The Book Club

Chapter 19 — The Truth About Greg

They didn’t go home. That was the thing Megan would remember later — that none of them could make themselves leave the circle. The meeting was over, the detective was gone, Deborah was gone, but the five remaining women sat in their chairs as if the circle itself were holding them upright.

Susan refilled everyone’s wine with shaking hands. Denise put the lemon bars on a plate and set them in the center, a sad offering. Janelle locked the door, though none of them could have said what she was locking out. Claire sat very still, the author without her pen name, exposed at last.

Claire told them everything. The real name — Claire Black, thirty-six, debut novelist, terrified of her own success. The research — two years in online archives, the case file that had given her the method. The binders, the timelines, the cold-case summaries. She showed them the summary she’d written months before ever hearing of Willow Creek: *Case 2009-8847.* She told them about the forged loans — three of them, two with Deborah’s forged signature. The woman in Dayton. The forty-seven phone calls in the final month.

“She told me,” Megan said quietly, “that he was going to vanish. Leave her the debt — two hundred thousand dollars — the house underwater, everything. Twenty-nine years of marriage, and she was going to be the cautionary tale.”

“Do you believe her?” Susan asked. “About — why? About Angela?”

At some point after midnight, Susan said the thing they’d all been circling. “Do you think she loved him? At the end?” Nobody answered for a while. Then Janelle, still at the window: “I think she loved who she thought he was. And then she found out who he was, and she —” She stopped. “I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a difference, at the end.” Denise said, “My grandmother used to say marriage is a long conversation. I think Deborah’s conversation just — stopped. And she couldn’t stand the silence.” Claire looked up, her eyes red. “In the book, the killer says the worst part isn’t the guilt. It’s the loneliness. Being the only person in the world who knows.” Megan thought about that — the loneliness of the secret, worse than the secret itself. Seventeen years of being the only person who knew. No wonder Deborah had kept everyone else’s secrets so carefully. She’d known exactly what they cost.

Megan thought about Deborah’s face in her living room. *I’m not sorry he’s dead. I’ve had seventeen years to be sorry, and I’m not.*

“I believe she believes it,” Megan said slowly. “And I believe —” She stopped. What did she believe? That Greg Price had been a thief and a cheat, forging his wife’s name, planning to abandon her to ruin? The records said yes. That Deborah had been a victim before she was a killer? Maybe. That any of it — any of it — excused crushing sleeping pills into a man’s whiskey and sitting at the bottom of the stairs, listening?

“I believe she was tired,” Claire said softly. “When I interviewed Ramos last year, for the book, he said something I’ve never forgotten. He said the guilty don’t confess to be punished. They confess to be finished. Deborah didn’t want forgiveness.” She looked around the circle. “She wanted it to be over. Seventeen years is a long time to be the only person in the world who knows.”

Janelle stood abruptly and walked to the window, her back to them. “She knew about my —” She gestured at the pages, still lying in their two rows on the coffee table. “Eleven years I carried that. The medication error. Eleven years, and she knew. She sat across from me for twelve years knowing, and she never —” Janelle’s voice broke. “Was any of it real? The friendship? Or was I just — material? Another secret to keep?”

“She kept it,” Denise said quietly. “That’s what she said, and I believe her. She kept all of ours. Every secret we ever told in this circle — she never used a single one. Not until she was desperate.” Denise’s voice cracked. “Is that loyalty or is that — I don’t even know what that is anymore. She protected us and she murdered him and she’s the same person. How is she the same person?”

They talked until midnight — about Deborah, about Greg, about the pages, about the things they’d each hidden and the woman who’d hidden the biggest thing of all. Nobody defended the murder. Nobody could — Janelle, who’d buried her own error, said it plainest: “I know what it costs to hide something. It doesn’t give you the right.”

But nobody could quite condemn Deborah either, and that was the hardest part — the gray space where their friend lived now, neither monster nor victim, just a woman who’d made an unforgivable choice on an October night and then lived inside it for seventeen years, sitting in a circle, listening, keeping everyone else’s secrets while drowning in her own.

Driving home at midnight, Megan thought about the novel’s alternate ending — the killer walking into the police station on a Tuesday morning, saying *I need to report a crime.* Claire had written it as fiction. Deborah had lived it as fact, two days late, on a Thursday night, in a community room that smelled of lemon bars and wine.

Every story deserves its ending. Megan had said that. She just hadn’t understood, until tonight, what endings cost — or who paid.