Epilogue
Fall 2020
I’m not going back to Victory Hills High School, at least not this year. The baby will be here in December. It’s a convenient excuse. Those halls house memories I’m not ready to face.
Darcy isn’t returning either. Her parents enrolled her in an online learning program for her senior year; I offered to help her with any English assignments. We keep in touch through text. No one thinks I’m crazy anymore, but she’s the only person who really understands what happened that day.
“So, Evergreen Mist or Cobalt Tide?” Danny lifts two paint swatches, waiting on an answer. We’ve debated for weeks which color we should paint the walls of our guest room, which is now being repurposed as a nursery.
“Try both,” I say, sitting in the wooden rocker. It’s the only furniture in the room. We’ve bought loads more but won’t arrange it until the painting is complete.
“Okay. Get going,” Danny says from his seated position on the floor. He looks up and smiles.
“I think I’ll be all right.” I plant my heels and rock back.
“You will,” he says. “But the baby doesn’t need to be around fumes.”
“You’re putting swatches on the wall. There’s not enough paint to bother him.” I rub my stomach, which seems to have doubled in size this past week. “Besides, he’s a fighter.” This baby has already withstood a hit to my head and the fight with Zoey.
Zoey. She never walked out of the pool that day. Sometimes I can still see her floating in the water, her black hair branching outward. She was close. I only needed to take a few steps to touch her, and yet I didn’t. I let her stay. I let her drown.
It was what Darcy wanted. In the moment, she was fueled by learning that Zoey had attacked her. That Zoey manipulated her in the weeks following Spring Fling. Darcy made a rash decision with a teenaged mind. I was the one who could have stopped it. I was the one who could have saved her.
Police were suspicious at first. However, it didn’t take much digging for them to piece together what had happened. Darcy and I gave them our account. We confirmed she attacked both of us. Then I told them everything else I’d uncovered. For once, someone took what I had to say about Zoey seriously and investigated.
They eventually strung together a parade of evidence. As I’d suspected, the emerald cross on Darcy’s keychain belonged to Abigail Morrison. She’d been known to wear the necklace almost daily, and her mother was always disturbed that it wasn’t recovered with the body. After that, they found more proof: DNA and cell phone data pinging Zoey’s location around the time Abigail went missing.
They found journals, too. The essay she wrote wasn’t her first account of what happened with Darcy. She liked to relive her attacks through writing, providing details only she could know. Within days, police stopped asking questions about what happened at the pool. Ms. Peterson was released, eventually leaving Victory Hills and her own collection of secrets behind.
And yet, my questions still linger. Did I do the right thing? Should I have given Zoey a chance? Had Zoey been my child, would I have wanted someone to save her? I think of Brian, and his sad, hypnotic eyes behind the glass on the last day I visited him. His final words. I wouldn’t have stopped. I don’t think Zoey would have stopped either. I cling to that.
“What do you think?” Danny asks. I blink and look ahead. In my mind, I was back in that day, wading in the water. I forget I’m different now. That I’m thirty pounds heavier and sitting in my future child’s room. My future son’s room.
“I really like it,” I say, swallowing down the urge to cry.
“Which one?”
“Either.”
Truthfully, I’m happier now than I ever thought I would be. I didn’t realize how much I’d been longing for a new adventure. I’d associated having children with continuing the past. Some days, I still worry. As Dr. Walters once said, there’s always a chance a person could be bad. My child will be no different, but I choose to hope for the best. I choose to see the good.
“I agree,” Danny says. He balances the brush against the paint can and crawls toward me. He leans against the chair’s curved legs and rests his head on my lap. “It’s going to be a beautiful nursery.”
I lean over to kiss the top of his head when I feel a tight tug in my middle. I flinch.
“You all right?” Danny asks.
I smile. “Fine,” I say. “I think the baby’s moving.”
Danny puts his hand on the center of my stomach. I shift to the left and wait for the little one to nudge again.
“Kicks will get stronger toward the end,” he says.
“I think that’s my favorite part. You really feel him moving in there. It makes it real.”
“I’m around pregnant women all the time, but it’s different now that I’m having one of my own. It’s got to be weird for you, right?”
“I’m getting used to it.”
“What does it feel like?”
I lean back and look at the ceiling. I rub my belly, waiting to see if he will move again. I close my eyes. Try to envisage his face. Try to envisage his future.
Then I say, “It’s like a flutter.”
If What I Know had you hooked from start to finish, you’ll love Some Days Are Dark, a twisty and completely compelling tale of a woman fighting to clear her name—regardless of the danger.
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Before
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