She Cried. They Buried Me. I Came Back. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Landing
Hallie wakes at the top of the gala staircase minutes before the fall that sent her to prison, films it, calls it out in front of 200 guests and walks out; Margaret holds up a prescription bottle with Hallie's name on it.
In my last life, Sabrina Rhodes cried on the witness stand, and twelve jurors gave me eight years.
I served three winters of it.
I died in the prison infirmary with a cough nobody treated, and the county buried me in a numbered plot with no name on it.
Then I opened my eyes at the top of a grand staircase, holding a glass of champagne.
Two hundred guests in black tie stood below me, under a tree hung with white lights that reached the second-floor balcony.
My green velvet dress fit. My hands were warm.
I knew this staircase. I knew the date, December nineteenth, and I knew what was about to happen on these steps.
Sabrina stood one step below me in a green satin gown, her pearl brooch pinned to the shoulder.
She had just asked me to come up and look at the tree from the landing.
She was my best friend. She had been my bridesmaid. She brought soup to my house when I had the flu.
Her back was to the drop, and her heel was already turning.
In a moment she would "slip," grab at my sleeve, miss, and go down twenty-two steps with her hand over her stomach.
A guest would film it from below, at an angle that hid my hands.
By midnight she would tell a hospital she was four months pregnant and had lost the baby.
Nobody had filmed my hands that night.
So I set the champagne on the banister, took out my phone and pressed record.
"Sabrina," I said, loud enough for the first rows of guests to turn, "I'm filming, so stand wherever you like."
Her weight was already going backward. Her arm was already lifting.
Then she saw the lens.
She stopped. She looked straight into it for a long time, longer than anyone looks at a phone.
Then she laughed.
"Hal, you're filming? Give me a second to fix my hair."
She put her foot flat on the step and patted her curls. Her arm came down.
"Take your time," I said, and I kept recording.
Below us the music went on, but the nearest tables had gone quiet.
"What's this?"
Dirk came up the stairs two at a time, his black velvet jacket open, a champagne glass in his hand.
My husband had a face that donors trusted on sight.
He put one hand on my elbow and the other, for a moment, on the small of Sabrina's back.
I knew that hand. In my last life I found out at the trial that it had been on her for eleven months.
"Hal, sweetheart, put the phone down," he said softly. "Sabrina's family. She would never hurt you."
"Then she won't mind me recording her."
"You're upset. Let's go somewhere quiet."
"I'm fine here."
"Dirk," said a woman's voice from the foot of the stairs, "she isn't fine."
Margaret Lang came up slowly with one gloved hand on the rail.
My mother-in-law ran the family charity and every table in this ballroom.
She had never once said my name without a small pause in front of it.
Near the coat check at the far end of the room, a tall man in a plain black coat was the only person not looking at me.
He was looking at Sabrina.
I knew his face. It was Dirk's older half-brother, Jerome, whom I had met twice in five years.
In my last life he had stood alone at the back of the courtroom for all three days of my trial.
He had stood alone at my grave too.
I didn't have time for him now.
Margaret reached the landing and opened her handbag.
"I wasn't going to do this tonight," she said to the couple nearest us, a donor and his wife. "But Hallie hasn't been taking these."
She held up an amber pill bottle.
"She hasn't been herself since the spring. She cries at night. Yesterday she told Dirk she heard voices in the walls."
I had said none of that.
The donor's wife put a hand to her chest and looked at me with open pity.
Dirk closed his eyes briefly and let his shoulders drop, a husband relieved to have it said at last.
"Mother, please. Not here."
"Those aren't mine," I said.
"They have your name on them, dear."
I took the bottle out of her glove.
The label said Hallie Lang. It had been filled yesterday at a pharmacy I had never walked into, for an anti-anxiety drug I had never been prescribed.
The doctor's name at the bottom belonged to a psychiatrist I had never met.
In my last life this bottle had come out for the first time at my trial.
This time they had brought it a year early, to the party.
Sabrina touched my arm. "Hal, honey, nobody's judging you. Let Dirk take you home."
Her hand was warm, and her voice was exactly as kind as it had been the first time.
I looked at the guests below, at the phones some of them had finally lifted, and at my husband's patient, loving face.
"Keep the bottle," I told Margaret.
I put my phone in my clutch with the video still running.
Dirk said, "Hal."
I went down the staircase on my own two feet, past the donors and the music and the tree.
I went out through the front doors into the snow, without my coat.
So I walked out.
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