.” She nudges her chin at the man on TV. “This guy can go choke on his own tongue.”
Cool your fire, I’m about to say. It’s my usual mantra for Sienna, words meant to soothe her anger. But Sienna speaks first: “I bet Gavin deserved it.”
I snap my gaze toward her. “How can you say that?”
“Because most men deserve it.”
I consider the flush in her cheeks, the same shade of pink that swamps her skin whenever we speak of her ex-boyfriend. “Is this about Wyatt?”
“What? No,” Sienna scoffs. “I haven’t seen Wyatt in months. I’m over him.”
“Clive Clayton?” I ask carefully. Not an ex. But someone who ruined her all the same.
“Everything’sabout Clive,” she seethes. “But also, no, just in general: men are trash.”
Sienna’s assertion reminds me of my mother, who raised me with a single warning:Never trust a man. She repeated it so often that, for much of my childhood, I thought it was a regular household proverb—something to be embroidered onto pillows, woven into welcome mats.
“Oh, really,” I say. “So, Jason’s trash?”
