Page 68 of The Missing Half
Jenna:Amy, please. If you know what happened, just tell me.
Amy:Jules told me she was raped
Everything in me contracts, sorrow and grief crushing against my body from all angles. And yet, at the same time, it somehow doesn’tfeel like a surprise. It feels as if the truth has been obscured behind a veil, just out of sight. Jenna and I could feel its presence, sense it, but we never wanted to look at it head-on.
Even though I already know what they’re going to say, I read the last few texts, and all my sadness calcifies into rage.
Amy:I’m sorry
Amy:I thought you knew
Jenna:Did she tell you who did it? Did she give you a name?
Amy:She said it was someone she used to work with. I’m not sure if she ever told me his full name. We just used to call him Skeevy Steve
Chapter Thirty-six
I stare at Jenna’s computer screen, rage pooling in my gut, hot and choking like blood. I can’t imagine the pain Jenna must have felt when she read those words, when she learned Jules’s already too-short life was filled with such violence. I think of Steve fucking McLean at the bar that night we tracked him down—the way his gaze traveled leisurely up my body, the way he sat across from me licking his lips. I close my eyes and see the exact moment his laughter died and that unnerving coldness took its place.
This is what Jenna has been hiding from me.
I’m not sure how all her lies fit around it yet, but I know now she didn’t deceive me to preserve some dark secret of her own. She did it, just as I first thought, to protect me. She didn’t want me to know about the horror that had been done to her sister, in case I assumed the same thing happened to mine.
I’m jumping to conclusions, I know, but now it’s all I can see: McLean slinking up to Kasey one night in the alley as she took out the trash. How would he have done it? Would he have offered her a cigarette first, or would he have just reached out and touched her face, a dirty fingernail pressed into her cheek?
An assault would explain everything—Kasey’s sudden shift inmood, her slip into isolation, the fear in her eyes when I went out at night.Don’t go anywhere alone.Because a girl alone, everyone knows, is never safe. It could even explain why she asked Sandy for all that money. Because she was trying to run away, to escape McLean. She just never made it that far.
While I would like to think none of this could have happened, because surely, if it had, Kasey would’ve confided in me, I know better now. My sister wanted me to navigate the world ensconced in bubble wrap. She wouldn’t tell me she was raped because it would’ve hurt me too much to hear. Even in their lowest moments, both Kasey and Jenna chose to protect me. Me, me, me, me, me. I want to be angry at them for their lies, but instead I just feel sick. If I’d been better, stronger, more capable, they wouldn’t have felt the need to keep me in the dark.
I feel a tear fall onto my thigh and realize I’m crying. Hastily, I wipe my face with the back of my hand, then move the cursor to the column of contacts next to the text thread. The walls of Jenna’s room suddenly feel as if they’re closing in, and I want nothing more than to retrace my steps out of her house and put this behind me. But I need to keep digging.
Amy’s texts had to have made Jenna focus on McLean, and I want to know what else, if anything, she uncovered. Because while this obviously makes him look even more suspicious than before, it’s not proof of anything. And the finality of all the evidence tucked away in that plastic box makes me think that Jenna found something concrete, that she knows without a doubt who killed our sisters.
I click on the first name in the list of contacts—Shawna Jackson—and a new conversation replaces the old one. Despite my blurred vision, it’s immediately apparent from their exchange that Shawna works at the dentist’s office with Jenna.Dr. Spencer was being such a dick today!Shawna texted, to which Jenna responded,Right???I am about to click back out when I see Jenna’s latest text, sent yesterday morning:
Taking a half-day tomorrow. Planning to leave office at noon. Sorry to leave you in the lurch last-minute. Something of an emergency.
I only vaguely register Shawna’s response—Np. Hope everything’s ok—because my heart is suddenly racing. Jenna was talking about today. And the clock on her computer reads 12:11. If she comes straight home, she’ll be here in less than five minutes.
I minimize the text thread, lurch to my feet, and hurriedly tuck the chair beneath the desk. My hands are jittery as I try to put everything exactly as it was, closing the laptop and straightening the pens. I should’ve taken a picture so I wouldn’t have to rely on my memory, but this will have to do. I grab my backpack and am slipping my arms through the straps when I notice that the drawer of Jenna’s bedside table is ajar.
I’m not sure what about this makes me pause, but it does, and I find myself walking that way instead of toward the door. I step beside the little table, lean over to peer into the open drawer, and see, tucked inside, a blue plastic box with a small white sticker. On it is a series of digits in large type, and beneath it, the words Smith& Wesson. I hear Jenna’s voice in my mind.I’d buy a gun,she said.I’d drive to his house and shoot him in the head.
Finally, understanding dawns, and the weight of it almost buckles my knees. Jenna told me she needed time alone to take care of her mom, when really, she needed it to gather evidence on McLean and hunt him down. Not only was she protecting me from the knowledge that McLean is a rapist, she was preventing me from being complicit in her crime, safeguarding me from the violence of getting even. Just like Kasey always did, Jenna has been trying to keep me safe. Guilt swells inside me at the thought that I ever suspected anything else.
I stare at the gun box, fear screwing my feet into the floor. For a moment, I can’t move, panic turning my mind blank.
But then I hear it: the sound of a vehicle approaching and turning into the driveway.
Jenna is home.
Chapter Thirty-seven
I stride to the open doorway of Jenna’s bedroom and shoot a frantic glance around for the nearest way to get out. I don’t know what to do about the gun or what I assume to be Jenna’s plan or any of what I have just discovered. All I know is that she can’t find me here, having broken into her house, snooping in her room. I can’t leave through the front door—she’ll be walking in in a matter of seconds. There’s the back door in the kitchen, but it’s across the house, which risks her spotting me. The only other plausible exit is the window in her bedroom.
Outside, I hear her truck door open, and I make a split-second decision.
I close the bedroom door, spin around, and dart across the room, the carpeted floor creaking loudly beneath my feet. When I make it to the window, I realize that there’s a screen on the other side. My mind screams at me in frustration. How could I have forgotten about fucking screens?
