Chapter 7: The Video

By Monday morning the video had five million views, and a news van was parked outside my school.

Terrence drove me there in the truck.

He had said I didn't have to go.

I had said that the children had spelling tests, and he'd looked at me for a second and then handed me my coat.

The parking lot of Marlow Bay Elementary was full of cars that weren't teachers' cars.

Parents stood in clumps along the fence with their phones in their hands.

A woman with a microphone and a cameraman stood by the front steps, ready.

"Mrs. Nordquist!" she called the moment I opened the truck door.

"Mrs. Nordquist, did you know your husband was going to die?"

Every phone in the lot swung toward me.

I stood very still with my hand on the door.

I could feel Terrence getting out on the other side.

"Mrs. Nordquist," the reporter said again, with great sympathy.

"You told him not to get in a car on Wednesday."

"You told him in front of his whole office."

"Is there anything you'd like to say to the people who think you knew?"

I thought about what I'd like to say.

I thought of five years of "don't take it to heart," and of a will that had changed itself on the lawyer's desk.

I could not say any of that.

But I had a lot of true things I could say, and I had one more folder in my bag.

"I did know," I said.

The lot went silent.

The reporter's eyebrows went up, and the cameraman stepped in.

"I knew," I said, "because my husband told me he would fake his death, and I believed him enough to beg."

I said it to the camera, not to her.

"A woman who wants her husband dead does not hire forty witnesses."

"She keeps quiet, and she waits."

The reporter's pen stopped moving.

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