Page 31 of The Arrangement

I nodded. "Fine. Do you need some help with this?"

He looked away from me, back to his work. "I'm almost done. Did you take care of the…"

"Yep, it's gone." I glanced around behind me, checking out the quiet drive to be sure no one was coming down it, feeling exposed, even in the privacy of our very secluded yard.

"I was thinking… Maybe tonight we can move the…thing—" He cleared his throat. "To the woods. Somewhere far away from the house." He gestured toward the thick, dark woods surrounding us. We only owned about three acres, but were enveloped by over forty acres of hunting ground owned by various people. There were plenty of places to hide a body, but it was risky. Too risky.

"Do you know how many hunting cameras are in these woods? What if we were caught?" I asked, watching as he continued to scrub the clean spot.

"Well, then we’ll bury it in our portion. Where there are no cameras."

"If they come looking, that's the first place they'll check. And I don’t want you digging the thing up. We have to leave it alone.”

The body was no longer a he, but an it. We'd made that transition.

Were there five steps to processing the fact that you’d committed a murder like there were for grief?

Step 1. Cleaning up.

Step 2. Detaching yourself from the victim by refusing to acknowledge they existed.

Step 3. To be determined

“Besides that,” I added, “returning to the scene of a crime is the worst thing we can do right now."

“Ainsley, we live at the scene of the crime. We can’t just keep him there. I can handle it. I can find somewhere to put him—”

“I said no. You’re going to get caugh—”

"Mom?" a faint voice interrupted my sentence, calling from inside the house, and I realized Maisy was standing in the living room, hair wild, one eye squeezed shut. She yawned, catching my eye through the glass of the door.

I opened it, putting on my best everything's fine smile. "Good morning, sleepy head."

"What are you doing?"

"Your dad's cleaning the porch. I just got home. Did you have fun last night? I didn't get a chance to talk to you very much after you got home."

"It was homework, so it wasn’t fun." She laughed, then her eyes filled with concern. "Dylan said you were sick. Are you better now?"

"Much. I think I ate something off at dinner."

“Nicole's dad says there's a bad stomach bug going around right now. He said he's had sixteen different patients this week with it."

"I don't think that's what I had. I'm feeling so much better already," I assured her, pleased to see the worry disappear. "Anyway, why don't you go on into the kitchen and get yourself some lunch, okay? I'll be inside in a second."

"Okay," she said, rubbing her eyes as she released another yawn and sulked to the kitchen.

"Do you think she heard us?" Peter asked, filling me with brand-new concern.

I shook my head. "She couldn't have… Could she?"

"Had she been standing there long?" As he asked, he stood up, dropped the sponge in the bucket, and dusted his hands on his pants.

"I have no idea," I said, inhaling deeply through my nose. I couldn't think about it. I refused to. There was no way she'd heard, and even if she had, no way she'd understood what we were talking about. I stepped a foot inside the house, glancing back at him. "I'm going to change and fix myself some lunch. You should hurry up with this and join us." I met his eyes, my gaze stern. “And wipe that petrified look off your face.”

Chapter Twenty

PETER