Chapter 5: The Real Question

The thing that Terry would remember later—much later, after the police interviews and the psychiatric evaluations and the sixteen months of intensive therapy that would eventually allow him to sleep without medication (though never without light, never again in complete darkness)—was not the revelation itself but the way Karen delivered it: with the careful patience of a teacher explaining a math problem to a student who'd shown up unprepared.

"Your condo doesn't have a basement," Karen said, setting his real phone on the counter next to the laptop with the multiple camera feeds. "But mine does."

Terry's brain, which had been operating in something like emergency mode for the past hour, making rapid calculations and forming hypotheses and generally trying to impose narrative coherence on incoherent data, simply stopped. Crashed. Exhibited the cognitive equivalent of a blue screen of death.

"Your apartment—" he started.

"Isn't an apartment. It's a house. In Roslindale. You've never been there, Terry, because I told you my lease prohibited guests, which you accepted without question because you're the kind of person who accepts things without question." She picked up the wine glass that someone—probably Diane—had left on the counter. Took a sip. "The kind of person who wouldn't notice that his girlfriend of seven years has been systematically dosing his evening tea with a combination of Ambien and a mild amnestic compound that a friend from pharmacy school very helpfully compounded for me."

The voices from the living room had stopped. The book club was listening now, Terry realized. Had maybe been listening the entire time.

"The man in the basement," Karen continued, "is named Theodore Brennan. He's your brother. Half-brother, technically—same father, different mother. He's forty-one, lives in Portland, works in software development, and has absolutely no idea that you exist because your father, who was not a good man, Terry, not a good man at all, kept his two families very carefully separated for approximately eighteen years before dying of a heart attack in a Motel 6 in Newark."

Terry sat down, or possibly his legs just stopped supporting him. He was on the kitchen floor now, his back against the cabinet where Diane kept her stand mixer and her collection of artisanal vinegars.

"Why—" But he couldn't finish the question because there were too many versions of it, too many whys stacking up like plates that were about to fall.

"Why did I drug you? Why did I make you think you'd committed a crime? Why did I spend seven years of my life constructing an elaborate scenario designed to make you believe you were losing your mind?" Karen knelt down, getting to his eye level the way you would with a frightened child or a dog that might bite. "Because seventeen months ago, you did something. Not with a ceiling fan. Not with rope. But you did something that hurt me in a way that required—" She paused, searching for the right word. "—calibration."

And but so the thing that Terry remembered, and this was the thing that Dr. Mehta would later identify as significant, was that he knew exactly what Karen was talking about.

The thing with Melissa from accounting. The three-month thing that had overlapped with Karen's mother's cancer treatment and which Terry had rationalized (at the time, to himself, in the silent internal monologue that constituted his private ethical framework) as being essentially victimless because Karen had been distracted anyway and what she didn't know couldn't hurt her and various other clichés that people deploy when they're doing something they know is wrong but want to continue doing anyway.

"You knew," Terry said.

"I knew." Karen stood up. "And the thing about knowing, Terry, is that once you know something, you can't unknow it. You can't put it back. So you have to decide: do you leave, do you forgive, or—" She gestured at the laptop screen, at the basement camera feed, at Theodore still slumped in the chair. "—do you make the knower understand what it feels like to not know? To have your sense of reality become negotiable? To lose forty-seven minutes and not know if you're a good person or a monster or just someone who does monstrous things in their sleep?"

From the living room, Diane appeared in the doorway. Behind her, three other women Terry vaguely recognized from previous book club pickups.

"Is he ready?" Diane asked.

Karen looked at Terry. Really looked at him, with something that might have been sadness or might have been satisfaction or might have been both simultaneously, which Terry was beginning to understand was possible after all.

"I think so," Karen said.

"Ready for what?" Terry's voice sounded distant, like it was coming from underwater or from very far away.

Karen picked up the phone—the fake phone that had been sending the messages—and showed him the screen. A video was queued up, timestamped from last night, 3:17 AM.

In the video, Terry was sleepwalking, yes. Was in Diane's basement, yes. Was standing next to the ceiling fan with the rope, yes.

But he wasn't alone.

He was with Karen. And she was awake. And she was directing him, her voice soft and patient, telling him where to stand, what to say into the phone, when to take the photo.

"The real question," Karen said, "isn't what you did, Terry. The real question is: what are you willing to say you did? Who are you willing to become? How much of your own story are you willing to let someone else write?"

She held out the phone. "Theodore needs a brother. A brother who will testify that their father was abusive. A brother who will help him win a lawsuit against the estate. All you have to do is remember something that never happened. Something I'll help you remember."

Terry looked at the phone. At Karen. At the women in the doorway who were watching him with the clinical interest of scientists observing an experiment.

The book they'd been discussing, he remembered now, wasn't Atwood.

It was a different book entirely.

One about gaslighting.

Terry took the phone.