Chapter 6

"What?"

Richard crossed the room in one stride. His face was bloodless.

"What did you say?"

The officer produced another video. A dashcam this time.

She slowed the playback. And there, crystal clear, were Lila's lips forming the words to her sister:

Enjoy yourself.

"You little—"

Richard yanked Lila up off the chair and threw her against the wall.

"I raised you. I gave you everything. The best of everything."

"Even my own flesh-and-blood daughter didn't live as well as you did!"

"Who the hell gave you the right—who gave you the right to hurt my daughter?!"

The officers couldn't get to him in time. He slapped Lila across the face a dozen times.

Finally Lila realized she was cornered. She laughed up at him, strange and broken.

"Who gave me the right?"

"You did."

"Aren't you the one who fed Zoey scraps every single day until she got cancer?"

"Yeah, I watched and did nothing. But who actually killed her? You did."

"She was a piece of trash you carefully groomed. I was the pet you loved without conditions."

"You only love yourself."

"Two daughters. You failed with both of us."

Richard snapped.

He grabbed her by the throat.

"You're lying!"

"I didn't do this to her!"

"It wasn't me!"

"I loved her!"

"My way of raising her wasn't wrong—!"

The officers wrenched them apart the second before he would have crushed her windpipe.

They said there still wasn't solid enough evidence to connect Lila to the assault itself—not until they found the man who'd attacked Zoey.

Lila begged the officers, sobbing, to let her stay at the station.

She didn't want to go home.

Richard dragged her out anyway.

At the house, Lila clung to Eleanor like a drowning girl.

"Mom, you have to help me. He's going to kill me."

Eleanor turned and pulled her close with the same gentleness she'd always had. But this time something in it made Lila's skin crawl.

"Lila. When Zoey was screaming for help—why didn't you save her?"

Lila started to shake. She tried to pull away.

She couldn't.

A blinding pain tore through her.

Richard's knife had gone straight through her stomach.

Lila coughed up blood and turned her head. Her father's eyes were black, burning.

"My sweet girl. Don't be scared. This is only the beginning."

"You're going to… enjoy yourself too."

At Zoey's funeral, Richard called his assistant and told him to bring photographs of his daughter.

A few minutes later, the assistant arrived with a thick stack of albums.

Richard opened them.

Lila. Lila. Lila. Lila. Every single photo, every page.

He shoved the albums back into the assistant's chest.

"I said my real daughter, you idiot!"

The assistant's voice came out small. "Sir… there aren't any photos of Miss Zoey…"

The pain hit Eleanor like a nail driven through her spine. She doubled over and crumpled to the floor.

Richard had said their daughter had to grow up with nothing. That was the only way she'd develop character. The only way she'd become strong, independent, worthwhile.

But it had hurt to watch.

Richard would bring home strangers' leftover food and force Zoey to eat it bite by bite. Eleanor had seen the revulsion on her daughter's tiny face, and she'd tried to shield her from the spoon.

So Richard had gone to the orphanage and picked out Lila.

"Our real daughter needs to be educated properly."

"You're too soft. If you feel sorry for someone, just pretend Lila is Zoey."

From that day on—

Richard made Zoey sleep on a mat on the concrete floor. Eleanor built Lila a dream princess bedroom.

Richard dressed Zoey in other people's cast-off rags. Eleanor bought Lila designer sundresses, ruffled dresses, everything her heart could want.

They were one of the wealthiest families on the eastern seaboard.

Their biological daughter had grown up looking like a street child.

And the child who grew up looking like a street child had said, over and over, the same sentence her whole life:

"Mom, Dad, don't you worry. When I grow up, I'll make so much money. You'll never have to work hard again."

Every time Eleanor's heart split in half and she thought I have to tell her the truth—Richard would stop her.

"Just wait. Give it more time."

Year after year. Until the valedictorian announcement.

Until the stomach cancer.

Until the funeral. Where they didn't even have a single photograph of their daughter to put on the casket.

It was so grotesque, so obscene, Eleanor almost started laughing.

Richard looked at his wife crying until she couldn't breathe, and he slapped himself across the face again and again.

He didn't know what this sensation was—this splintering pain in his chest. He didn't know if it was regret.

He'd been telling himself for weeks now: it was for her own good, it was all for her own good.

But the guilt was coming in so fast now he was drowning in it.

He knelt in front of Eleanor and sobbed into his hands like a child.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I—I finally understand. I killed her. With my own hands."

Eleanor stared at the man kneeling in front of her, and finally spoke.

"Richard. I want a divorce."

"No—"

He collapsed. In his entire world there was only one person left.

And now that too would be taken from him.

The day the police came with a warrant for Lila's arrest, they found her already dead at Richard's lake cottage.

Richard confessed to everything and was sent to prison.

Eleanor finally managed to find one photograph of Zoey—a picture from when she was a baby—and taped it, carefully, reverently, to the headstone on her grave.

On a clear, bright afternoon, she drank a bottle of weedkiller.

"Zoey. Mom's coming to find you."