When I'm Her by Sarah Zachrich Jeng

Author:Sarah Zachrich Jeng [Zachrich Jeng, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

27

Mary (Elizabeth)

Now

I leave my server a generous tip. When she picks up my credit card slip she says, “Can I just say, I follow you, and I love your whole thing so much? You’re like, peak comfort internet.” She makes it sound like Elizabeth’s life is a show she watches.

I could summon a rideshare to get home, but my feet take me to the nearest subway stop. Public transit might be grimy and crowded, but I’ve been dependent on it for years and it’s familiar. I need that right now.

On the train, I revisit Elizabeth’s text message inbox. I’m not quite ready to discard my theory that Lorne’s behind the threats, though I can’t find a pattern between his and Elizabeth’s ups and downs and the timing of the messages. Nor is there a smoking-gun directive to Lorne from Elizabeth, ordering Garrett’s death.

If she asked him to get rid of Garrett, she did it in person.

What if Elizabeth had Lorne kill Garrett with an overdose, and now he’s got that to hang over my head? Then I’ll really be screwed.

But I still can’t find proof that she took such a risk. Once I scroll back to before Garrett died, I find a surprising number of texts between him and Elizabeth, but they don’t tell me much. They’re similar to her exchanges with Lorne: brief and mainly setting up in-person meetups. Only instead of fake photo shoots they’re brunches, happy hours, and Elizabeth’s influencer parties. In one, she arranges to help Garrett shop for a gift for his assistant, which sounds innocent until I realize there’s no way in hell he was holding down a job at that point in his downward slide.

Were Elizabeth and Garrett having an affair?

The train goes around a sharp curve, causing one of the tourists standing next to me to stumble into my shoulder. It knocks some sense into me. There’s no way she’d be screwing Garrett Deegan. He repulsed her even before Halloween, and afterward she’d have gone out of her way to avoid him.

It’s suspicious that they hung out so frequently in the weeks leading up to his death, especially in situations where it was just the two of them.

Garrett knew Elizabeth and I could inhabit each other. I always assumed he’d never figured out that we had used the Empathyzers that night, and that was one reason it had been so easy for the Deegans to blame me—because he didn’t throw any doubt on my guilt. But what if he knew, or suspected, that Elizabeth had been the one who pushed him? What if he told her that, before he met his end?

Elizabeth might have panicked. She might have devised a plan to rid herself of Garrett, then escape the consequences by starting a new life in my body. Joke’s on her, right? She never realized I’d end up as the prime suspect, and her visit to the house last night was buyer’s remorse.

Except I’m not sure Mary Burke is the prime suspect in Garrett’s death anymore.

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