But Oliver doesn’t bat an eye. “Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.”
As Julia heads toward her bedroom, Oliver calls out, “Hey, this is gonna sound weird, but do you mind if I check out Emma’s room for a bit?”
It’s so far from what Julia expects that she laughs a little. “Sure, knock yourself out.”
The whole time Julia nurses Emma, she wonders what in the world Oliver could want in Emma’s room. How utterly strange this day has been, and yet it’s not completely awful. She strokes Emma’s soft head of hair. When they’re done, she swings Emma up onto her hip again and walks out of the room quietly. Julia’s used to moving quietly because noise bothered Marshall. She startles when Oliver pops out of Emma’s room.
“There you are,” he says. “All done?”
Julia nods, unsure what to say, and Oliver clears his throat and looks at Emma. “So I got a few things for you that I really, really wanted when I was a kid. Do you wanna take a look?”
Emma hides her face in Julia’s armpit, and Julia shrugs. “It’s not a no.” She makes her way into the room and gasps.
Somehow, in the space of twenty minutes, Oliver has managed to put up a small white tent in a corner of Emma’s room. Above the tent is a colorful sign that says: EMMA’S QUIET CORNER. Inside the tent, Julia spots mounds of pastel-colored cushions and a couple of soft toys. The entire corner looks magical.
Oliver hands Julia a board book. “This is a sensory book. It’s got all sorts of different materials in it that she can play with.” He nods at Emma. “When I was a little boy, I was always really scared of unfamiliar things. Strangers, or situations, it didn’t matter, I was scared of them, and I always wished that I could have my own little corner to hide in whenever it got too much for me. So I thought maybe you’d like this.”
Emma is staring at the tent with mouth and eyes wide open, wonderment written all over her face. “Mine?” she croaks.
“Yes, baby.” Julia is surprised to find that her voice is wavering. She lets Emma down gently and tears rush into her eyes when the little girl toddles over into the tent and cries out, “Wow!” It’s the exact sort of thing that Marshall would’ve hated, because he didn’t want to “pander” and “make her soft.” But it’s also the exact thing Julia knew, deep down inside, that her daughter needed. And yet it had taken Oliver, someone who’s only met Emma the one time, to provide it. “Thank you,” she whispers to Oliver, who smiles back. They gaze at Emma’s chubby feet sticking out of the tent flap.
The bell rings then. “Oh, I forgot to let you know,” Julia says, “Sana asked if she could come over to ask more questions for her podcast.”
They go to the front door, leaving Emma in her bedroom, chattering happily to herself. Julia only agreed to being interviewed because she thought it would look suspicious if she said no, but now, after seeing Emma so happy, Julia is in such high spirits that she doesn’t mind having to answer questions about her late husband. The feeling lasts up until Sana steps inside and sees all the artwork in the hallway. Sana’s face tightens with what Julia swears is not just anger, but white-hot fury, and it is then that Julia realizes that maybe she’s not the only person hiding some dark secrets about Marshall.
TWENTY
SANA
The entire way to Marshall and Julia’s house, Sana wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s different, coming here again without Vera striding ahead of her, conveniently giving her a legit excuse for coming by. Now she’s here on her own, and, well, she definitely was not expecting to see the pile of artwork just left in the hallway like that. The entire pile looks so pathetic somehow, a little graveyard of stolen art, and hers probably hidden inside it.
She hadn’t ever thought of the possibility that she hadn’t been Marshall’s only victim. In hindsight, she realizes of course she’s not his only victim. Why the hell would she be? Of course he was preying on multiple artists, selling them hope before betraying them and then ghosting them. The discovery that there seem to be dozens of artists in the same position as Sana should comfort her. She’s not alone. She’s not the world’s most gullible idiot for falling for Marshall’s ruse. But it doesn’t make her feel comforted at all. In fact, she feels even worse. The knowledge that she’s nothing special, that her art wasn’t even that unique, as it turns out. That she was caught up in nothing more than one of Marshall’s many, many scams. It makes her pain feel ridiculous.
Stop that, Sana scolds herself as she follows Julia into the house. Just freaking let it go already. Enough moping around, feeling sorry for yourself. I bet none of these artists are still hung up on their precious stolen art.
Still, Sana can’t quite shake it off, that heaviness settling on her shoulders like a weighted blanket. Part of her wants to sift through the canvases and find her paintings. She wants to grab them and run away. But she can’t. If she did that, Julia would know that Sana had a connection to Marshall, that Sana isn’t just a random true crime podcaster here to research a story. That Sana very much had motive to kill Marshall. And worse, that Sana had been tracking him down for months—some might say she was stalking him. He was certainly horrified when she’d shown up that day and confronted him. Crazy bitch, he’d spat at her. Get the fuck away from me before I report you for harassment and stalking. And now here she is, in his freaking house, under some ridiculous, flimsy guise that would fall to pieces as soon as anyone even breathed on it.
When they get to the living room, Sana is surprised to see Oliver there. She doesn’t like Oliver, although it doesn’t have much to do with his personality, which for the record seems decent. But he looks so much like Marshall that Sana can’t quite bury her hatred deep enough.
“Hey, Sana,” Oliver says, and Sana has to stop herself from shuddering. Even his voice is like Marshall’s.
“Hey.” What the hell are you doing here? she wants to say to him.
As though reading her mind, Oliver clears his throat. “I was just here dropping off some of Marshall’s stuff. I think you might have seen some of it in the hallway?”
It feels as though her skin has shrunk two sizes too small for her body. She can see Julia and Oliver looking at her, so she forces herself to nod in what she thinks is a casual way. “Cool.” Belatedly, Sana realizes that as a podcaster looking into Marshall’s death, she can actually be a bit nosier. It’s only natural for her to be curious. God, this whole pretending to be someone you’re not is so hard. How the hell did Marshall do it so effortlessly? Sana quickly sifts through what she’s about to ask, looking for anything that might give her away; then she says cautiously, “It looks like there’s a lot of artwork? Was Marshall an art collector?” The questions fight her, every word struggling not to come out, because hah! An art collector? More like an art thief.