Chapter forty-eight:

 

 

I watch them for a long time. And it’s weird because I know that the human body holds anything from six to eight pints of blood in it. But it seems so much more when it’s coming out of a person and soaking into the carpet. It seems never-ending. Like there is an infinite amount of blood leaking from this man and staining the already disgusting carpet.

And this blood will never come out. It will never wash away, no matter how much disinfectant is used. Whoever lives here afterwards (not me or Carrie) will have to replace this carpet, and maybe even the floorboards underneath. In fact, I think this house will always be soaked in blood, because this much blood doesn’t go away. Not ever. They should probably just demolish it after we leave.

I feel bad, because I know that Carrie killing Adam has probably just knocked thousands off the other house prices in this street. (I’m not stupid and I shared a cell with a house auctioneer for a small time. He liked to rape and murder women when they were having a viewing, but honestly he wasn’t that bad a guy—well, beneath all of the murder and rape, of course.) But I do feel bad, because the other people on this street, they don’t deserve this. It’s not their fault that Adam was a dick and Carrie was a whore. They didn’t choose this, and neither did I.

“Are you okay?” I ask her, because she seems really unstable right now. She screamed at me, and that’s not like her because she knows I don’t like to be yelled at, never mind screamed at. And of course she’s sitting in Adam’s blood and it’s soaking into her clothes, and that can’t be nice.

She’ll need another bath, I think.

But I know that we really need to get out of this house soon, because other people will come looking for Adam, or even Carrie. And maybe the neighbors have heard all the shouting recently but have turned a blind eye to it because they’re used to it, but the sound of a gun? No one ignores that. At least not in neighborhoods like this. In my neighborhood people would pull the blinds down so they didn’t have to get involved. It’s dog eat dog where I live. But not here. It’s supposed to be nice here.

But I look around at the bedroom and then at Carrie, and I know that it’s not that nice. Houses may be more expensive, but it’s just as shitty of a neighborhood as mine is. I wonder if all the houses are like this around here. If inside those beautiful brownstone walls there is just as much misery and pain as there is inside these ones. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all of this it’s that things are never as they seem. People are never as happy as you think.

When I first saw Carrie and Adam, I thought they were a happy couple. I thought they were having a real relationship. And when I saw him going into this house, I thought, Damn, this girl has her head together. She’s really done something with her life. Of course I still hated him for being with my girl, but at least he seemed like a respectable guy. At least that was something. But he’s not respectable.

I was wrong.

Wrong about it all.

They were not happy together. And she doesn’t even own this house. Which is good, because it’s a mess.

So I know, when Carrie looks up at me again, that she doesn’t mean it when she says that she hates me.

“I hate you, Ethan.”

She’s just angry and hurt right now.

“I wish I had never met you.”

She just killed another person after all.

She leans over his body and presses her tear-stained cheek to his bloody chest, and gross, I think.

But she’s acting irrationally. She’s probably in shock. I’ll help her through it. I’ll be a good shoulder for her to cry on. Because I know we’ve had our moments, and we’ve gone through some serious stuff these past few days, but I’m understanding. I get that we had fifteen years of pain and anger to work through. I get that, and I forgive her.

Adam wouldn’t, of course. He’d make her suffer for her sins, but not me. But then Adam’s not going to make her do anything ever again. Not now that she just killed him.

That’s some major shit. I get she’ll need to get her head together before we can move on from this. Though as upset as she is, it’s of course not the first time she’s killed someone.

She did kill her dad, after all.