Only If You’re Lucky

I trail Detective Frank into the station, whatever he wants to talk to me about apparently important enough to require bringing me in.

“I’ll be fine,” I said to Sloane and Nicole earlier as they watched me ease into the back of his cruiser, their lips set into two twin thin lines. I tried to smile then, tried to exude a sense of calm and control, although the metal partition cutting the car in half made the whole thing feel like a prisoner transport, the skin on my wrist where those handcuffs once hung tingling with the memory. “I’ll meet you at the apartment when I’m finished.”

Frank is unusually quiet now as he leads me down a long beige hallway, the entire building smelling like burnt coffee and body odor. I wipe one palm against the leg of my jeans, the other gripping a cup of coffee I had accepted just so I could hold onto something. There are so many scenarios running through my mind right now; so many reasons for why I could be here.

They haven’t found Lucy, I know that for a fact, but there are the other things they must have found.

“I wanted to give you a heads-up before the news goes public,” Frank says at last. He stops in front of a closed door, putting his hand on the knob before turning to face me. “Some bombshells are about to come out about your friend. I wanted you to be prepared.”

“Bombshells,” I repeat, my heart picking up in my throat. “What kind of bombshells?”

He searches my expression, eyes flicking back and forth for information. Like he still can’t decide what I know and don’t know; what I’m sharing with the police and what I’m keeping for myself.

He sighs when he doesn’t find anything, turning back around and pushing the door open.

“I’d like for you to meet Lucy’s father,” he says. “Although I believe you two are already acquainted.”

My eyes widen at the sight of him, feigning surprise, although it is still strange to see him here: Mr. Jefferson, ripped out of one reality and implanted into the next. I used to imagine him visiting Rutledge during parents’ weekends; helping Eliza and me move into the dorm. Instead, I find him sitting on the far side of an interrogation table, his hands wringing nervously in his lap and his own cup of coffee sitting untouched in front of him.

“Margot,” he says, looking even more ragged than he did in December. That wiry beard flecked with gray; those wrinkles like scars, deep and jagged, the physical proof of his emotional pain. “Margot, honey, I’m so sorry you got dragged into this.”

I walk forward slowly, cautiously, slipping into the seat opposite him. It’s ironic: the two of us sitting at a table like this, cups of coffee between us like Christmas morning, two months ago, right before everything changed.

“I had no idea she would go to this … extreme.”

“Lucy?” I ask, finally finding my voice. I try to sound uncertain, confused, forever meticulous in the way I word my questions. Careful not to reveal something I shouldn’t already know. “Lucy is your—?”

“Yes,” he says, like he can’t bear to hear the word that comes next. “Yes, honey, and it was a mistake. All of it was a terrible mistake.”

I think of his words on the porch again; the torture in his voice as he rocked slowly in the dark. His own quiet admission, that secret he had been living with silently for the last twenty-three years.

“As a parent, you usually get it wrong more often than you get it right.”

“I thought I was doing a good thing,” he says to me now. “I was providing for them, at least. I bought them a house, paid their bills—”

He stops, pushes his hands hard into his eyes, and I realize, for the first time, that he isn’t wearing his wedding ring.

“I barely even knew her mother,” he continues, refusing to look at me. “It happened one time. She was practically a stranger.”

I keep my mouth shut, knowing I’m supposed to be learning all this for the very first time. It’s hard not to call him out on it, though. Not to point out that the house he bought them was practically a trailer; that the bills he paid were a sorry substitute for real responsibility. That he was doing a good thing only for himself.

“Then Lucy showed up at the house one day and I knew,” he says, lowering his hands on the table, suddenly looking like a stranger himself instead of the man I always admired. The man who read my writing and danced with his wife in the kitchen; the man who sometimes felt like more of a father to me than my own. “I knew who she was immediately. She had her mother’s eyes. That bright blue color.”

“What did you do?” I ask, leaning forward, the curiosity in my voice authentic this time. Thinking of Lucy and me up on that roof; her fingers working at her necklace as she pulled me close like she was sharing a secret. She had danced around that moment so delicately before, with a ballerina’s sweeping finesse, and the memory of her voice raises the skin on my arms now, so close to finally knowing what’s real and what’s not.

“I turned her away,” Mr. Jefferson says, his voice devoid of any emotion. “I told her to leave. I had a family, Margot. A real family.”

Had, the use of past tense, sends a fresh wave of tears to my eyes as I remember the two of us together on Christmas, Mrs. Jefferson notably absent. I wonder when she found out about Lucy, if it was before or after her own daughter’s death. I wonder if she blames her husband for everything now. I wonder if that’s why she left.

“Eliza and her mother were just upstairs,” he continues, pulling my attention back. “I couldn’t risk her ruining that.”

I picture Lucy on the stoop, a bundle of nerves and his rejection knife-sharp as he slammed the door shut. I can still see her standing there, dazed and numb. Nowhere left to go so she just stayed and watched. Imagined what it might be like to be them.

“But apparently Eliza overheard us talking,” Mr. Jefferson says next and I snap my neck up, surprise radiating through my chest like a tremor. “I didn’t even know until the police told me. She never said anything.”

“The police—?” I ask, turning to Detective Frank, suddenly remembering what he said to me after he searched our house, the two of us sitting together in the yard.

“I know about Eliza. Levi’s old fling and your friend from before.”

I think about the way Eliza sat in the kitchen with that faraway stare; the way she opened her mouth so many times like she wanted to tell me something only to snap it shut, swallow it down. The way she and Levi were always whispering, silencing themselves when I got too close. How she kept alluding to going through something I wouldn’t understand.

“She knew,” I say, the shock still settling in. “She knew about Lucy and she told Levi instead of me.”

“Honey,” Mr. Jefferson says, reaching out to grab my hand. “Sometimes it’s just easier to talk to a stranger.”

I swallow, watching Detective Frank as he walks closer to the table. No wonder Eliza and Levi got so close so fast. No wonder she thought she loved him, the only person in the world who knew her secret, this heavy thing she just had to unload. It’s why she got so angry with me when I pushed her, challenged her, her bitter best friend who always assumed her life was perfect.

It’s why she couldn’t tell me, that ever-present fear of shattering the illusion.

“Levi went to his local PD over Christmas break and told them what he knew about Lucy,” Frank says to me now, his voice from the yard still echoing around me: “It seems like a pretty big coincidence. Your next-door neighbor, your two best friends.” “Apparently Eliza only knew Lucy’s first name, but Levi was starting to put it together. He remembered Eliza telling him once about someone breaking into her house.”

I sit in silence, remembering how angry I had been at Eliza for confronting Levi about the break-in; how he had insisted it wasn’t him. The way he looked at Lucy that first time in Penny Lanes like he somehow knew her, recognized her, jet-black hair like Mr. Jefferson’s and tics like Eliza’s that were too similar to ignore. The way he cocked his head on Christmas, eyeing us curiously from the door.

The two of them sitting on his bed, his body rigid as Lucy pulled him in for that kiss.

“Levi told the police in December that he thought Lucy might have been there the night Eliza fell,” Detective Frank continues. I look at Mr. Jefferson, his palm cupped tight across his mouth like he’s trying to keep a sob from escaping. “He was beginning to think Lucy might have pushed her.”

I sit quietly, pulse throbbing in my neck, these next few seconds the most important of my life.

“He was told at the time that there was no evidence to support his claim, so it’s possible he had been trying to get close to Lucy on his own to find some answers,” he says, sighing, and I continue to nod, thinking back on what Lucy told me in the shed: Levi being drunk and angry, yelling at her in the woods about not wanting to pretend.

“We believe he may have confronted her about it on the island, which is what led to their argument.”

Maybe he really was calling her out, flinging her arm off his leg like that. Sick of coddling up to a girl he suspected was a killer solely for justice, a quest for answers.

Maybe that’s why his death barely even fazed her: another happy coincidence, another barrier eliminated in her brand-new life.

“Margot, we found some things in Lucy’s bedroom that support all this,” Frank finishes as a single tear slips silently down Mr. Jefferson’s cheek. “Some things that will probably disturb you.”