MARLOW FIN: How? How can anyone help me?
JODI LEE: Just concentrate. Focus. Your sister left with Patrick. Then what? What did you do next, Marlow?
MARLOW FIN: [Closes eyes, tilts face up] I . . . I walked down to the dock. There was water. I wanted to be near water.
JODI LEE: Why did you need to be near water?
MARLOW FIN: I was hot. I was just so hot.
JODI LEE: Did you get in the water?
MARLOW FIN: No . . . I don’t think so. I think . . .
JODI LEE: What next? What did you feel? Hear?
MARLOW FIN: I heard the water lapping against the dock. I stood there for a while. Letting the night breeze cool me.
JODI LEE: Was anyone else there?
MARLOW FIN: I don’t know . . . I . . .
JODI LEE: Who else is there, Marlow?
MARLOW FIN: [Crying] I wanted it to stop burning.
JODI LEE: What was burning?
MARLOW FIN: Me . . . I was.
JODI LEE: You can tell me, Marlow. You can. Was anyone else there?
MARLOW FIN: [Gasps] Yes.
JODI LEE: Who? Who was it?
MARLOW FIN: I did get in the water. I remember now. I was in the water.
Oh God . . . Oh God, help me. I remember now. I remember . . .
CHAPTER 52
ISLA
The Night before the Interview
Everybody knows Marlow Fin.
Everybody thinks she killed her sister.
Everybody thinks I’m dead.
I am perched. I am patient. Just one more night. I feel myself holding my breath already with the rest of the world, watching and waiting for that face to show up.
That face I saw in the window.
I see it again and I bend down and spread my hands wide over the television.
She is exiting a restaurant, her head bowed low as a bevy of paparazzi take her picture. Each flash makes me flinch.
“Marlow! Marlow!” they cry out, as though she’s in peril.
She steps down from the curb. I can see her ache. Her pain. Her sorrow. She is my sister. I don’t need to see it. I can feel it just by touching the screen, the glow of it giving me even more of a measurement.
“Are you going to tell the truth?”
“Did you do it, Marlow? Tell us what really happened!”
Yes, tell them. Tell them what happened.
You would think it would have been maddening to always see her face on the news. An endless montage of her red-carpet premieres, her modeling shots, her movies, her face flashing like a disorienting strobe light. But it was the opposite.
The more her face was shown, the less mine was ever brought up. I was missing but she was the focus. The hot intensity on her made me feel safe. I was the buried lead, disregarded, the part of the story most people forgot about.
Isla is missing. But she is the one we care about, the one we love to obsess over.
I was always the unseen sister, and it was a gift.
My apartment has become a cocoon of protection and illusion over the last nine months. I’m dizzy with no longer existing, cut off from anyone who ever knew me. Within the walls of this apartment, I’m shielded from the rest of the world.
