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PROLOGUE
TRANSCRIPT OF DETECTIVE JIM WALSH
INTERVIEWING WITNESS ELIZABETH MATTHEWS
E. Matthews: First off let me tell you that I have no skin in the game here . . . Shit. Sorry. That’s probably a bad metaphor given how he was . . . how he was killed, right?
Det. Walsh: It is in fairly poor taste.
E. Matthews: All I am trying to say to you is that I don’t really know them. Together, I mean. I don’t know anything about Bex and her husband— what is his name again, Guy?
Det. Walsh: Grayson.
E. Matthews: Right. Again, no disrespect. I’m nervous. I knew his name was Grayson. I never met him. Until yesterday I hadn’t seen her in about fifteen years.
Det. Walsh: But you did attend college with the deceased’s wife. You used to be friends with Rebecca Sommers.
E. Matthews: Yeah, I knew Bex back in the day. That’s what we used to call her. Bex. No one ever called her Rebecca. I think she hated being called Rebecca back then . . . but it seems like something he would have liked.
Det. Walsh: He? Her husband? The one you don’t know?
E. Matthews: Yeah. From what I’ve seen of him on her Instagram account. He just seems like the kind of guy who would be more into a Rebecca than a Bex. Rebecca sounds more proper and sophisticated . . . more wifey.
Det. Walsh: Wifey?
E. Matthews: Yes. Wifey.
Det. Walsh: But you said you didn’t know the deceased, you never met him.
E. Matthews: Exactly. I’ve never met him.
Det. Walsh: And until recently you hadn’t been in contact with Mrs. Sommers.
E. Matthews: A couple of weeks ago she reached out asking me if I was still a journalist and if I would be interested in writing a profile about her.
Det. Walsh: And that is what you were doing with her on the night he was killed.
E. Matthews: Yes. We were hanging out. I had plans to write something for the magazine I work for. We were attending the conference and then I was supposed to go with her to her ranch.
Det. Walsh: Were you with her all night?
E. Matthews: No.
Det. Walsh: When did you last see her?
E. Matthews: Around eight- ish.
Det. Walsh: Do you have any idea where she is now?
E. Matthews: Do you?
Det. Walsh: I’m going to be the one asking the questions for now. Grayson Sommers was brutally murdered in his own barn and you are the last person to speak to his wife before she disappeared. Do you think she
would be capable of that sort of thing?
E. Matthews: No. I mean . . . I don’t think so. I don’t know what she’s like now. She did use to be one of the most capable people I’d ever met. She used to be able to do anything.
Det. Walsh: How about you start at the beginning . . .
Chapter One
Lizzie
Two weeks earlier
There are things I know I should be doing before bed in order to get a “good” night’s sleep.
I should wash and moisturize my face with at least five different products, turn the temperature in my bedroom down to slightly chilly, put all my screened devices in another room to charge.
I should meditate and then engage my husband in some sweet and meaningful conversation about our days. Or maybe the conversation comes first, then the meditation.
I can’t remember.
I should light a candle and write in a journal. I should think about what I’m grateful for.
I should just be.
But I’m not doing any of that. Who actually does any of that? I’m scrolling Instagram like any normal thirtysomething woman with a dirty face in a too‑warm room while my husband reads the news on his phone next to me, sometimes murmuring in disgust, sometimes chuckling for no discernible reason, since absolutely nothing in the news is funny anymore unless you’re a sociopath.
I must have made a noise during my scroll because Peter leans over and places his scruffy chin on my shoulder.
“Are you creeping on that girl you went to college with again?”
“Nope.”
“I see her chickens on your screen.” I tilt the phone away. “And that three‑ legged goat. Why doesn’t someone shoot that thing?”
“That goat has its very own Instagram account with 1.2 million followers,” I reply, even though I’ve explained this to him before. “Tripod is their own influencer.”
“What’s her name again? Skanky Betsy?”
Back in college we all used to call her Slutty Bex, not Skanky Betsy. And it was a nickname she fully embraced. She owned it. I realize that it isn’t politically correct to call someone Slutty anything anymore, but when that person gets their own T‑ shirt made with the nickname Slutty Bex on it and they wear it on senior day, then I think it’s okay to remember them like that in your own head or, in a moment of weakness when you feel weird about looking at their social media account all the time and even stranger about how your friendship ended terribly, to tell your husband about the nickname Slutty Bex and maybe laugh about it.
I really haven’t talked to her in fifteen years, not since Bex ghosted me after college. It’s funny how a slight like that can still sting so many years later, but it does.
Back then she wasn’t the person she is now, the one I only let myself peek at once or twice a week because her Instagram account infuriates me for no rational reason. Or maybe it is rational. The issue is that Rebecca Sommers, or rather @BarefootMamaLove, bears absolutely no resemblance to Bex, the woman who once did a forty‑five‑second keg stand in the basement of Sigma Chi with her top off. Or the woman who befriended me the first day of college by ordering two pizzas to our shared dorm room and
watching Sliding Doors with me because I was too nervous to go out to the frat parties. I’d never had a single sip of alcohol before and she didn’t make me feel dumb about it. She bought me some fruity wine coolers and taught me how to handle my booze. Rebecca Sommers has absolutely no resemblance to the girl who convinced me to pierce my belly button with her even though I had never even pierced my ears.
In her new life, the one I watch on social media, Rebecca now lives in a renovated farmhouse on a ranch somewhere out West where she raises fluffy heritage chickens, cows, sheep, and goats. No one in her family ever wears shoes but their feet are somehow never dirty. She makes her own cheese, milks her own
milk, and bakes enough bread to feed a small army. These days she’s very, very blond, not the dishwater‑blond variety from college, but like a honeydew‑meets‑a‑gold‑doubloon kind of yellow. It’s a blond that costs money. Bex didn’t have money in college. Like me she worked in the cafeteria as part of her work‑study program. We were the only ones in our sorority who had actual on‑campus jobs. None of the other girls needed them. Their parents were the type who paid their tuition in full, who bought them off‑campus apartments and rented out the rooms to other students because it was a “good investment.”
It was Bex who got me to rush for our sorority because she said it would be “a hilarious social experiment,” and she was probably the reason they let me in. She charmed all those fancy Tri Delts with her off‑ color jokes and her ability to score drugs from a townie. We were a package deal, so they accepted me too.
Bex was also an RA in one of the freshman dorms like I was because it gave her free housing. It wasn’t cool, but it was cheap. Being lower middle class gave both Bex and me an edge, it made us weirdly chic to the trust fund girls from NYC and LA. We weren’t exactly charity cases, but we gave the sorority street cred. We were inseparable back then, and our friend‑breakup, if you can even call it that, still has the ability to make me overwhelmingly sad, especially when I’m scrolling social media after one and a half glasses of wine.
I’ve never met Bex’s husband. But it seems like she married up in a big way. I, on the other hand, just got married.
That’s unfair. I married well. I married a man who is funny and tender and a good father and who still thinks I’m interesting after a decade of marriage. I married a man who knows how to change a tire, find my G‑spot, swaddle a baby, make my mom laugh, and do our taxes. He’s a man who can tell when I’m sick of small talk at a school‑parents party and always finds a way to extricate me from a conversation with the head of the PTA. These are not trivial things.
But I also married a man who is now unemployed despite being overeducated at one of the top schools in the world. A man who has never worried about saving or investing. A man who might never work again because he’s too proud to take a job he considers beneath him.
But he’s still a good man. I have to remind myself of that.
And he’s still stupidly handsome as he pushes forty. If I weren’t so tired from work and raising our two kids, I would happily have sex with him more often than the once everytwo weeks we seem to be managing these days.
Bex and her husband apparently do it every single day. I know this because they crafted a reel on Instagram with their pastor (their actual pastor) about how they decided to reignite their sex life for their thirty‑fifth birthdays. They encouraged their followers to participate in the #WhoopieWithYourSchmoopie challenge. That video got something like eight million views and the comments were uncomfortably supportive and also slightly sad, filled with women who I assumed were complete strangers to
Bex bemoaning their lack of a sex drive or their husbands’ affairs or their closeted sexuality. I gobbled them all up like a grocery‑store romance novel, all those secrets spilled onto a small screen.
If I called Peter my “schmoopie” he would likely divorce me. And rightly so. I would respect him for that. It would be the correct decision. I made the mistake of showing the whoopie challenge to him, which led to my having to explain how I knew Bex in the first place, which led to his scrolling through her account and then calling me out every time he caught me looking at her or Tripod or her six beautiful kids.
“She seems terrible,” he said the first time I showed him her profile.
I loved him even more for hating her as much as I do now. That’s one of the best things about Peter. He hates what I hate and that’s a real turn‑on for me. Some people want to like the same things as another person, but give me a man who also despises work birthday celebrations, loud chewers, and people who talk on wireless headphones in public and I swoon.
Hate is the wrong word when it comes to Bex. I’m wounded in ways I can’t properly explain. I miss her and that ache turns into frustration, which turns into disdain. Her feed riles me up with misplaced envy because there is no way in hell I would ever want to live on a farm with six children. I want to say that scrolling her Instagram is not some regular thing for me. But that would be a lie. I swear that I have my own fully functional (mostly) adult life and priorities that do not include her. I just sometimes get sucked down the rabbit hole and then I feel all the feelings.
Both Peter and I hate influencers, but as magazine editors— or in Peter’s case, a former magazine editor— we have a reason to. They did sort of help destroy our industry. I don’t think any of them meant to. In fact, I know they didn’t wake up one morning and get together in one of their beautiful McMansions or rustic off‑the‑grid cabins or anti‑vax communes and say, Oh, I want to kill print journalism and the careers of thousands of reporters, but that’s what happened over the past five years. I’m still holding on to my managing editor job at the magazine by a wisp. When Peter got laid off we used our savings to move out of New York and over to the Philly burbs, where our kids could go to public school and my mom could help us with childcare. Everyone at the magazine is remote now anyway so I only need to be in the office one day a week, if that. Peter is allegedly working on a novel. I’m trying to keep my job so that we all have health insurance.
I scroll Instagram so often because I’m looking for stories that will keep the magazine relevant, or so I tell myself.
Peter nuzzles my neck in a way that I usually enjoy, but I’m too exhausted to think about what leaning into the nuzzle might lead to. It’s not that I don’t like the sex. It’s wonderful once it gets going, once everything is firing. It’s just that getting there can be tedious. Even though I’ve wasted an hour on social media, the ten minutes it will take to get everything situated for sex with my husband (the stroking, the rearranging of the pillows, more stroking, the lube) doesn’t seem like the best use of time when I
could be failing at trying to fall asleep.
I lean just slightly away, and he knows I’m not into it tonight. When you’ve been together as long as we have you only need to make the slightest bodily movements to indicate your mood. It’s one of the things I appreciate most about marriage, the sharedsign language. He rubs the sore spots in my shoulders and my neck instead and that is almost as good as the bygone orgasm.
“Her farm does look lovely,” Peter says. “Is it a vineyard or a farm farm? Do they actually grow things or raise things?” Peter grew up in central London. I don’t think he’s ever been on a farm except for the scraggly pumpkin patch we take the kids to in October.
“Her profile now reads, ‘Building our ranch from the ground up with the help of God’s grace.’”
“What does that mean? Growing the ranch from the ground up? Don’t most things begin on the ground? You wouldn’t construct something from the sky down, would you?” Peter is a stickler for both grammar and proper use of language. I think it’s in the genetic code of most British people. They can’t help themselves. It’s like they all learned to read from the Oxford English Dictionary while we Americans got our first sentences from Hop on Pop. His dictatorial command of words served him well at the hard news magazine where we met and where we both worked at the start of our careers. I left after I had the kids, when I was politely told that my time constraints as a mother would be incompatible with going out on the campaign trail and doing long‑form investigative pieces. Peter left when the time constraints of all our readers precluded them from reading the magazine anymore and it shut down.
“I honestly don’t know what building it ‘from the ground up’ means. It seems like it’s been there for quite some time,” I say. “No one is building. I think she’s just being poetic. There’s the high protein grain. Apparently, it’s made with pig colostrum. Gross. There are cows. They love raw milk.”
“Do they also love salmonella?” Peter scoffs. I ignore him.
“I think they started making soap. Definitely organic eggs. And she seems to breed those chickens. You can actually buy baby chicks. They ship them in the mail. Seems cruel to me. And sheep for wool, which she uses to knit, and they also sell lamb meat. She has a whole online store. You can buy everything in her pictures. Look, I could buy this baby carrier right now!” I click an Instabuy link.
“We have a carrier,” Peter points out. “And besides, Ollie is getting too big. He hates it.”
We do have one, but it’s nothing like this one. We have a secondhand BabyBjörn that’s been passed through my mom group and probably seven babies. It’s frayed on the top where it’s been chewed on and there are stains from various bodily fluids that will never come out.
Rebecca’s baby carrier, the one that is almost always strapped to her chest in her photos, looks like it’s been spun from the rawest of raw silk. There are no stains, no teeth marks. It fits her like a couture gown as she sweeps the porch, hangs the sheets on a line in the fields, bakes everything from scratch. Her pristine carrier looks blessed by the gods. It costs an otherworldly amount too: $575.
Her audience adores the carrier except when she has one of the babies facing out in it. Then they’re enraged. Then they rail on her for being a terrible mother because everyone ought to know that letting a baby face outward is a massive safety concern. Her audience seems very fickle. They love her one day and
hate her the next. I think she must just let the baby face out for the camera. It makes better photos. Who wants to stare at the back of a baby’s head in a picture?
“Was she always a Jesus freak?” Peter asks. We are not a religious family. Peter’s religion is soccer and mine is lapsed Episcopalian. I don’t remember Bex being religious at all. In fact the only time we talked about religion was when she told me her mom had been ostracized by her very Catholic parents for having Bex when she was a teenager.
“Her husband must be religious. She wasn’t into that at all in college. But she does mention God a lot in her stuff these days.”
“You know quite a bit about this woman for not having spoken to her for over a decade,” Peter says. He has said this before.
“Probably about as much as you know about your favorite sports dudes,” I snap a little. “Stats and whatnot.”
“But she isn’t a professional athlete. She’s just some girl on the Instagram.”
A woman, I want to correct him, a woman with eleven million followers, but the semantics aren’t worth getting into when it comes to social media and influencers. Peter has no patience for any of it. He never even joined Twitter back when it was still called Twitter and almost all of us at the magazine were required to use it. “The people who want to read my writing will find it,” he always said. They didn’t.
I’m about to drop the phone on the floor and shove it under the bed like I do every night since I don’t have the energy to get up and go plug it in in the bathroom as Goop recommends. But then I get a notification.
Shit! Can someone now tell if you’ve been looking at their profile too long? Did I accidentally like that last picture of Bex and her six kids milking that cow? Six feels like too many children to me. Two children feels like a lot of children to me. I don’t even know how your vagina would handle that many kids. But thinking about Bex’s vagina feels invasive now that she’s sending me a direct message.
She has been insta‑stalking me? Well, that’s sort of nice to hear. But what is she even looking at? The sad backyard birthday party I had for Nora with the recycled balloon arch I borrowed from my cousin’s baby shower, or did she see my taco Tuesday reel where I very cleverly made a train of taco shells for my twenty‑month‑old to follow into the kitchen? (In hindsight that was a terrible idea. We’ll be finding pieces of those taco shells until the kids go to college, but there were five minutes when it looked pretty damn cute, and it got a ton of likes from my small coterie of followers from the neighborhood, which gave me an endorphin boost that I enjoyed too much.)
What am I supposed to write back? And why does her casually cheery tone piss me off so much? The answer to that is painfully obvious. She was the one who chose to end our friendship. She was the one who didn’t show up at the airport to pick me up like she was supposed to or answer my calls or texts afterward. She was the one who outgrew me and tossed me aside. She said the cruelest things to me that anyone has ever said.
Yet, I answer her. And I am cheery as fuck when I do it.
We live in such a strange time where we have to pretend not to know exactly what a person has been up to even though they post about what they have been up to nearly daily—or in Bex’s case, hourly. Am I supposed to pretend I don’t know about the ranch, the six children, the three‑legged goat, all that whoopie, while we message each other on the very platform where I’ve seen all these things?
The banality of it is soul crushing. Peter is staring at me now. I’d be staring at me too if I were him. What expression must be on my face as I furiously type to this random person while lying in our bed in the middle of the night? Emily, I mouth my sister’s name. My younger sibling has been working in Asia for the past six months so it’s never inconceiv‑able to get texts from her at all hours. Peter rolls his eyes and then blows an imaginary kiss my way before turning over. I hate lying to him. And he hates it when I keep tapping away at my phone once he goes to sleep. We both do. We have an unspoken rule that once one of us shuts our eyes the other puts down the phone. I type a quick bye.
I smile at her use of the word turd because it doesn’t seem at all like the kind of thing she would ever post in one of her cap‑tions and I feel like I’ve gotten a little bit of the real her. I hate the rush that gives me. Also, I don’t want to correct her about where I live. Leaving New York feels like a failure. There are a dozen things I want to type, but my fingers are frozen. She keeps going.
