Cross My Heart

Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“You brought me to your house ?”

Blair gapes at it like it’s haunted, like gauzy figures stand at the windows, watching us through the glass.

“I live in the apartment over the garage. The house is my parents’.”

She spins toward me, and the look she gives me is uncomfortably familiar. One that means I’ve gone too far.

“You wanted privacy,” I explain.

“I meant like a coffee shop or something. Not your house .”

She emphasizes the word like it’s the most ludicrous thing in the world, welcoming a stranger into your home. But she doesn’t feel like a stranger to me—and not just because I’ve combed through her photos, clocked all the ways she’s changed since she first met Morgan in college. There’s something in Blair I recognize: the kind of pain that gnaws at you like an infestation, weakening you from the inside out. She’s trying to hide it—stiff posture, clenched hands—but I know she feels close to crumbling.

“A coffee shop wouldn’t be private,” I say, “and my house was in walking distance.”

She glares at me through the darkness, shifting her weight as if she might bolt. “For all I know, you could be the one who killed Morgan.”

I frown at her. I thought we’d moved beyond that. “Do you really think I killed him?”

“I don’t know, I met you like ten minutes ago.”

“But you asked me to read his emails,” I point out.

“Yeah, maybe this was a bad idea.”

I draw closer to her. “No, I think it was the right one. I think we’re each other’s only lead.”

She bites the inside of her cheek, head slightly shaking as her eyes veer up the street.

“Please.” I touch her arm. She looks at my hand before dragging her gaze to mine. I let go. Take a step back. “The police may have told me more than you, but they’re not telling me much. Nothing makes sense, I’ve barely slept in days, and I have to know who this other Rosie is. I have to know why she did this. To Morgan and to me. I have to—”

I stop as pressure builds in my chest, like a sob is stuck there. I rest my palm against my heart, focus on breathing until the strain subsides.

As Blair watches me, her expression inches from wary to almost worried. “You okay there?”

I nod, measuring another inhale.

Blair nods gently in return, then scrapes out a chuckle—dry and a little bitter. “You know, you’re the first person I’ve seen in the last few days who looks as shitty as I feel.” She shifts from foot to foot again, bouncing on her knees. “Fine, let’s go inside. I had a giant latte before I left and I’ve had to pee for like an hour.” She marches up the driveway, and I stutter into step behind her. “And while I’m doing that,” she adds over her shoulder, “you can start reading the emails so we can nail this pink-haired bitch.”

Once inside, I point Blair to the bathroom. She heads there after handing me her phone, open to the messages, and I drop into a chair at the table, exhaustion hitting me all at once.

Beside the fruit bowl, there’s an orange prescription bottle I don’t remember leaving there. Reading the label, I see it’s not one of mine; it’s Mom’s. The sleeping pills she offered to let me borrow last night, accompanied by a note: To help you feel better .

But sleep is just an opportunity to dream. And right now I’d only have nightmares.

Pushing the bottle out of the way, I turn to the emails on Blair’s phone—and right away, Morgan’s words knock me sideways. It’s like reading an alternate version of my life, one where I did orchestrate that café meet-cute I fantasized about. When Morgan describes the exact shade of Other Rosie’s hair, I can’t believe how similar it is to my own: like a cherry blossom . She even bought a Danish, my go-to order at Sweet Bean. Then again, that’s most people’s go-to order, the pastries so popular they’ve been featured on the Food Network. Still. It feels like another violation.

But as I read on, the feeling branches into other, more complicated ones. I’m torn between being unnerved by this woman—and strangely drawn to her. I enjoy her sense of humor, her quirky little quips. If I didn’t know any better, I might actually laugh at her banter with Morgan. Instead, I feel a jab of jealousy at how quickly she captivated him.

Then I reach the point in the email when Morgan mentions Daphne, and any envy or endearment instantly dissolves.

I’ve always known it’s a risky thing, letting women get too close to me. You’re the only one, Blair, who knows the real me and somehow hasn’t suffered for loving me.

I continue reading and struggle to balance it all: details I’m collecting about Other Rosie—she likes Friends , same as me, but same as millions of other people, too—and my mind’s furious whirring at Morgan’s more unsettling lines. I think she sensed something in me. The darkness like a storm beneath my skin.

“Find anything?” Blair asks, reentering the room as I finish the first email.

I shake my head, gesture for her to sit. Then I dive into the second message, where Rosie leaves a note for Morgan in his mailbox, setting up a date at the park. Morgan watches her there before he approaches, hoping she’ll worry he stood her up. They joke about birdbaths. Bugbaths. Morgan says he’s—

My breath snags in the back of my throat.

I’ve been preoccupied with ideas for my next book. I think it’ll be about a woman who had a heart transplant. She connects with the husband of her heart donor

I look up midsentence. “He was writing about me?”

“Apparently,” Blair scoffs, and I can’t tell if her irritation is directed at me or Morgan. “But he never told me you were a real person.”

I slump back in my chair, the air knocked out of me.

He says in the email, I’m still waiting for the protagonist to take shape . Is that all my messages were to him—inspiration for a character? When he asked if we could meet in person, was it only so he could study me up close? See the pink, puckered skin between my breasts, then describe it in a book?

My scar aches at the thought, and as I rub it through my shirt— my scar, mine—I read the lines that follow, where Morgan sketches Other Rosie as a character too. Her hair. Her contradictions. He ponders what he could do with her, wonders at the darkness she’s endured—the same thing that once drew him to Daphne.

I touch my knuckles to my lips, push back against a surge of nausea, but at the start of the third email, he references my story again: I think there’s something there. Something with all sorts of twisted potential. I read the sentence twice, my eyes stuck on twisted . Stinging with it.

Across the table, Blair’s gaze presses on me, impatient. I force myself to continue.

Morgan invites Rosie to his house, shows her his library, and even though I’m supposed to be scrutinizing her gestures for something familiar, I can’t help but dwell on his references to his wife instead—each one pinpricked with guilt. He insists he’s done punishing himself over her: It doesn’t change what happened that night . He recalls how, at Blair’s encouragement, he removed all pictures of Daphne so she’d stop accusing him from the frames. Even when Morgan kisses Rosie—something that, only minutes ago, might have felt strangely like a betrayal—he alludes to Daphne’s death, thinking of Rosie’s skull as something he could crush.

Dread curdles inside me as I near the end of the email. Rosie scrambles out the door, and Morgan panics that she knows something, that she’s scared he hurt his wife. I shouldn’t have let her leave , he says. A sentence that growls with aggression.

For the first time, I wonder: If Other Rosie did kill Morgan, is it possible she was defending herself? Possible that, had she not stabbed him, she might have been the second woman to end up dead in that house?

“So?” Blair says when I set down the phone. “Did you find anything?”

I shake my head, staring at the screen until it blurs. “Not about Rosie.” I choose my next words carefully, conscious that I’m speaking to someone who loved Morgan—and knew all his secrets. “Blair, is there any way…” I trail off. Try again. “Do you think it’s possible Morgan killed Daphne?”

Her eyes flash. “No!”

“He said he wanted to prove he can care about a woman without it ending in bloodshed.”

“That doesn’t—”

“He freaked out when he thought Rosie was suspicious of him. And every time he so much as mentions Daphne, his tone sounds really guilty. He said after she died, he looked at her pictures and only saw her blaming him. What else could all of that mean—other than he did something to her?”

“It means the opposite!” Blair snaps. “It means he did nothing to her. Nothing!” She slaps one hand on the table, so hard I feel the vibration under my elbows. But just as quickly as her muscles tensed, they loosen on a sigh. “That’s why he felt guilty.”

With a grunt, she tilts forward, massaging her temples, eyes plastered to Mom’s prescription bottle without seeming to see it.

“He was writing when she fell,” Blair says. “In his office down the hall. He told me he heard some noises in the bathroom, like a giant thud, but he—he didn’t pay much attention to it. He was writing,” she says again.

Blair reaches for the orange bottle, absentmindedly tipping it back and forth. As Mom’s pills rattle inside, it sounds like teeth chattering.

“He went to refill his water at the bathroom sink, like an hour later. That’s when he found her.”

I sit up straight. “An hour ? He heard a crash in the bathroom, and instead of checking to make sure his wife wasn’t hurt, he just ignored it so he could work ?”

“You don’t get it, that’s just how Morgan was. Once he was in the zone or whatever, he had to keep writing. He couldn’t just stop or he might lose those words, his train of thought. And he had deadlines, contracts, he—”

“His wife was dying on the bathroom floor,” I say, and I’m surprised how steady I sound.

“He didn’t know that, though. It never occurred to him that the crash he’d heard could mean she was hurt.”

But how could it not occur to him? I hear so much as a thump in the distance and panic it’s one of my parents, my mom tripping over a rake in her garden, my dad falling on the steps up to their house, his new hip blasted out of place.

“Look,” Blair says. “Daphne and Morgan weren’t, like, in the best place when she died. They’d been fighting a lot.”

My eyes widen, prompting Blair to charge ahead: “Oh stop, I don’t mean it like that. She just kept randomly getting upset with him. Especially when he wrote. Like, one time, she burst into his office, slammed his laptop shut, while he was working , and started yelling at him. Completely out of nowhere.”

Dimly, I remember that incident from his messages. He said Daphne demanded he look at her, and when he did, he saw only a stranger.

“That doesn’t sound like something that happens ‘randomly.’ ‘Out of nowhere,’?” I say, emphasizing Blair’s words.

“With Daphne, it was. Although—in her defense, I’m sure it can’t be easy, watching your husband sell millions of copies of his books while yours are published by some tiny press no one’s heard of. And Morgan did say she was sensitive about him taking inspiration from her childhood. So I think when he was in his office for a long time, completely locked into his writing, Daphne just got—I don’t know: worked up.”

“Did you ever actually ask her about it, though? About why she kept getting upset?”

Blair fires off a quick, staccato laugh. “Uh, no. Daphne and I didn’t talk like that. I tried to be her friend, but she always got, like, agitated around me. I don’t know if it was a gender thing—like she was threatened by Morgan’s best friend being a woman—or if it was just because I’d known him so long and barely blinked when he was being… difficult. Because he actually could be kind of a dick. But that’s fine, I can be kind of a bitch. Either way, most of what I know about Daphne comes from Morgan, and he always talked about her”—she curls her fingers into air quotes—“?‘unhinged outbursts.’?”

Unhinged. A more palatable word for crazy. But no matter what Morgan told Blair, no matter how Blair defends him out of loyalty and love, if Daphne got “upset” sometimes, she had her reasons. I’m rattled enough just from Morgan thinking of me as research; I can only imagine how betrayed Daphne felt whenever he embedded her trauma in his books.

“Couldn’t he have been lying?” I ask. “About what happened the night she died. From just the handful of messages I exchanged with him, I know he lied sometimes—so how do you know what he told you was the truth?”

“Because I know him,” Blair says, her tone as barbed as her gaze.

“Yeah, but—”

I thought I knew him too. Not like Blair did, obviously—Morgan and I talked for only a few weeks compared to their years of friendship—but I saw him, saw our future, so clearly in my head that, for a while at least, I believed the fantasy would only be sharpened by reality, not shattered altogether. Even when I spoke to Piper, who actually knew Daphne, knew the effect that Morgan seemed to have on her, I dismissed most of what she said. But I don’t think I can anymore. Which means other things she said might have also been true.

“I spoke to a close friend of Daphne’s who said Daphne was scared in the days leading up to her death.” There was that reviewer, too—a former student of hers who described Daphne as troubled, distracted, like she hadn’t been sleeping.

“Scared?” Blair cocks her head, frowning. “I don’t know about that. I guess she was… more upset than usual?” Her shoulders lift as they curl forward—half shrug, half wince. “But I think that was my fault, actually. There was this night when Morgan and I were supposed to go out for a drink, but he was still working when I picked him up, so for a few minutes it was just me and Daphne, standing there awkwardly, this air of hostility just… wafting off her, like always. So just to say something , just to fill up that angry silence, I was like, ‘Hey, what do you think of the sequel?’ And how was I supposed to know he hadn’t even told her about it?”

I shake my head. “Sequel?”

“To Someone at the Door . He’d just signed the contract for his next book, right before Daphne died.”

I reel back in my chair. It shouldn’t surprise me; Morgan’s debut was his most successful novel. There’s been demand for a sequel ever since the film adaptation leaned into the story’s loose ends. But Morgan must have known it would hurt Daphne. He must have known, in publishing and promoting his new book, the old one—with its haunted title—would be everywhere again.

“And Daphne was not happy about it,” Blair says. “She marched up to Morgan’s office and I could hear her yelling at him. Crying. Demanding to know what the book was about, what other”—Blair tosses up air quotes again—“?‘scraps of my life’ he’d be using in it.” She crosses her arms, scoffing. “It wasn’t going to have anything to do with her. But she freaked out all the same. Barely gave Morgan a moment of peace.”

And still, he kept writing it. Even on the night she fell, the night she died, he kept writing a story he knew Daphne feared.

“So, are you done,” Blair says, “acting like my best friend could be a murderer?”

I manage a nod. Swallow saliva that’s turned acidic. Morgan wasn’t a murderer, no. But he wasn’t the man I’d pinned my hopes to either.

“Great.” Blair leans forward, sliding her phone from my side of the table to hers. “Now: What about Rosie? Did you recognize anything?”

“No. Sorry.”

Blair groans, leaning back in her chair. “Well, it has to be someone you know. It’s usually the people closest to us who hurt us the most.”

I nod, because I’m still seeing Daphne on the bathroom floor, her skull cracked from a fall Morgan heard—and didn’t give a second thought. I see the rings on their fingers, in sickness and health. I see how close I came to falling for a man who would break a vow like that.

And if that’s how he treated his own wife, I can’t help but wonder who else he’s hurt with his behavior. And who would want to hurt him in return.

“So is there anyone who has, like, a grudge against you?” Blair asks. “Someone who would want to frame you?”

I shake my head, the line between Morgan and his killer becoming even more difficult to see. Because it’s one thing for someone to want revenge on Morgan. But why would they make me a part of it?

“Not that I can think of. And the only ones who even know about my connection to Morgan are my best friend and DonorConnect itself.”

“Okay, so maybe it was your friend.”

I almost laugh. “It’s not.”

“Maybe she pretended to be you for some reason and—”

Now I actually do laugh, the sound so sudden it cuts Blair off. Even if Nina had the inexplicable desire to throw on a pink wig, date Morgan Thorne, cheat on her husband, whom she loves more than anyone—when would she have had the time? Her life is a closed circuit of hospital, home, and the occasional thrift store.

The thought squeezes my laughter into a nearly hysterical pitch—until it stops as quickly as it started. I slump back, overwhelmed with weariness.

“No,” I say. End of subject. I hold Blair’s gaze, determined not to break it. Her brow wrinkles as we watch each other, and after a few moments, she rolls her eyes, stands from the table, and pockets her phone.

“Okay then, I guess we’re done here.” But instead of turning for the door, Blair leans forward, tapping the note Mom left me: To help you feel better. “What is it, Valium?” She nudges her chin toward the prescription bottle, its label facing me.

“Sedatives. My mom wants me to take them. I’ve been struggling to sleep since…”

The phrase dangles for only a second before Blair nods. “Yeah. Me too,” she says. “Must be nice, though, having a mom who actually cares.”

I look away, remembering Morgan’s comments about Blair’s mother, that day I eavesdropped at Sweet Bean. Even in the emails I just read, he said her mom intentionally sabotaged Blair’s appointment for her wedding dress.

“Sorry,” Blair adds. “That’s bitter of me. I just—haven’t received so much as an acknowledgment from my parents about Morgan. I left them a voicemail, but—” She shrugs.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “That’s a terrible thing for family to do.”

She chews her lip, staring at Mom’s note. “Morgan was my real family.” She blinks hard and fast. “I’ll never stop fighting for him.”

When she opens the door to leave, muggy air rushes at me, almost stifling. Blair pauses in the threshold, meeting my eyes again—only this time, there’s a warning in hers.

“You should probably be careful,” she says. “If this Rosie woman really did pretend to be you and killed Morgan? There’s not much else she won’t do.”