And so she had ended it with Guy, that very night, and was lying in bed with a fresh bruise and a fresher future, when she heard the front door of the house open, and she knew, immediately, who it was. Bobo. He hadn’t given up, he had simply gotten the day wrong or, scared off by the traffic ticket, had delayed a day, not thinking it mattered. And now here he was searching for the gun. And now here he was coming toward her step by step. And now the past that she had thought she had shucked forever just the night before was climbing up the stairs.

It is impossible to know what was darting through her mind at that very moment. Sadness, fear, disgust, despair, relief? Was she thinking of her father and the way he deserted her those many years ago by his death? Was she thinking of the dark nights when her uncle crept into her room? Was she thinking of Jesse Sterrett and the way he was murdered and how she protected her uncle while she used her lover’s death to get herself out of Pierce? Was she thinking of me? It is impossible to know what was darting through her mind, but we do know what she did as Bobo approached. She didn’t shout, she didn’t rise and send him away, she didn’t pull Guy from the bathtub to protect her, she didn’t call for the police. What she did instead was lift the comforter high over her head so that Bobo wouldn’t know for sure who was beneath, so that Bobo would think it was the original target, so that Bobo would take the gun and fire into the mattress and end it all.

She wasn’t the first Prouix sister to try to kill herself, but she was the one who succeeded.

There were moments when I had imagined I understood Hailey Prouix, and, to be fair, not all of those moments were in the depths of sex when understanding flows like cheap champagne through the overheated synapses of the brain. There were moments when I felt a deep connection with her, moments when I believed I caught a glimpse of the interiors beneath her lovely shell. There were moments, God help me, when I thought the solution to Hailey’s sadness might just be me.

And now, sitting in the dark on the steps of the house in which she died, sitting beside another of her lovers, all I knew with certainty was how little of her I understood. What is love when it is based on myth, on a false image, on the lies we tell ourselves? What is love when the imagined object of the emotion bears no relation to actuality? Can that even be love at all?

I didn’t have any answers, but by believing I loved her I had convinced myself I understood her, and in so doing I had failed her. If I had the least inkling of what she’d been through, maybe I could have done something, said something, forced something, maybe I could have changed everything. But of course I did not. I had deluded myself that I understood, when in reality I understood nothing.

Nothing.

“Oh, my God,” said Guy in a moan of recognition. He was thinking it through, we were thinking it through, and it would take us both a very long time.

About the Author

William Lashner is a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was a criminal prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice. His novels – Fatal Flaw; Bitter Truth; Hostile Witness – have been published worldwide in ten languages. He lives with his family outside of Philadelphia.