The Secrets You Keep(111)

It took a few beats for me to realize who it was. Neither time nor tragedy had dimmed her prettiness, but her long blond hair was now brunet and cut to her chin. Her skin was as creamy-looking as it used to be, though there were small crow’s-feet around her eyes, the kind you get from too much sun. Something else seemed different, too, though I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“Oh, my gosh, Jillian, it’s you,” I said, finally wiping the blank look off my face.

“It’s really nice to see you after all this time, Bailey.”

“Your hair—it’s different. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

At first she didn’t seem to grasp what I meant.

“Oh, right,” she said, lightly touching the locks by her temple. “I stopped coloring it a long time ago. And yours is short now, I see.”

“Yeah, I chopped it off when I hit thirty, let it grow back, then cut it again just recently. I never had great hair, did I?”

“Well, at least you’re a natural blonde.”

I smiled and she smiled back. But the sheer pleasure I experienced at the sight of her quickly began to shape-shift into awkwardness. I could sense guilt creeping around the edges of my mind, trying to assert itself. You were a lousy friend to her, Bailey. She suffered the most horrible loss, and you didn’t reach out.

Jillian, however, seemed genuinely pleased to see me. Nothing about her attitude hinted at lingering disappointment that spanned over a decade and a half. I couldn’t believe I was actually setting eyes on her. Where had she been all this time? Had she been all right?

“Were you here tonight—at the event?” I asked.

“Yes, I mean, kind of hanging in the back. I wanted to get in touch with you, but I didn’t know any other way. I was afraid if I used the email address on your website, the message would end up in some kind of black hole.”

“What are you doing in the city?”

“Living here—temporarily. A sublet in Williamsburg.”

I had no idea what she did professionally or even if she worked. What I could surmise just from looking at her was that her clothes—cropped black pants, chunky heeled sandals, and a flowy gold-and-black top—were classy and hip and that she probably wasn’t married, since there was no wedding band on her left hand.

“It’d be great to get together while you’re here,” I told her, though the idea, even while she stood right in front of me, was difficult to imagine. “Do you have time?”

“Yes. I was actually thinking we could do it tonight.”

She said it with what seemed like odd casualness and disregard, as if she didn’t expect me to have either plans for the evening or a desire to go home. But I sensed urgency underneath. Despite the fact that I’d promised my live-in boyfriend, Beau, that I’d decompress with him tonight on the roof deck of our apartment building, there was no way I could turn Jillian down. I wanted to know what she’d been doing and how she’d fared in life. Besides, my guilt wasn’t going to take anything but yes for answer.

“Of course. Were you thinking of coffee, wine . . . ?”

“Either’s fine.”

“Um, okay. There’s a café I noticed a block up on Lexington. They seem to do both, so why don’t we try that.”

It took only five minutes to reach the café and we didn’t say much on the way, just an inconsequential comment or two about how nice the summer weather had been so far. We settled at a table at the back and each of us ordered a glass of wine, her white, me red. She excused herself, saying she needed to use the restroom.

While she was gone, I texted Beau, telling him that we’d have to bag the roof deck tonight because I’d run into a long-lost friend—and would explain more about it later.

Long-lost friend. Did I have the right to call her that?

She certainly hadn’t strayed far from my memory, nor had the brutal crime. Even after all these years, the details of the grisly murders were still vivid in my mind, as I’m sure they were for people who lived in or near Dory, Massachusetts—one of a series of towns and villages in the Berkshire Mountains Jillian’s parents, brother Danny, twelve, and sister Julia, nineteen, a college freshman at home recuperating from mono that semester, had been stabbed to death by a teenaged boy from their neighborhood who apparently had become obsessed with Julia.

At the time of the killings, I’d agonized over what Jillian must have been going through. Though we’d only known each other for five or six months, we’d grown pretty close. In addition to living a few doors down from each other in the dorm, we were both in the same late-day sociology class and had settled into a routine of splitting a pizza afterwards and trying to decode the ramblings of our professor. I could still recall Jillian wagging a pizza slice one night and exclaiming, “That man is going to drive me into the arms of animal research.” She had a magnetic confidence, as well as wry sense of humor and a contagious, carefree laugh. It was my first realization that science majors could possess a wicked sense of humor.