And now Addy was bleeding out.
Someone gasped. Laura wasn’t sure who it was. Joyce or Susan. Maybe she did it herself. A moment later, someone else started laughing. The sound of it echoed in the trailer, where the air was almost solid, like you could take a chisel and break off a piece if you hammered hard enough. Laura forced herself to look up from the blood on her hand and examine the women around her. The laughter pitched higher, growing more hysterical, and Laura realized it was Susan.
Susan’s face contorted into a horrible grimace of pleasure and pain, like she was trying to convince herself to be happy she’d just shot someone who never did anything to hurt her.
And then the screaming started. Addy wasn’t dead yet.
Susan had shot her in the shoulder. Blood poured out of the wound.
Laura looked around for something to staunch the bleeding. She settled on a blanket thrown haphazardly over the back of the sofa.
Addy screamed again as Laura held the fabric against her shoulder. There was so much blood.
“This is insane,” Susan said between gulps of air to feed her laughter. The gun hung loosely at her side. Laura looked to Joyce for help, but Joyce wasn’t paying attention to Addy. Joyce was eyeing the gun.
The elegant woman remained calmer than everyone else. Joyce reached up with a hand, her wedding and engagement rings glinting off the ceiling light, and brushed a strand of sleek chestnut hair out of her eye. You’d never know, looking at Joyce, that a woman had just been shot in front of her, or that the gun had been wedged into her side only an hour before.
“Susan, put the gun down.” Joyce said it like a command, the way Laura’s schoolteachers would tell her to sit up straight in her chair or stop chewing the ends of her pencil.
Laura considered her options, even as part of her wanted to give up and curl into a ball on the couch and let the world spin out of control around her. So much death. So many terrible things.
And of course, Laura felt that small flutter in her stomach, and remembered she wasn’t just responsible for herself anymore. She had another life she was guiding into this world, and she couldn’t let anything or anyone hurt it. It was the last piece she still had of Dermot.
Susan ignored Joyce’s instructions. She began to pace the small aisle between the couch and the door of the trailer. Susan pulled her hands to her forehead, the gun dangling from a fingertip. “No, no, no,” she murmured to herself. “No, no, no.”
Joyce sat up even straighter in her square of the couch.
“Somebody help me,” Laura cried out, but both women ignored her. Addy mumbled something, but Laura couldn’t hear it.
The blanket was doing nothing to help stop the bleeding. Laura’s hands were warm with Addy’s blood, and a metallic scent clung to the air. A wave of disgust clambered up Laura’s throat, and she fought the urge to vomit. She needed to keep herself calm.
“You can’t take this back,” Joyce advised Susan. “You’ve done this. You killed her, just for the spite of it.”
Susan and Joyce were both acting like Addy was already dead.
Susan locked eyes with Joyce, terror written clearly across her face and her eyes wide with shock. Pale streaks ran down her cheeks where tears had washed away her heavy foundation.
“I didn’t think… I didn’t think I could do it.” Susan’s voice strained at the edges.
“That’s right.” Joyce stood up, and Laura held her breath. “You didn’t think. That was your problem.”
“So much has happened. I didn’t mean for any of this to be real. I can’t believe it’s real.”
Joyce edged closer to Susan, her hands raising slightly as though she were about to comfort her.
Something shifted in Susan’s face. “She was always a bitch, you know?” she said.
“Who was?” Joyce asked, her hands almost to Susan’s shoulders, playing at an embrace for comforting her. The gun was limp in Susan’s hands and very close to Joyce.
Laura kept pressing down on Addy’s shoulder, all while trying to make sense of what was happening between Joyce and Susan. A second flashed where Joyce tried to snatch the gun, but Susan was quicker than that and she sidestepped from Joyce’s reach. Joyce’s cheeks flushed, with fury or embarrassment or both, Laura wasn’t sure.
Susan cleared her throat. “Trina. Trina was always a bitch.”
Joyce was quiet for a moment. “You knew her?”
“We went to school together. I knew her and her fiancé.”
“You didn’t say anything about that before.”
Susan didn’t respond.
“You grew up together?” Joyce prompted, still standing so close to Susan.
“Trina was four years younger than me, but she was in the popular crowd at school, and for some reason she decided to single me out. She made my life a living hell. My parents were very religious, and she convinced the entire school we were in a cult. She said terrible things. Things that ruined my life.”
Susan took a deep breath. Joyce looked bored already.
“In college, I thought I had left all of that behind. I was seeing a wonderful guy, and I brought him home to meet my parents. I made the mistake of accepting an invitation to a house party a high-school classmate was having—they’d sent the invite through Facebook—and Trina was there. Once she walked into the room, all fresh and wild, there was no stopping her. Tom was a goner.”
“Tom?” Joyce was paying attention again.
Susan stared out into space, but Laura noticed a twitch in her jaw. “Tom Hovisky. You have to realize, I wasn’t the way I am now.” Susan held up an arm to gesture to her rich clothes, her expensive haircut. “I was still so much under my parents’ influence. I thought dressing nicely and flirting were sinful. I was lucky to have Tom even be interested in me in the first place. I couldn’t believe my luck when he sat next to me in the library and introduced himself.”
Tears formed in Susan’s eyes. “He congratulated me on earning the highest grade on our calculus exam. One thing led to another, and I offered to help him with his homework in the class.”
Joyce made a small noise in the back of her throat.
Susan cut a discerning look at both Joyce and Laura. “I knew it might have started off as him using me. But then we fell in love. We enjoyed spending time together. Tom was the first man I slept with. He was going to propose soon, I was certain.”
