The Perfect Stranger

Stumbling along the waterfront path as it winds past the outbuildings of the Grand Hotel property, Elena spots a long wooden fishing pier ahead. Two men are there despite the thunderstorm, standing side by side along the railing holding bamboo rods above the water.

Elena stops ru

“Help!” she calls. “Please, please . . . someone is trying to kill me . . .”

They don’t turn their heads toward her, can’t hear her voice above the hard summer rain.

She looks over her shoulder, still expecting to see . . .

Landry, Je

She tries to catch her breath, shouts again, “Help! My friend . . .”

My friend is dead.

I went to tell her that I thought we should get out of that house before something terrible happened, and . . .

And it already had.

I found her, and . . .

And I panicked, and . . .

And I didn’t stop to help; I didn’t even stop to grab my cell phone to call for help.

I just ran. Ran away, ran for my life.

Again she looks over her shoulder.

No one is chasing her.

But I know what I saw. I had her blood on my hands. Dear God . . .

Kay. Poor Kay.

Blinded by the glare of flashbulbs, Je

“We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty . . .”

Not guilty.

Stu

Not guilty?

She clearly remembers what happened that night at her mansion in the Hollywood Hills.

Olivia, the daughter she’d given up for adoption, had found her way back into her life—

Just as Steven once had, about seven, maybe eight years after she left Mi

She didn’t give it to him.

Later, Je

She didn’t care.

Olivia did.

Olivia had maneuvered her way into her life as a personal assistant, never letting on who she really was.

It wasn’t until later—when Olivia was dead and she was sitting in a jail cell—that Je

She eventually found Steven, not long after Je

One night, she snapped.

Crept into Je

It was my life, or hers. I did what I had to do . . . Or did I?

Was there a part of her that knew all along who Olivia really was, and what was coming, and did nothing to deter it? A part of her—a spurned, furious part of her—that wanted to punish Olivia for the sins of her father?

No one will ever know the whole truth.

No one but me. And I’ll never tell.

It doesn’t matter now anyway.

Wesley Bauma

She looks up at him.

He gives a little nod.

She can hear Cory’s voice in her head. You can do this.

Okay.

Thanks to him—thanks to Wesley—the nightmare is over. Je

“Thank you.” Her voice seems to echo in hundreds, thousands, of microphones. Flashbulbs are still exploding before her eyes. The room is silent, waiting. Someone coughs.

You can do this.

“Seven years ago last week marked the begi

A lump rises in her throat. She’s thinking not about Ingrid Bergman, but about Meredith Heywood. And the others.

Eighteen months ago she set out to learn everything she could about breast cancer. She stumbled across a vibrant online community of women who were living with—and dying from—the disease. Ever the method actress, she was drawn into their world, essentially becoming one of them. She celebrated their triumphs, mourned their losses, and took up their battle cry, immersing herself not just in the emotions, but in the politics.

For eighteen months their world was her world.

Now it’s time now for her to move on.

She takes a deep breath. “I’m grateful to Wesley Bauma

I only wish you could know how much you meant to me—or why I left without saying good-bye.

“Kay . . . who did this to you, Kay?”

Landry’s voice, farther away now.

Was it like this for Meredith? Kay wonders. Could she hear me moving around her bedroom that night as she lay there on the floor? I should have talked to her. I should have told her why I did what I did. That it was out of love for her. I couldn’t bear the thought of her suffering the way Mother had. I knew she couldn’t bear it either . . .

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

When Meredith told her she was terminally ill, something shifted inside Kay.

All those years at the prison, watching criminals march off to the lethal injection chamber, had taken their toll. Killers who had tortured i

Not Meredith.

She knew what she had to do. She had to help her friend escape.

Maybe I had selfish reasons, too. Maybe I couldn’t bear the thought of being the first to go. Maybe I needed Meredith to be there, waiting for me, so that I wouldn’t be alone when the time came.

Was it so wrong, really?

When she first came up with the plan, Kay didn’t think so. It made a bizarre kind of sense, and after all, it was going to happen anyway. She even did some reading about euthanasia.

Mother used to talk about that a lot. Dr. Kevorkian had been tried and convicted around the time her own illness began to progress.

“They do lethal injection executions at the prison where you work,” she’d say. “You can get your hands on those drugs, can’t you?”

“No, Mother,” Kay would tell her. “I can’t.”

Yes, she could.

She did.

She kept the deadly liquid in the drawer of her nightstand, just in case Mother’s pain became unbearable.

Kay found herself imagining the heartfelt deathbed apology her mother would make, for withholding her love all those years.

I do love you, Kay, Mother would manage to say. I’ve always loved you, more than anything in the world.

Sick . . . bald . . . dying . . .

And then her mother would beg her to help her, and she would gently inject her with the drugs that would stop her heart and end the suffering at last.