Part 4
Grant arrived at the motel forty minutes later with another investigator and a digital recorder. It was nearly midnight, but he looked fully awake, as if he had expected the case to turn in this direction and had only been waiting for the moment it did. I sat at the small table near the window, wrapped both hands around a paper cup of coffee, and told him everything my mother had said. My voice shook at first, then steadied as I repeated the details. Weston climbing through the bedroom window. Weston searching for money. Weston panicking. Weston setting the fire to erase evidence. My mother knowing since the morning after. My mother telling him to stay quiet.
Grant listened without interrupting except to clarify names and times. The recorder’s red light blinked between us like a tiny warning.
“Did she explicitly say he started the fire?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Did she say he knew you were inside?”
“She said he swore he didn’t. But I don’t know if that’s true. I was supposed to be working late. My schedule changed two days before.”
“Did Weston know your schedule?”
“He used to. I don’t know anymore.”
The other investigator, a woman named Detective Marisol Keene, wrote notes in a small black notebook. “Has Weston contacted you since the fire?”
“No.”
“Has your mother attempted to call back?”
I looked at my phone on the table. It had remained silent since I hung up. “No.”
Detective Keene’s mouth tightened slightly. “All right.”
The next days passed in a blur of interviews, statements, and practical humiliations. There is something uniquely exhausting about proving you had a life after that life has been reduced to ash. The insurance company wanted inventories. The police wanted timelines. The landlord wanted forms signed before he would release what little remained from the apartment. People asked me to remember the purchase dates of furniture that no longer existed, the serial number of a laptop melted beyond recognition, the approximate value of a quilt my grandmother had sewn by hand from old dresses and flour sacks. How do you price the last object that still smelled faintly of someone who loved you?
Friends from work brought clothes. My boss paid for a week at an extended-stay hotel and told me not to argue about it. A woman named Tasha from the second floor found me through the apartment complex email list and dropped off a box of toiletries, snacks, and a pair of fuzzy socks with little cats on them. Kindness arrived from places I had not expected. It made my mother’s absence louder.
On the fourth day after I spoke to Grant, Weston was arrested.
I found out not from my mother, but from Detective Keene, who called while I was sitting in the lobby of the extended-stay hotel eating instant oatmeal with a plastic spoon. She told me Weston had been taken into custody that morning and charged with burglary and arson, with additional charges possible depending on the prosecutor’s review. She spoke carefully, professionally, but I heard something human underneath.
“We recovered clothing from his residence,” she said. “There are items being processed now. We also obtained surveillance footage from a gas station near your building showing him purchasing a small fuel container that night.”
I closed my eyes. Until that moment, some foolish piece of me had still hoped the story would unravel differently. That my mother had misunderstood. That Weston had lied to sound more important than he was. That the keychain had been planted by some impossible coincidence. But there it was, hard and plain. A fuel container. The word accidental no longer had anywhere to hide.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“He’ll be arraigned. The prosecutor will decide how to proceed. You may be contacted by victim services.”
Victim. The word landed heavily. I had used it for other people, people on the news, people in case files, people whose tragedies had shape and official language. I did not know how to wear it myself.