Such a Quiet Place by Megan Miranda

CHAPTER 26

IWAS STAKING THE FOR-SALE sign in the front yard when the car pulled up behind me.

I heard the window lowering, the questions beginning: “Harper Nash? Can I get a moment of your time?”

“No comment,” I said with barely a glance over my shoulder. The reporters were becoming less frequent, but a few persevered.

“You sure about that?”

The sound of her voice registered first, and I stood slowly, wiping my hands on the sides of my shorts.

Blair Bowman smiled tightly from behind the wheel of a black SUV as she turned off the engine.

I looked quickly up and down the street as she approached, sleek dark hair tucked behind her ears but dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, like she was just out for a drive.

“Let’s take this inside,” I said.

Her smile grew. “I thought you might reconsider.”

INSIDE, BLAIR BOWMAN PEEREDaround the house carefully, like she was imagining Ruby here.

But the house had changed since I’d prepared it to put on the market. The downstairs smelled of fresh paint and polished floors. I’d already removed half of my things to make the space look bigger. Upstairs, Ruby’s old room had been converted back into an office. There were no personal touches anywhere—a blank slate for other people to imagine their life, their future.

Some days, if I was lucky, I wouldn’t see her ghost.

“So, you’re moving. Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. But I felt the pull of some trajectory, away from all of this. From Ruby, and Lake Hollow, and the life I’d built here. The possibilities that existed elsewhere. “My brother lives close,” I said. “I’m going to visit him for a while.”

She nodded. “That’s probably a good idea right now. Though I guess you’ll be back eventually, if there’s a trial.”

There wasn’t much yet to prove it was Charlotte—just the things she’d said that night: to me, to Tate, to the neighbors who were listening. Just the antifreeze in her garage (in so many people’s garages). It was still so early in the process. Too early to know what she would do, what others would do. Whether she’d take a deal. Whether there would be enough to convict.

Blair walked deeper inside, down the hall, toward the kitchen. “I suppose you know why I want to talk to you,” she said, turning around.

Because Ruby was staying here. Because I was the one to call the police that night to tell them Charlotte was guilty. To share what Ruby had uncovered.

I said nothing, though. Waiting for what she would reveal.

She smirked. “It’s not that difficult to trace an email, Harper.”

I flinched, though I supposed I’d suspected it—the reason she had shown up at my door. I thought I’d been so careful.

“An anonymous email, sent from the college campus, with a post from that message board… It was a short list, Harper.”

I crossed my arms. “There are plenty of us who work at the college and live in this neighborhood,” I said. It didn’t have to be me.

She shook her head, hands up, conceding the point. “If it came down to it, it wouldn’t be difficult to prove. Do you have any idea of the information stored in digital images?” She closed her eyes briefly. “Look, I’m not here to give you a hard time. But there’s so much interest in this case—in Ruby’s release, in her death—that someone else is bound to come looking.”

And yet she was the only one here.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said.

“I guess I’m just here to satisfy my own curiosity,” she said. “Closure, you could call it.” She shifted on her feet, looking at me closely. “Did you always know she was innocent, Harper?”

“No,” I said. The truth. “I just wasn’t sure she was guilty.”

I’d sent the email to the lawyer in January. After Christmas with my brother, when I’d told him about the trial and my part in Ruby’s conviction.

He’d asked if I knew she was guilty, and I couldn’t answer. That look in his eyes—that question—it stuck with me.

It must’ve stuck with him, too, for him to call me about it again on New Year’s Eve. His apology, though, had not absolved me.

Was I sure?

Were we ever?

I believed back then that the system would shake it all out—but that was naive. We were the system. Decided what went in and what stayed out.

And so, spending the end of winter break alone in this empty house, I’d revisited everything, trying to convince myself.

I’d saved every post from that message board—so sure, like we all were, that the truth would emerge between the lines. I’d prove it to myself. So I knew we had done the right thing, the good thing.

When I saw that post, I’d barely remembered it. But I started to imagine the motives behind the comments. The meaning within the questions. Margo asking, What if we find something else? And Chase telling her: Don’t. Javier, Tina, Charlotte, and Chase, each of them doubling down on Ruby. And I wasn’t sure why.

“I thought it would get the case looked at again. Get her an appeal, if there was something to it,” I said. “So we could all be sure. I didn’t know it would take everything back to square one. I didn’t know it would get her out.”

There were times when I held tight to her innocence. There were times later, like after I’d found the keys buried in my yard, when I believed she was guilty.

And now Blair Bowman was in my house, talking about closure, like that was possible. I was responsible for Ruby’s release—not sure, at the time, if she was innocent or guilty. I’d felt responsible for her: for what she did and what was done to her.

“Do you think it was worth it?” I asked Blair now. Ruby had been set free, but she was killed because of it. If it was justice we were after, I didn’t think we had achieved it.

Blair didn’t answer, looking around the house again. “I told her not to come back here,” she said. Like she was trying to excuse herself, too, for all that had come after. Like she felt some of that same guilt. “I told her not to see you. She promised me she wouldn’t.”

I stared back at her as the realization hit me. “She knew it was me?”

“Of course. She saw that email and she knew right away.”

Goose bumps rose on the back of my neck as I remembered those last words—the ones she’d allegedly spoken to Mac at the edge of the lake. Can you believe it? Harper, of all people.

“She never said anything,” I said. How many things would be different if she had said it? If she had asked? If we had talked about all the steps that had gotten us to where we were?

“I guess she wasn’t sure of your motivations.”

I looked to the clock. I had to finish packing, had to hit the road soon, if I wanted to make it before dark. “I’ve got to get moving,” I told her, leading her back to the front door.

“Some advice, Harper?” she said as she stepped outside.

“Shoot.”

“If you don’t want someone else to dig it up, delete the account. Make sure nothing’s on your computer. Pretend it never existed. If someone else comes by? Pretend you’re not home.”

And then she started walking away, down the steps, back to her car.

“Don’t worry,” I called after her. “I know how to stay quiet.”

She gave me a quick, uncertain look over her shoulder as she opened her car door.

Like she had forgotten, already, what great pretenders we all were here.

The things we had feared—and the things we had become.