Tag: thriller

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Ben thought it looked like a conference room, but he’d never been interrogated before, so maybe it wasn’t actually a conference room. They didn’t hustle him into it, exactly, but they seemed on edge until the door was closed. There were a couple other people—agents, he assumed—who looked at them a bit curiously, then all reacted the same way: their eyes got big and they very clearly feigned nonchalance.

Her boyfriend’s dad still worked here, huh? Maybe her boyfriend’s dad killed her. Or, maybe, this boyfriend—she’d had a boyfriend?—killed her, and the dad was covering it up. Could Ben make it work? The boyfriend wouldn’t have killed the roommate thinking it was her, the way some of the theories were running, but …

There was a coffee pot and a mini fridge in here, so it probably wasn’t an interrogation room. Jack got the coffee going and nodded down at the fridge. “Help yourself. You mind if we record this?”

He was pretty sure he wasn’t allowed to mind. “Maybe I should call my agent?” he suggested, making sure he sounded uncertain. “If I’m talking about the book. I don’t … well. I don’t know how this goes.”

There was a knock on the door and Tyler went to open it, but only just enough to accept the delivery of some legal tablets and a copy of Since You Went Away.

A clearly worn copy. Ben felt the pride swell up in his chest, ready to burst, even though the people reading it had combed through it so closely for a killer.

“I think you’re fine,” Tyler offered, holding the book up as his evidence. “It’s already out there, right? They’re not changing anything in it at this late date.”

That was true, but he hesitated a moment longer anyway before opening the fridge—he didn’t actually want anything—and pulling out a tiny bottle of water. It would give him something to fiddle with, anyway, and anyone in his position would be nervous. They were accusing him of having written a love letter to a murderess, after all. He even took the chair Tyler gestured to, which of course put him across from the agent and with his back to the coffee pot so they’d have to circle him for a refill and make him decide whether to turn and face them or let them just lurk back there.

When he’d started that sentence about calling someone, Tyler had winced. He thought the last word was going to be lawyer. Jack didn’t have such a tell. It was a good thing to note.

They settled in across from him, trying for casual with a slight underpinning of urgency, and it helped him relax. Maybe guilty people fell for their act, but it was all too clear to him.

Jack slurped some of his coffee and opened a thin manila folder. “You’re born and raised in Kalamazoo, right?”

He nodded.

“Went into the workforce right after high school … D&L Janitorial … started your own business in late 2019 … how’d that work through COVID?”

Ben let the smirk linger for a moment because that was the right reaction: show the natural one, then realize it wasn’t the socially acceptable one. “I felt like I was fleecing some of those people. They’d invite me in, hide out in a room, and have me deep clean the entire place.”

“And now they call you for crime scenes,” Tyler mused. “You must’ve seen some things.”

The wince could stay longer. “I don’t really like to think about it. The stuff that can happen around here. But, yeah, that’s me. I took over for Dirk when he retired, so … it was kind of a ready-made spot to step into.”

Baseline. They were getting his baseline. It was supposed to make him relax so they could see what he looked like when he told the truth and compare it to how he acted later, when he answered the big questions. So this was the time to fake his tells: start peeling the label off the water bottle and stop himself. Let his leg jiggle. Rub at his mouth. Nothing too extreme, because he hadn’t thought to start any of this back at his house, but hey, they were his usual nervous tics. He’d probably done them anyway, without thinking, just because two strangers in suits had shown up at his door.

“And you live alone?” Tyler asked, and why the hell did that matter?

Baseline questions. They were just establishing his baseline. “Yeah.” He tried a smile. “Ladies don’t exactly flock to you when you drive the clean-up van.”

“No family?”

“No. Ma died a couple years back.” This was usually where he added something like It wasn’t COVID, but that would be oversharing. It was a recognized stress reaction, and he wasn’t supposed to be overly stressed just now. That would come in a minute. Did they think he didn’t know how this went?

“So you were with D&L in 2018 and most of 2019.”

Here we go. “Yes?”

“D&L cleaned between renters at the Sussex Apartments.”

He nodded. “Yeah, sure. I cleaned there a lot.”

“Including numbers 12 and 17.”

This called for a blink. “Sure. I picked places I know. It’s another trick—like the faces?” Except he didn’t name the apartment complex in the book. He didn’t use the real name, and he hadn’t made up a name. It was just the place where Rosie lived, so the name didn’t matter, because there wasn’t another apartment complex and no need to make a distinction.

Jack nodded, even though he’d been speaking to Tyler and telling Tyler about the faces. “It’s the right numbers, though. Ellie Dawson and Heidi Phillips were in 12, and Trevor Laitila and his girlfriend were in 17.”

He shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, sure. The numbers must’ve been in the articles or on the news, and they stuck, because I knew them. They make sense, anyway. First-floor apartments, small building …”

Tyler flipped a page in the folder they seemed to be sharing and bingo, there was the exact article about Heidi that listed her apartment number.

They’d had a hell of a time renting that unit out ever since. As far as Ben knew, it was empty right now, even though they’d done a complete renovation on it. It wasn’t haunted—he didn’t believe in ghosts—but people just couldn’t walk into 12 without thinking about what happened there, like it was the Overlook’s 237. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t the same furniture, or the same carpet, or the same bathtub, or that nothing was still in the place the old ones had been. He was also pretty sure those unlucky enough to end up in 10 or 14 also freaked themselves out with auditory hallucinations, even though nobody had reported hearing anything on the evening of May 24. Whoever killed Heidi Phillips was a ghost.

Unless it was her own roommate, who’d slipped in quietly and unnoticed because she was simply supposed to be there.

“Did you follow the case when it was happening?” Jack asked.

Ben nodded. “You couldn’t really get away from the first one. The Morgan girl. They really kept hammering it on the news, you know? Beautiful college co-ed, how’d she fall so low?”

“They held that candlelight vigil,” Tyler reminded them. “We’ve got footage, actually. Dawson’s there, with Fisher and Phillips.”

He shook his head and shifted. “You don’t actually think Lida-Rose Dawson … killed them?”

“I’m afraid we do.” Jack shrugged to show that no, he wasn’t actually sorry about it.

“But why not put out a warrant?” he pressed. “Track her down that way.”

Jack snorted and slouched casually. “Because she’s disappeared. There’s no record of her past June 2019, so she’s hidden deep. The last thing we want to do is cause a country-wide panic and send lynch mobs after totally innocent women who look a bit like her—”

“And give her a warning so she can flee,” Tyler put in.

“— so it’s fallen to the wayside.” He waited a beat. “Plus Hillier’s muzzled it. He doesn’t want us digging for her, so he’s decided she’s presumed dead and all but closed the case.”

Hillier. That was a slip. Her boyfriend’s last name was Hillier. “How do you know she’s not dead?”

Tyler sighed. “We don’t. But, if she’s still out there …”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Jack suggested. “Why’d you pick this case for a romance novel?”

“It’s not a romance,” he corrected, because that was something he knew had to become habit. “People pick up a romance, they expect a happy ending. It’s romantic, but not a romance.”

Jack just gestured for him to go on.

“Well …” He opened the little bottle and finally took a sip. “It was everywhere when it happened. My mom really fixated on it. She didn’t live with me—I don’t think I could’ve stood that—but she started getting worried, even though they weren’t actually anything like her. You know?”

Jack and Tyler both nodded, so he steadied himself with a breath and prepared to go on.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 2:14PM

This is your warning that, as soon as I see you tomorrow, I’m handcuffing you to that bed and you’re not getting away until I’m done with you.

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:19PM

Well now. Glad I didn’t read that until all the students left. You don’t NEED the handcuffs, but I’m not saying no.

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:23PM

You’re not supposed to have your phone out in class and I know you sure as hell don’t check this email on your school computer. XXX

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:28PM

Are those kisses or is that the rating for tomorrow night’s activities? About to get in the car and head home. Call at 7?

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: March 19, 2019 3:31PM

It can be both. Drive safe. Talk at 7.

---

Chapter Sixteen

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Ben had never actually thought to look up FBI offices in Michigan. He supposed that, in the back of his mind, he figured there was one in Lansing, and that was it. This wasn’t the time to Google it and educate himself, since first the agents waited for him to get ready—what was a man supposed to do to get ready, ye gods?—and then brunet, oh so friendly, offered to ride shotgun so he’d know where to go.

Brunet was named Tyler. “Because of the novel,” he confided—appeared to confide—as he buckled in. “Not the movie. I’m not that young.”

An FBI agent younger than Fight Club. Was that even possible? Besides, the movie was only three years behind the book, so if this agent—this kid—thought that three years made that much of a difference, he was that young. Maybe younger. Ben grunted to show he’d heard, but this wasn’t a junior high sleepover, and they weren’t seventh grade girls. If Tyler wanted to keep up a one-sided truth or dare and keep picking truth, that was on him.

“You know the main character doesn’t even have a name?” Tyler shook his head a little. “Most people don’t realize that. They remember Tyler Durden, which is how it’s supposed to go, but then they all stop and get a weird look and ask hey, do you remember the name of the character Edward Norton plays? Except nobody does, because he doesn’t have one.”

He really preferred Tyler around Jack, because at least that Tyler wasn’t babbling.

“I just think it’s interesting. Naming. I mean, I know it’s not the same,” he continued with a deep nod, either not looking at Ben at all or pretending not to. “My wife and I are trying for kids, so the name thing’s come up a lot. And that’s just one—you had to name a whole book of characters.”

Right. He did. Did FBI agents routinely read books? And not just books—advance reader copies. Someone had to have gotten their hands on one of them, the stuff they sent to bloggers and big names, not FBI agents. BookTokers, not G-men. Why were Feds called G-men?

“I suppose it’s easier,” Tyler mused, because he wouldn’t shut up, “when you start with a template. All the names—you didn’t change them much.”

He took a slow breath and concentrated on checking his mirrors. “I wasn’t ever going to mention it. Thom knows.” And he was sure they knew who Thom was. “If anybody asked about it, the similarities, I’d say yeah, sure, I was here when the murders happened, but … look, the thing is, some authors use movie stars. Others just Google it—blonde woman in her twenties, guy with black hair in his forties, whatever. You find a picture, and it starts off being a picture of someone else, but the more you work on it …” He was saying you too much. He sounded like a nervous first-time speaker trying to remember all the lines he was supposed to parrot. Maybe that was okay. “Years ago, when I started working on this, they were Kelsey and Ashleigh and Heidi, sort of. Maybe even mostly. But they were the newspaper versions, and the people I shifted them to be in my head … they’re my characters, because they’re not anything like the real people. You know?”

“Can’t say I do,” Tyler said pleasantly.

Shit, it was just a nervous tick.

“Sounds like the sort of writing process talk they’d eat up on campus.”

He wasn’t sure if it was a smile that flicked over his face because he quashed it so fast. “I’m not the kind of guy they invite to college campuses.”

“Maybe we need more books by guys like you.”

This was not like any male bonding he’d ever negotiated before. “You read it?”

“I did, yeah. My wife’s totally green. Man, if she knew C. J. O’Connell’s a local … Turn left here.”

Honestly it felt like taking his driver’s test again: check the mirror, flick the blinker, and keep an egg between his foot and the brake pedal.

“Cal, though,” Tyler said abruptly, almost making Ben flinch as he waited for a gap in the traffic. “You made him up completely.”

There was no good response to that. At this point, he was just lucky he wasn’t sweating. Yet.

“I read a review … I think it was on Goodreads … someone said Rosie’s the main character of the story, but you can’t tell it from her point of view, because … hell, I’ll have to find it again. Something about the mystique, maybe, so Cal’s the narrator. Sort of like how Nick narrates Gatsby.”

He tried not to clear his throat. “Nick narrates Gatsby because Gatsby dies.”

Tyler laughed, and it might have been real. A surprise reaction instead of one that was carefully calculated. “Don’t let my wife hear you. That’s what she calls a half-points answer: technically true, but barely on the dart board. Nick’s the narrator because he’s just enough on the outside to be fascinated with Gatsby, hear all the truth about him, and ignore it anyway.”

“Yeah? Is that what you wrote in your own paper in high school?”

This chortle was Tyler fully under control. “In high school, I wrote papers that sounded a lot like SparkNotes.”

SparkNotes. Were SparkNotes even around when Ben was in high school? Cliffs Notes, sure, but SparkNotes felt new.

And Tyler was positioning himself: not the expert, but married to the expert. Whom he was trying to impregnate. Hopeful family man who didn’t know the first thing about writing and would listen wide-eyed to Ben describe his whole process. Anything to keep him talking.

“Yeah, my wife gives me the same look.”

Maybe Tyler didn’t even have a wife. Maybe she got assigned whatever occupation would help him most in the moment. Maybe he wasn’t even married. Maybe he was gay. What was the worst-case scenario here?

“But the thing is, I read Gatsby again recently, and I have to say, you’ve got a lot of the same vibe. They didn’t host those giant parties, maybe, but that apartment was still a hub. Cal meets her casually, he’s still kind of peripheral … there are all these people around her, this whole network, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really knows her. Right?”

He nodded. That was the safest answer, especially when he wasn’t entirely sure of the truth.

“And he’s … well. The thing is …” Tyler shifted for the first time, like he’d suddenly realized the seat wasn’t entirely comfortable. “Cal never actually confesses his feelings for Rosie. He’s not really clear on them. Nick, now … he never says anything to Gatsby, because he’s too passive. You know? Everyone’s cheating, Nick doesn’t try to stop any of it … so he’s not going to tell another man what he’s thinking, right? 1920s, that’s not going to happen. But then!” He held up a finger. “Chapter Seven plays out, someone’s dead, and Nick’s got to confront who Gatsby really is.”

“Gatsby didn’t kill Myrtle.” Except Tyler was trying to draw comparisons between Gatsby and Rosie, so which character was he defending?

“No, but he was willing to say he did, to cover for Daisy.” The agent shook his head slowly. “He was blinded by his obsession, and Nick?”

Ben managed to keep his lips from opening. Cal’s not obsessed didn’t escape.

“I guess what I’m wondering is—turn in here—if Cal maybe doesn’t commit to telling Rosie he loves her because he’s got some suspicions. You know? If you tapped into that, and you know …”

That was complete and utter bullshit. “I’m sorry, man, but it really sounds like you guys are grasping at straws.”

Tyler chuckled his dangerous chuckle again. “Or maybe you missed your true calling and should’ve been a profiler. Any spot up here.”

He licked his lips before he caught himself. “I thought profilers only worked serial killers.”

“The three girls, right?” Tyler shrugged as he unclipped his seatbelt. “That’s enough, even without the other two.”

Shit. A ball of ice replaced his stomach. “… other two?” Was that hesitation too long?

The agent nodded. “Yeah, the bus driver and the neighbor. They’re not in your files?”

“The …” Solved. Those were solved. It was the bus driver’s boyfriend, who was a druggie loser, and the neighbor borrowed money from the wrong people who took his life when they couldn’t get it back.

“Yeah. It’s amazing, really.” Tyler opened the door and looked over at him before he got out. “You zoomed right in on them. Connected them right back to Rosie. The subconscious …” He shook his head in admiration. “Yours is working overtime.”

Okay, and the subtext? He fumbled for his own seatbelt and nearly lost his footing on the dry pavement, and he clicked the fob twice because he couldn’t remember if he’d locked the doors, causing the horn to honk and tell the world he’d hit it twice. Did they honestly think he was brilliant, some sort of self-trained Will Graham, and Rosie was a murderer?

Jack held the door for them, looking around and almost twitching, like someone put a spider down his collar and was ready to send a snake after it. “He’s not supposed to be in today,” he said cryptically as Tyler went to the elevator and pressed a button.

Ben frowned.

“Boyfriend’s dad,” Tyler supplied, gesturing for him to get on the elevator first.

“Wait, he …?”

“Still works here?” Jack finished with a deep nod. “Nothing’s proved, right? Except for the fact that, any time this comes up, he shuts it down. Sweeps it back under the rug.”

He nodded slowly, trying not to retreat into his own head, but, what, she had a long-distance boyfriend, and it was his dad who turned out to be their handler? So it wasn’t witness protection, after all? It was a kidnapping disguised as a favor?

The FBI didn’t know where she was, either. Maybe it was even worse than he’d imagined.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: February 22, 2019 9:21AM

I’m not sure they should’ve canceled classes today. I know why they did, but that means we’re just separated and drifting. Callie texted to tell me the line for the counselors is ridiculously long, and everybody’s crying, so even if I wanted to talk to someone I’d have to wait, and cry in front of them, and I know it’s not the pity Olympics, but Kelsey and I go back to first grade. Even the other two from our high school didn’t know her that long.

She’s the one who grew up on a llama farm before they moved and who puked on the blocks and whose mom was all gung-ho about Brownies and survival stuff. There was one winter camping weekend thing we did where Mrs. Morgan found a pile of snow, stuck wooden dowels all over it, and had us dig out the middle as a snow cave. All the other grownups are like oh, no, don’t go digging tunnels and stuff in the snowbanks because they’ll cave in on you, and she’s all psh, you have to dig smart. The dowels showed you how far to hollow it out so it’d stay standing.

Neither of us kept up with scouts, but we had classes together. We were in band. And then we ended up here, not really together but I still see her more than Kate and Jessie. And now …

I keep going over how it doesn’t make any sense, because it doesn’t. Kelsey still lives on campus. She’s still trapped in the K bubble. If I hadn’t ended up with Heidi, then I probably would’ve taken her up on the offer for sharing a double. But she’s got that single, and she doesn’t even have a car on campus because parking’s such a pain. That’s why I’d pick her up for Meijer runs: shopping, but also just to get her off campus.

So it makes no. Freaking. Sense. That she was out Wednesday night. There’s no angle to make it work unless she was lured or kidnapped, but there’s no security camera footage of anything, and they also said she was drunk. Kelsey, who never drinks. Some of the others tease her about it, but I think it’s family-related. Her mom knew the cool outdoor survival stuff, but there was always a distance with her dad.

I’m doing the same thing the papers are: speculating. Except they don’t know her, so they think they’ve got it all figured out. Of course it was a stupid drunk college student, out in the bad part of town, looking for a drug deal. It makes so much sense that way, and then of course it’s Kelsey’s fault.

She wouldn’t do this. There’s no way she’d do this, except I’m just being difficult, because clearly she did, and the police are already annoyed with me for making it more of an issue than it already is. They just tell me they’re on it, and they won’t give me updates if I call because I’m not family.

It’s supposed to be comforting, I think, that it didn’t happen on campus. “One of us” died, but it wasn’t “one of us” who killed her. I keep hearing people mention oh, have you ever looked at that one memorial bench near the chapel? It’s for Maggie Wardle, whose name I didn’t even know until now, because her ex-boyfriend killed her on campus in a murder-suicide. So. We’re supposed to be grateful Kelsey’s not that.

This isn’t what senior year’s supposed to be, is it? I know yours wasn’t exactly a bed of roses, but it wasn’t this.

I should try to do some homework. God, that feels like such a joke. Gran’s trying to convince me not to come home this weekend, but I don’t know if that’s the right choice.

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: February 22, 2019 12:03 PM

Babe: hop in your car. You’ve got a key. I’ll see you at my apartment after work. If you want to come home, then come on home.

---

Chapter Fifteen

Catch up on the previous chapters here

A knock on the door jerked him out of his reverie. It was his first sex scene, and he was deep—heh—into it, to the point where he nearly felt every inch of her skin and heard her sigh. It would need work, because he wasn’t the sort of guy who usually read this stuff and had all the proper vocabulary at the ready, but it wasn’t exactly something he could shake off, either. At least his phone was right there so he could scope out the view from the doorbell camera, because maybe it was just a package.

Shit. Two men in dark suits. If he didn’t answer, they’d check the garage—van on one side, sedan on the other—and then start circling the house, peering in windows. That, for some reason, wasn’t trespassing. The problem was how you had to be home to tell people to get off your property, or else they’d put on their puppy eyes and say they were just worried about you. It was a wellness check until you told them to go the fuck away, but that would mean showing them he was home, after all.

Sighing, he decided to leave his notebook open, the pencil—mechanical, and almost out of lead—next to it as he stood up, slid his phone into his hip pocket, and tried to think cool, calming thoughts. This wasn’t the time to think about her, or about the scene he’d just been writing, although part of him was far less inclined to simply let that go. Would they notice? Probably. He was a single man who lived alone and wasn’t often seen out with friends, so why not scope out his den for some porn if they got half a chance? The problem was balancing exactly how much of a chance he should give them.

He reached the door just as one of them knocked again and opened it up with a carefully practiced expression: a little distracted because he’d just been pulled from his work, but concerned enough about what, exactly, brought these two strangers to his stoop.

“Bentley Beckett?” the one on the left asked. They were nearly twins: chiseled jaws, hairlines just starting to recede, that one blond and his partner brunet.

He blinked, because the script called for it. “Ben to my friends. Who—?”

They held up their IDs in unison, making them synchronized swimmers as well as almost-twins.

“Uh.” Ben blinked again, eyebrows raised. “What’s going on?”

“Likely nothing, Mr. Beckett,” the brunet assured him, tucking his ID away again. “But I wonder if we could come in?”

Good cop? Not that there really were any good cops. He calculated the risks and rewards as quickly as he could, but he thought that the blond might have noticed him doing it before he nodded and opened the door wider for them to come inside.

“Mr. Beckett,” the brunet—seriously, they flashed those IDs too quickly for him to catch their names—repeated, lowering his head a little like this was serious personal business. “We’re here to confirm that you’re the author of the book Since You’ve Been Gone, published under the pseudonym C. J. O’Connell.”

He jerked back. “What?” Ben was a man caught in his lie, of course, but it was an accepted lie. Even the biggest names published under a pseudonym now and then. “You’re not supposed to—” He deliberately swallowed the rest of that sentence, too, and it worked, because the blond looked smug: Gotcha.

“We presented your agency with a warrant,” the brunet explained, and yes, he was at least soothing cop, if not good cop. “They resisted and ran it by legal, but we got the warrant, and they gave us your name.”

“Mr. Beckett, do you know where Lida-Rose Dawson is?” the blond rapped.

Uh. What?

“Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson,” he repeated. “Informally known as Ellie. From her initials, I guess. Because a lot of people are interested in finding her.”

This was not how he’d imagined it. “I’m sorry?” Shit, what did they know? What did they think they knew? What did they want him to give away? Every blink, every glance … they’d read into it. Into all of it. And he could review his own footage later, trying to judge his performance, but what was he supposed to do now?

“Mr. Beckett, she’s wanted for questioning in the murder of her roommate,” the brunet explained. “The inspiration for the final murder in your book, right?”

“Uh.” Okay, this, at least, was expected. Ben gestured back into the house. “You want to look at my research? Because it’s all newspaper stuff, so …”

“Could we?” the brunet asked while his partner nearly shouldered him out of the way in his own house. Eminent domain, gentlemen.

He—Bentley Brooks Beckett, and seriously, Ma, why?—followed along, offering, “My den’s the room on the right,” in case the FBI agent couldn’t tell the difference between a den and a laundry. In case the FBI agent chose to make a mistake and stumble around like Ben had a body hidden back there.

Ben couldn’t turn around and watch both of the agents at the same time, but he saw the way the blond swept his eyes over the stuff hung in the hallway—some photos of him and Ma at different ages, some thrift store paintings—and he figured the brunet was doing it, too. Scoping him out. Figuring out the king from his castle. They would’ve clocked his clothes, too: jeans and a chambray shirt, leather belt clearly old and well-worn, work boots that clomped on the bare wood floor. His hair, in need of a cut, and his beard, trimmed just the way he liked, which would mean something to them. All of it would mean something to them because they wanted it to mean something to them. They had a story, so their report would include the details that supported it and ignore anything that tried to tell a different one.

“Yeah, so …” Ben sidestepped the blond agent to open the lower desk drawer and pull out one of those expanding folder things, although it wasn’t expanded very far. “Those three college girls, right?”

“We’re interested in the fourth,” blond told him, taking the folder anyway and opening it to pull out the contents. “The one who didn’t die.”

“Rosie,” brunet supplied. “In your book, she’s the one you call Rosie.”

He grimaced and shrugged. “I’m not good with names. I guess I didn’t change it very much.” There was a lot he hadn’t changed very much, thanks, but why were they here after her? Did that mean that she wasn’t in witness protection, after all? That she’d disappeared, but without help? Shit, had she been out there on her own all this time? Without some group of them acting as her support system while keeping him away from her?

Blond ignored the notebook on his desk and fanned the printouts of the newspaper articles dealing with the deaths of Kelsey Morgan, Ashleigh Fisher, and Heidi Phillips. Two were drunk when they died, one in a bad part of town and one in her own car—operating heavy machinery after imbibing, tsk tsk—and the third had been safe at home, but clearly she’d invited the wrong person in to join her.

Ben shifted, rubbing at his left arm because of course he’d be anxious about two feds dropping in on him like this. “I mean, they’re inspiration for the book, yeah,” he offered in the silence, “but the people in my head aren’t anything like the real ones were. Inspired, you know? But not …” He trailed off, because this was a good time to trail off.

Blond held up the paper-clipped stack—if a half-dozen sheets constituted a stack—of articles about Heidi Phillips. “In your book, the roommate’s out to dinner with a friend when the murder happens.”

He blinked. “In the …? It’s fiction. It’s—look, I didn’t date Lida-Rose Dawson.”

“And she wasn’t out with ‘a friend’ that night.” He tried to level his gaze at Ben, but Ben had two inches on him. “Her alibi was her boyfriend. Long-distance, and he just happened to show up that night and say oh, no, Ellie couldn’t have done it because she was with me all evening.”

“Until they both walked in and found the body,” brunet agreed. “Together. Or so they said.”

Shit, what? “What?”

“Yeah, that part didn’t make the papers,” brunet added almost comfortingly.

It looked like he’d have to learn their names.

“It didn’t make the papers because the boyfriend’s dad happened to be one of us,” blond snapped. “So they helped cover for her. The boyfriend and the dad.”

“Jack—”

The blond—Jack—slashed a hand through the air, ignoring his partner and focusing on Ben. “She disappeared. Ellie. We’re pretty sure her boyfriend’s dad orchestrated it, off the books, and we’ve been trying to find her ever since. So when we get wind that there’s this book coming out, and it’s going to be big, and it looks like the author had some inside knowledge about the person we’d like to question for Phillips’ murder …”

Seriously, there had to be a better reaction other than blinking, but he just couldn’t think of one. “Uh. It’s fiction.”

“Well, then, you’ve got quite the imagination, don’t you, Ben?”

He didn’t, actually. That was part of the problem with the second book. “I don’t … you’re saying that the … the sort of general case I used as a, I don’t know, plot backbone for my book means you … you think I’ve written a book where the main character falls in love with a murderer?”

“Possibly a serial killer,” Jack said, once again overriding his partner. “The other two women? She knew them, too. They were over at her apartment all the time that year.”

“The … the one killed on Elm and the one who crashed her car?”

Jack clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Should’ve done some more research there, Ben. Fisher’s car was tampered with.”

“They kept that out of the papers,” the brunet said quietly.

“Sure, so the real killer might slip up and mention it, but …” Jack dropped the printouts on the desk, scowling when they weren’t heavy enough to make a satisfying sound. “The real killer pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes and ran off, didn’t she?”

“Mr. Beckett, the reason everyone’s in a frenzy about your book is that you seem to have some sort of insight into Miss Dawson.” It seemed that the brunet’s usual volume was quiet, which Ben realized could easily be mistaken for calm. Or friendly. “Would you at all be willing to come with us into the office and tell us about your process?”

He licked his lips.

“You’re the first possible thread we’ve found to pull on this thing in years, so if you could help us find her … get our questions answered …” The brunet shrugged. “For Miss Phillips. For all of them.”

He ran a hand over his hair—at least it wasn’t a blink—and sighed. “I was writing, but … you’re talking right now?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

He minded. He minded a whole lot. But this thing went both ways. They wanted to know what he knew about her, right? He could say the same thing about them.

They let the silence drag on this time, and he sighed, lifting his hands and letting them fall to slap his thighs. “Sure. Okay. I don’t think this is going to help at all, but …”

Jack smiled tightly. “Thank you. We’ll caravan on over.”

Right. Okay.

This definitely wasn’t an eventuality he’d planned for.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: January 11, 2019 10:48PM

I know I’ve got class tomorrow, but I can’t sleep. You should be in bed so you won’t get this until the morning, and even then I don’t want you wasting time worrying about it. I know you’ve got enough going on, and in case you need it in writing, I’m glad you told me. I worry about you, you know? That’s what you do when you love someone.

The TL;DR is that Trevor from 17 hasn’t been parking in my spot anymore because he’s been dead for weeks.

Now for the part you don’t have to read. Hell, I might even delete it. Sometimes just writing it out helps.

Is this like normal as you grow up? The more people you meet, the more are going to die. Right? But we’re not talking people who were old or sick. Margaret was killed by her boyfriend, for crying out loud, and that’s not okay. That’s not normal. Right? Most guys aren’t like that. Can’t be like that.

Right?

Or is this me being young and naïve and all the things Gran keeps telling me not to be, using the voice that means she doesn’t think I am, but maybe I am, after all? Like when she just got fixated on how I only did the single semester in Rome so I’d be home for your graduation, and that was the only reason. Because I’m still too young to make decisions like that? I don’t know. Fuck, I’m rambling.

Trevor’s been dead in a snowbank probably since the last time he parked in my freaking spot. I guess not many people hike that trail this time of year, or maybe he was found off the trail—there aren’t many details, but this is the second person I know who’s been murdered in months, and that’s absolutely not normal.

I should’ve just taken the single on campus. Or even a double. I didn’t have to save Heidi’s ass, and that’s not exactly paradise, either. We’re cordial, and we’ve managed not to go off on each other, but if she tries to tell me I haven’t done my share of the freaking chore list when we both know which one of us steps up and fills in when it’s not her week, and which one just sits there on her ass and goes “Well it’s your job this week,” I might just storm out. Leave her hanging.

God I’m distracted. In a mood. Everything’s going wrong, so everything seems like it’s going wrong, and I just don’t know what I’m doing here, but I’m too close to the finish line to back out now. I’m counting down the days because I’m done with this part of my life, you know? I’m ready to stop transitioning from high school to real life and just start living real life.

If you’ve read this far, I want you to know something else, too: I don’t care if Erin and Liza and whoever else keep telling you that the first year’s the worst and you need to come back for a second year and it’ll be so much better. If you don’t want to teach after this year, then don’t. No one’s going to make you sign that contract. We’ll work it out, because that’s pretty much the only non-negotiable here: the future is us. I want you happy, and if that means riding into battle against your mentor and your principal and whoever else, fine. I’ll get my sword.

I love you and I wish you were here. This whole long-distance thing really sucks.

E

---

Chapter Fourteen

Catch up on the previous chapters here

He often thought about hiring someone to clean his house, maybe once every other week to take care of the dusting and the vacuuming and those chores that didn’t need to be done every day but still needed to be done. What stopped him most times was the thought that he’d have to let someone in, perhaps with her own key, and he wouldn’t always know what she was up to if he was out. The laptop was password-protected and didn’t contain his most personal documents, but those were in his desk. He could lock that room, but then he’d still have to clean it himself, anyway, and just ask Bluebeard: locking a room was the surest way to make sure someone forced her way inside.

The second reason was the fact that he didn’t want to have to endure all the chuckles. They all thought of the irony—oh, the guy with the cleaning service wants to hire someone to clean his own house—and not the fact that most people came home from work and got to do something other than work. Besides, he was expensive. Paying someone to do it technically cost less than taking the time to do it himself.

He was past the usual everyday or every week sort of cleaning, anyway. If someone was desperate, he’d take a job cleaning an apartment between tenants, but he didn’t do that if it was just the normal wear-and-tear. His specialty was deep cleaning, the kind of thing where people didn’t have the supplies on hand, or maybe you couldn’t even get them at Meijer.

Crime scenes. A number of his jobs were crime scenes, after the tape came down and the scene was released but before the family or the landlord was comfortable coming back in.

Landlords were better than family members. He knew just how hard to push to up the price but keep the job. Families were harder, because usually they were grieving, which either meant they were too lost to know if he asked for too much or they felt the world owed them.

Maybe the world did. He could certainly relate to the feeling that things were sometimes entirely unfair, and that other people—bad people—had too many good things happen to them. It defied that deep-seated sense of balance. And yes, he knew what it was like to have someone taken away from you, without notice. Without the chance to even say anything. So sometimes he bent, but never too much.

People talked, and if they heard you were an old softy at heart …

He lived alone and couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anyone over. FedEx and UPS didn’t count, especially since they never got past the entryway. Sometimes they’d open the front door, if he was home, and stick a package inside if the weather was iffy. That was fine. He had cameras on all the doors, anyway. There was the one on the doorbell, the popular kind everyone seemed to have these days—everyone practically had to have these days if you didn’t want kids stealing your packages—but the others were his usual: the kind that so many people overlooked.

Okay, there were some drawbacks to not being the guy cleaning out apartments between renters, but what was he looking for? He’d already found her. Found her, lost her, and now he was looking for her again, this time looking for a very specific her instead of this nebulous, perfect idea of her.

A very specific her that people were making sure stayed far, far away from him. There was a whole group on that side, with all kinds of specialties and expertise and degrees to make that end of the seesaw plant itself on the ground. If he tried asking outright, going around and saying her name, then all was lost. They’d vaporize him and she wouldn’t even know it. She’d just be stuck there, waiting for him, and he’d never come.

The book tour was just about finalized. He was coming.

He couldn’t be absolutely positive she’d know about it, but everyone was raving about the book. Since You Went Away—what a stupid title. They were trying to make him into the next Wally Lamb, stealing song lines for titles, but whatever. That was fine. Wally Lamb was big. Oprah’s book club big. The bigger the book got, the more likely she’d see it, no matter how small of a town she lived in.

It was that patience thing again. He had to wait, and keep his own spirits up even if he didn’t see her on this tour. There might have to be another book—hell, he’d already started working on another book—and another tour, to give her time to find it and realize and make plans to show up. He didn’t know how short a leash they had her on, after all, so she might not even be up to date on world events.

That wasn’t a topic he liked to dwell on. What about the COVID lockdowns? Had she been alone, with maybe only a single agent as her lifeline? Did they use that international event to make her world even smaller? And what about after? Did they squish her down in a box, a single room, and make sure she never wanted to leave it?

It was the doom thinking getting to him again. The need to plan for the worst-case scenario so he had a reaction at the ready. It didn’t matter that he so rarely had to use such a plan—the point was that having one made him feel better. It calmed him, and centered him, to make sure he wouldn’t have to think if the worst actually happened. He was prepared for it, so anything else would be easy.

Well. The worst would be if she were dead. That was something he didn’t like to think about because, if that were true, it was all pointless. There was no coming back. No getting her back. Just … nothing. If she were locked up, someone’s prisoner, he could get her out. Find her—somehow, find her—and get her out, but if she were dead …

Death was the end. You couldn’t just turn the page on that, forgive and forget and whatever else they might have to do once they finally reunited.

It was possible she thought he didn’t want her anymore. It was possible—another idea that was hard to grasp, not that he ever really tried—that she’d given up on him and moved on. Sure, he’d been there for her and helped her, stepping up the way no one else had, but then … this gap. They took her away, some nebulous they, and he couldn’t find her. He could watch out for her and protect her, but he couldn’t find her.

Maybe he simply wasn’t good enough. If he’d been good enough, he would’ve found her.

Everyone wanted to know they were worth fighting for. She was, honestly and truly, but it probably didn’t look that way to her. Wherever she was.

He shook his head and went to sit down at his desk, reaching not for his laptop or the legal pads but a spiral notebook he’d bought at Meijer. The new book. He’d written the first one longhand, so he figured he might as well do that for the second. Even though it wouldn’t need as many drafts before he typed it up.

This one was a love story, too, but he’d make it have a happy ending. Thom didn’t mind that Since You Went Away—God, such a stupid title—didn’t have one, but of course it bugged him. She deserved a happy ending, especially after everything else that happened to her. All the people who’d used her and couldn’t care enough to even look for her. Hell, maybe she’d run because she couldn’t stand any of them anymore. Just because the worst sea lampreys were gone didn’t mean others couldn’t swim up and take their place, so maybe she’d finally put herself first and laid down some boundaries.

That was distressing, because he really should have found her by now if she was escaping the others. The bloodsuckers. Maybe she thought he was tech savvy in a blanket sort of way, instead of knowing his way around some specific pieces. Or that he’d have connections or …

It didn’t matter. He had the first book, and he had to work on this second one. Thom was expecting it, and there’d be buzz on the tour, and Thom was all about leveraging that into an even bigger book deal. He’d need it, because he probably wasn’t going to keep up the business as things moved forward. Especially if moving was in his future.

Moving somewhere closer to her.

He opened the notebook to the page where he’d left off. This woman’s name was Catherine, but that didn’t matter. It was still her, just under a pseudonym, and he wasn’t the first to wonder what was in a name. Skimming the last few lines, he reminded himself where he’d left off: Catherine at home, changed into a nightgown and curled up on the couch, book in hand … and utterly unaware that someone was outside, looking in.

He wasn’t entirely sure who that someone was yet, or how he fit in, but he knew who’d come to Catherine’s rescue, so that was all right. Picking up his pencil, he continued getting a little closer to finding out.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: October 26, 2018 12:07PM

Oh my God. I just saw the paper and now I feel like such a terrible person. You know why Margaret wasn’t there yesterday or today and the whole bus route was even later than usual? Her freaking boyfriend murdered her Wednesday night. They only just found her. She’s in freaking pieces and I was making heartless jokes.

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: October 26, 2018 1:38PM

You are not a terrible person and you’re not heartless. If you weren’t in class I’d call you. I’ll call after school, okay? Take an hour and just talk.

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: October 26, 2018 2:14PM

You have to say I’m not terrible or heartless because otherwise you’re dating someone terrible and heartless. Don’t you have a bunch of grading and lesson planning to do?

To: LidaRoseElizabeth
From: MathyMart
Sent: October 26, 2018 3:24PM

I have to say you’re neither terrible nor heartless because I am bound by the curse of the blue fairy to only speak the truth. And yeah, I’ve got a shit ton to do but they can’t just bleed me dry. One hour. Tell me when you’re calling and you’ve got exactly 60 minutes. I’ll be coming back in tomorrow anyway.

---

Chapter Thirteen

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Part Two: The Loneliest Number

He mostly used his laptop for work. It was a write-off that way. Plus he only had the one laptop, unlike his phones. He had his work phone, his personal phone—which was a joke as far as the phone part actually went, because who called him now that Ma was dead?—and a couple more burner phones in case he needed to call someone and it wasn’t business, but he only had the one laptop.

And he was careful with the laptop. He didn’t type anything in it that he didn’t want other people to see, just in case. All his daily thoughts—he didn’t do anything so structured as journaling—were longhand, and he’d written three drafts of the manuscript that way before ever typing it up, going over and over it with a critical eye to make sure he didn’t put anything into the digital realm that he didn’t want other people knowing.

He was a careful and exacting man, and it showed. His agent even pointed it out—This is one of the cleanest manuscripts that’s ever hit my inbox! Thanks, Thom. It was always nice to be appreciated.

He was meticulous, but he couldn’t honestly say he was a patient man. He would wait, if necessary, but he didn’t like waiting. Every minute stood out clearly. Maybe he simply had a better sense of time than most people. He’d tried meditating, multiple times—he was also persistent—but it never seemed to click. Focusing on his breath was just another way of recognizing the way time was passing. It had to pass, since there was simply no other option, but breaths and heartbeats and guided meditation simply filled it instead of removing him from it.

Maybe he didn’t understand meditation, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying. YouTube, online forums, in-person private sessions … none of them broke through. He did all the so-called homework—which was assigned in units of time, by the way—and honestly wanted to succeed, but no dice. He managed to clear his mind of everything but the passing seconds.

It could be worse. At least that was the only thing he couldn’t get rid of when he wanted to. There were times it was good to put thoughts in a box on a shelf and come back to them later, because they’d be too distracting otherwise. And even though his business charged by the job instead of the hour, it was nice to have that comparison ticking away: ahead of schedule, on track, or taking a loss.

A business loss was one he could handle. He could recover from that, especially because he lived frugally and had a nice cushion in the bank. Even nicer since the advance and the book delivery. The bank knew he had the money, but there wasn’t an obvious trail of where it came from. Clearly if he’d deposited a check saying something like for writing the novel Since You Went Away, it would defeat the point of using a pseudonym. They were checks from an agency, but they didn’t even say what kind of agency.

And yes, he’d be showing his face. He hadn’t particularly wanted to, but they’d talked him around, because publicity practically required it. They could hold back the photo for now—he’d said something about how a man in his position didn’t exactly like to be seen as the literary type, especially when words like heart-wrenching and tender got thrown around too—but he’d be out there, doing the readings. Big cities, sure, but he’d also requested small Midwest towns.

He couldn’t be completely positive that she was in witness protection, especially after all this time, but the trail of hits for Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson was still cold. As far as he could tell, the last record of her existence—the last time anyone, anywhere, admitted to seeing her—was June 2, 2019. That was another police interview, and then … absolutely nothing.

It had to be witness protection. At the very least, it was a closed-court name change, and that was a bitch. He didn’t have the skills to try to hack it—he’d barely been able to confirm that Lida-Rose Elizabeth Dawson hadn’t changed her name the regular way, with a paper trail—and that wasn’t something he could casually ask someone to do. Mostly because he didn’t have any friends.

Even then it would be too big of a risk. That would leave a trail, in someone’s mind if not on the Internet itself, and he couldn’t have that. Especially not now when his ultimate plan, the Hail Mary long shot, was working.

He’d done a bunch of reading about witness protection, or at least as much as he could access as a normal citizen who wasn’t part of the program itself, and he didn’t think they would’ve put her in a big city. She probably wasn’t in Michigan anymore, but he couldn’t see the FBI footing the bill for New York or Los Angeles. He’d toyed with the idea all the same, since she’d be able to disappear into the masses there—well, as much as someone like her could disappear when she always stood out—but he didn’t think she’d want to go to a city. There was a comfort level involved, and she was Midwest to the core. She’d be somewhere in the Midwest, saying she came from somewhere else in the Midwest, but probably not Michigan, and …

And. He didn’t have much to come after that and.

She wouldn’t be going by her birth name, and she’d avoid anything else that was recognizable about her habits and hobbies, but that was it. And it didn’t help, because how many young women of approximately the correct age in the Midwest didn’t have a deep interest in classical studies? Her height would be the same, and likely her build, because he couldn’t see the FBI starving her or forcing her to gorge, but her hair? It could be any length and any shade. She might even be wearing colored contacts, which was a shame, because her eyes were so gorgeous. You lost a lot of depth with colored contacts, what with eyes being windows to the soul and all, but he did rather like that thought. Wherever she was, she wasn’t sharing her soul, because he wasn’t there to appreciate it.

Would they give her a fake diploma along with her fake name? He doubted it, but again, looking for a woman in the Midwest without a college degree still left a wide swath of the population. There were numerous jobs she could have, especially by now, when she might have worked her way up. Gotten a certification or training or whatever to get out of her entry-level starting place that they forced her into because they’d convinced her they were the good guys.

She didn’t have to be in the Midwest. He knew that in his head, but his gut told him otherwise. She wouldn’t want to go far. Italy had been more than enough, and she hadn’t signed on for the whole year there, either. It was too far from home, from everything she knew and loved.

He’d kept an eye on her grandmother, in case she decided to move or take some strange vacation—strange because that woman hardly ever left her house, much less the city limits—but no joy. He hadn’t even been able to catch any gossip about it, either, and he’d spent so much time bugging hair salons and the yarn store. God, those files were the most boring things to listen to. He could pick out her grandmother’s voice when she came to the knitting group, but nobody even asked her about her granddaughter. They all bragged about their own kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, but nobody even mentioned the only one he cared about.

If she was in witness protection, then her grandmother wouldn’t know where she was. If they did phone calls—he hadn’t figured out how to bug those, so it wasn’t worth the risk of breaking into her house to install anything—those would be secure and probably monitored in real time. He could plant his usual bug, sure, and get her half of the conversation, but that wouldn’t be enough. It would be more of the knit night conversations, and annoying questions he’d love to have the answers to, but unless she talked on speaker phone … and even then …

The book was a long shot, but it had always been a long shot. First he wasn’t sure he could even write one, and then revisions looked like another Everest, and follow that up with the freaking query letter and synopsis … and the rejections … and the whole process of revising once he did get a yes, which didn’t feel like it was worth celebrating because it wasn’t over yet. More revisions, but this time it was suggestions Thom made, which was even better because it skewed reality, and then it went out on sub, and then … finally … there was a contract and a publication date.

A signing tour.

It was a risk, not putting his face out there until the first event, but that was a big city night. New York. It would make the papers, the Internet … and she’d see him. All the buzz meant they were all dying to see him, to learn who, exactly, had written something so tender and insightful, and he’d be inescapable.

That was all she needed, really: to know where and when she could find him that wasn’t Kalamazoo. If it was in her current state, all the better. He wasn’t sure if she’d have to report interstate travel to her handler or whatever you called the guy who dictated the new face she showed the world, but it would be better if she could show up somewhere a short drive away, and see him, and he’d know. Their eyes would meet, and he wouldn’t even have to say a word to her where anyone else could hear. They’d nod, and he’d know she was there, and he’d wait for the sign. The one that said she knew why he’d done it all, that she knew he’d come for her, and the only answer to that was yes.

---

To: MathyMart
From: LidaRoseElizabeth
Sent: September 8, 2018 8:32PM

Mart—

I’m not saying I’m never moving again, because of course I’m moving after graduation, but at that point I think you’d better really really like your apartment. I hate packing, I hate carrying, and I hate trying to pretend like I’m all neat and organized and the sort of person who unpacks right away.

I’m just glad you helped me load up the dang car. I know you wanted to come down and help with the rest, but you’ve already got so much to grade and even more to plan, and you’re totally rocking it, by the way. Those middle schoolers are going to know more math than I do.

Heidi helped me carry stuff in, but she’s got that bad back. I swear she was going for all the heaviest boxes, anyway, because she hates not being able to help, but the last thing I need is to worry about her making it worse and messing with the first week of classes. She wasn’t even wearing her brace today. She’s just so blasé about it. I don’t want to be Gran here, but the Lord only gives you one spine.

It’s not as bad as she made it out to be. (Heidi in a nutshell.) We’ve got the common living room and kitchen, which has this absolutely teeny table and chair set, and the shared bathroom, and we each have our own room. They’re exactly the same size. The furniture isn’t stuck to the walls like it is in Crissey, but I swear the carpet dents have been there a million years. We’ve got all those strict rules about hanging stuff on the walls, so I haven’t done any of that yet. Mostly I’ve got the boxes in here and my laptop set up on my desk. It took way too long to connect to the Wi-Fi because they’ve got all these security layers in place (who’s going to be sharing national secrets here???) but clearly I’ve got it figured out. Finally.

I don’t know how this is going to go with Heidi tbh. So many people were like oh, sure, room with a mostly-stranger anyway so you don’t ruin a friendship, but it’s still weird that Sierra left right before senior year. Found herself in Belize and all the rest, I guess, but man. I can’t imagine that, you know? Finding something that means packing up and leaving everything you’ve ever known, for a language and culture you don’t know … you know me and my inability to learn proper Italian. Travel, yes, fine, but she’s out there totally alone.

And I’m exhausted. I’m glad I picked Saturday so I have tomorrow to try to … I don’t even know. Stock up my half of the fridge and try to shift back into school mode, I guess. Buckle down and complete this freaking degree and just check the next box to get to the next step. (You, by the way. In case you forgot. The next step is you.)

Love and hugs and lots of kisses, Ellie

---

Chapter Twelve

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Adam stepped into the spare bedroom for a phone call, but Nell wasn’t going to get her hopes up. He had more to do than babysit them, the cast-offs from an out of state cold case, and man, was she in a bad mood today. Something was possibly finally happening, but it wasn’t enough. They were closer than ever to figuring out who murdered Margaret and Trevor and Kelsey and Ashleigh and Heidi, names that Nell had almost stopped running in a loop in her subconscious, but close wasn’t actually there.

Her friends were going to push Since You Went Away to the top of the bestseller list, and O’Connell wasn’t even going to be hit with the Son of Sam laws. Nobody cared if you made money off a crime as long as it couldn’t be proved that you were the one who’d committed them.

Kent brought her a glass of room-temperature water and stood there. “Drain it.” That was why it wasn’t cold: hydration without the ice pick. “I mean it,” he added when she sighed. “Chug.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She did not chug it, thanks, but she did manage to drink it all. Nell put the pillow back and adjusted her position on the couch when he returned to the kitchen to refill her drink, putting ice in it this time. “You still glass half fulling this thing?”

Kent looked down at the water, but she didn’t think he’d misinterpreted. “Yeah,” he finally said, but only after he sat down again. “Anything to turn a spotlight on this guy. When we know what he looks like, we can keep an eye out for him. Maybe they can’t get him for what he’s already done, but they can stop him from doing more.”

She nodded at the coffee table. “His ‘more’ is writing a novel.”

“And that’s weird, right?” He grinned a little ruefully. “I mean, I never really liked English class, but even people who did think novels are a lot of work, right? And publishing timelines are slow, so … what, he whipped that up before we even moved here and piled up a stack of rejections?”

“Yeah, for being the kid who didn’t like English, you know a lot more about that whole process than I do. Ask me how long it’d take him to learn to do latte art and I’ve got an answer, but …”

He shrugged. “You were always better at writing things than I was.”

Nell wrinkled her nose because she wasn’t so sure about that, but she’d certainly been required to write more than he had. “So you think he started this right after we left?

“Maybe. Or maybe he’d already written a lot of it. That last part, though … the final little thing that isn’t labeled a chapter but isn’t really an epilogue?”

She nodded.

“That’s where I think he’s the clearest about what he wants.”

Nell took a deep breath and straightjacketed her arms around herself, but she wasn’t a constrictor snake. She couldn’t keep tightening it even as she exhaled. “Me.”

“You,” he agreed.

Except, by that point, she’d been truly gone. She’d still had her purse over her shoulder, at least, but the police took over the entire apartment, so she wouldn’t have been able to take her laptop even if she’d wanted it. It was just Nell, in her date-night outfit, and Kent, who at least hadn’t brought his duffel into the apartment yet, first taking his car to the police station, and then talking to the FBI agents, and then Kent calling his dad.

At the time Nell had thought his dad worked at a bank or as an accountant or something. The suits and the haircut could’ve gone either way.

Kent kissed her temple softly. “Earth to Nell.”

“You’ve reached Nell’s answering service. Leave a message and she’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

He chuckled and wrapped his arms around her. “I know this can’t possibly be true, but I feel like I’ve been thinking about back then more than I ever have before.”

She licked her lips, but the question was too big. Kent was the one who’d left the most. He was the one who got family photos, and wedding photos, and photos of nieces and nephews he’d never met. Nell leaned back a little, just enough to catch his eye. “Do you regret it?”

Kent nodded once, not as his answer but an acknowledgment that yes, it was indeed the one big question they’d never discussed. “I think mostly I feel guilty. Nell …” He took her hand, frowning a little. “You know I was stuck. That it wasn’t working out, but I was too far in … the fact that I only got to do this, to figure things out without the whole family expectations hanging over me, because so many of your friends were murdered … I regret that part. That the price was so steep. But this?” He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it gently. “I’m more me today than I’ve ever been. And you still seem to want me around, so …”

“I love you.”

He grinned like it was the first he’d ever heard of it. “I love you, too.” He leaned in to kiss her slowly, the kind of kiss that would have led to far more if there weren’t still an FBI agent in the apartment. Maybe it was the thought of Adam that made him pull back and frown a little down at her. “What about you? Do you miss the person you thought you would’ve been?”

It was his wording more than the question that made her frown and really try to think it through. She chewed on her lip and shook her head slowly. “I think about the only clear thing I had in mind for my future was being married to you. The job … I couldn’t really imagine it.”

“Kids?” he prompted softly.

This head shake was firmer. “I couldn’t really see that happening. It was sort of a vague ‘Yeah, someday’ thing.” And someday was still in the future because neither of them really felt comfortable embarking on that whole experience when there was still someone out there who might try to find Nell again.

A concern that felt a lot more real since Wednesday.

“Okay,” Adam announced as he came out of the back bedroom, as though he needed them to know he was returning, but his quick stride wouldn’t have allowed them much time to stop making out or readjust clothing or anything. Nell straightened up, anyway, because he was both focused and distracted. “We’ve got an author photo of O’Connell. That’s all they’re calling it—an author photo, so they’re not committing to it being the actual guy, but since he’s going to be going on tours and giving readings and all …”

Nell held out both hands for his phone because they were shaking too hard for her to take it with just the one and not drop it, and she pulled it in close and hunched over it like it was a scrying glass and she was a bog witch. Kent leaned in, too, but she barely noticed as she looked at the headshot of a man who wasn’t quite smiling as he looked directly at the camera. He had brown hair, just long enough to hint at curls, and the sort of beard outlining his jaw that meant he still spent time every morning shaving part of his face. His eyes—when she zoomed in to be sure—were also brown, very dark, and it was hard to tell exactly what emotion they betrayed. There were lines at the corners of those eyes, but for some reason she thought they were more from squinting than from smiling. The background was a greenish blur, like he was outside among the trees, and he didn’t have a tie, but he wore a collared shirt, unbuttoned at the top.

Zooming back out again, she tried to take all of it in as though she’d just passed this man on the street. As a quick assessment, he was cold and reserved. He wasn’t the Mona Lisa but a guy who realized a camera was on him and tried to do something with his face that wasn’t simply a blank stare. His mouth hadn’t been caught halfway into or out of a smile, because this man didn’t know how to smile. Even if he formed his mouth into the expected shape, his eyes were simply dead. They weren’t warm brown. They were mud.

“And?” Adam prompted, because apparently even FBI agents trained in interrogation tactics had a limit to how much silence they could take.

Kent shook his head, clearly passing the answer on to Nell.

But she had to shake hers, too. “I have absolutely no idea who this is. I’d say I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

---

from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)

Duke only calls me after hours if it’s an emergency, but this isn’t the normal kind of emergency. I answer right away, because that’s job security and I’m the most dependable one on the team, and even though my screen tells me it’s one of Duke’s numbers, it doesn’t sound like Duke. “Cal.”

And that’s it. Usually he doesn’t even say hello and it’s just straight to the problem, but that’s it: half my name. “Yeah? I’m here.”

“Cal, there’s been …” A break, and a honk, like he’s blowing his nose. Like he’s crying? “There’s been a murder. In 12.”

My hand goes numb and I almost drop the phone.

“It’s—Cal, I don’t know, okay? One of them was out with a friend, and came home, and the two of them found the other one, and it’s … it’s bad, but I don’t know which one. Okay?”

I can’t feel my lips and tongue, either, but I hear a sort of padded “Rosie had dinner with a friend tonight” come out. There aren’t any sharp corners to the words. They’ve all been filed off. Novocained.

“Okay. Okay, but I also need you to remember that the police have the witnesses, so if you can’t get a hold of her right away …”

My mind keeps replaying the sound bite. There’s been a murder. In 12. There’s been a murder. In 12.

No. Just no. Either way it’s another one, another K senior, and they all know each other, and now Rosie—please God let it be Rosie—is alone and, what, giving testimony? Trying to recall every man who ever looked at Hailey wrong? Listing off her favorite bars so they can check the security footage and trying to remember which dating apps she has on her phone and hoping she’s got some sort of alibi to back up when she left earlier tonight?

Dinner with a friend. She had dinner with a friend, and they went out, so there’s the friend and everyone at the restaurant. I don’t know what restaurant. They dined in somewhere, so it wasn’t something like Burger King, but they hadn’t decided where to go last time I talked to her.

Let it be someplace sit-down, where they laughed with the waitress and left a nice tip, and other diners looked over and admired two friends having a good time, and maybe one of them ordered a drink so they had to show an ID, and maybe they paid with credit cards …

And why is that where my mind’s gone? Rosie didn’t do this. She’d never dream of doing it. But she’s the roommate, so if there isn’t a convenient ex-boyfriend around …

“Are they still there?” I ask without meaning too. “The police and Rosie. Are they still there?”

“I don’t know. I’m not there yet—I just got the call myself, but … Cal …”

He’s not convinced. He called me to tell me someone’s dead and he doesn’t know for sure who it is, but he’s ready for it to be Rosie. He probably only knows Hailey’s name because of the checks every month, but he knows who Rosie is. Why Rosie matters.

He’s called me and he’s not even there yet to see how bad it is.

---

This is the end of Part One.

Chapter Eleven

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Adam didn’t wear his dark suit and tie, which just made him look strange. Most of the check-ins happened in Waterloo, although it wasn’t like Nell and Kent snuck into the office or anything. They walked into the building like normal, which was a pretty clear sign that nobody thought they were being followed or watched or any of that. The case was cold, and they had never properly been in witness protection, so they had to take what they could get and be grateful for it.

Adam in jeans and a Slipknot t-shirt felt like a sign of the apocalypse, but that was probably better than Adam in full FBI mode showing up at their apartment, even if his severe haircut was jarring in contrast. He carried a backpack instead of a briefcase and slipped out of an old pair of loafers, offering his hand to each of them in turn. “Talked to your dad yesterday,” he told Kent.

“Yeah?”

Adam nodded and gestured for them to go on into the living room section of the apartment. “He’s going to see about getting his hands on a copy and he sends his love.”

Nell figured there was probably more than that, but communication with their families—Kent’s immediate family and her grandmother—was all done through letters and much delayed, like it was WWII and things had to be scrutinized for secret messages or revealing information. She didn’t understand how it worked, but was just glad it did, because at least it meant Gran didn’t think she was dead or missing.

“Right, so …” Adam took the chair and pulled out his own Since You Went Away, which looked far worse for the wear than the copy Art lent Nell, and a thick file. “Do you mind if …?”

Kent helped move the coffee table closer to Adam, hesitated, and then sat down next to Nell without offering coffee or anything. At this point Adam was so intent he might not have heard the question, anyway.

“First thing: the publisher’s refusing to reveal C. J. O’Connell’s full name, or address whether O’Connell is, in fact, his last name.”

Nell blinked and took Kent’s hand in both her own when he offered it. “Is that …?”

“Suspicious?” Adam suggested, then shook his head. “If it’s a pseudonym, they’ve basically promised him they won’t ever tell, barring a warrant for that information. But it also means the publisher knows something’s up, so their legal department will be sent after that to see if it’s something they really need to worry about.”

“And that helps us?” Kent asked doubtfully.

The agent shrugged. “Any cracks we can exploit … any loose lips … we might be warning him but, at this point, if this highly anticipated debut author disappears before he can do all his scheduled events, then he gets reported missing and everyone’s searching for him, anyway.”

Adam might shrug, but, if they didn’t know what O’Connell looked like, it was entirely possible he could disappear to Colchester.

“We’ve got someone on his literary agency, but I don’t have a report on that yet,” he continued, pushing the book back so he could open and page through the file. “It’s probably the same situation as the publisher, or else I would’ve heard something.”

“They’re reporting to you?” Kent’s voice was sharp.

But Adam shook his head. “They’re reporting to Kalamazoo and it’s being forwarded to me. Only one person knows Iowa has anything to do with this.”

Nell looked at Kent, because that one person wouldn’t be his dad, so there were at least two, but that just seemed like quibbling over nothing. Except … wait, did Kent’s dad know they were in Iowa? He’d called in the favor, sure, but …

“We’re looking into getting a warrant for both of them, by the way,” Adam continued. “The publisher and the literary agency. Whichever we can finagle first to get his real name so we have something more specific to work with than the entire list of people involved back in 2019.”

Nell closed her eyes, but Kent seemed alert as ever because he asked “You’re not looking back through that list?”

“I have the list, but part of this whole situation means I can’t just ask people in my office for their eyes, too, because it’s a Michigan case. In fact, I have the whole file, and I’ve been spending a lot of time with it and making comparisons lately.”

It was almost too much effort to pry open her lids again and study Adam, but yes, there were bags under his eyes. He was losing sleep over this, too, which was mostly comforting.

“Nell, I’ve got a difficult question for you.”

Like there were difficult questions no one had yet asked her. “Okay.”

“What are the chances someone bugged your apartment?”

She blinked.

“See, the part in here …” Adam started to flip through the book, then shrugged. “The narrator describes the morning after Kayleigh’s murder. He says he shows up, Rosie’s roommate lets him in, and he stays for the police interview. And it … well.” He looked at the folder, but apparently decided they didn’t really need the full side-by-side comparison. “It sounds a lot like what happened when your advisor showed up and refused to leave for the remainder of the interview, so … if someone had your living room bugged, and was listening in …”

“And just put himself in Michael’s place?” Kent mused.

Nell shook her head. “You think someone had a camera in our apartment?”

“It wouldn’t have to be a camera,” Adam almost reassured her. “A microphone would be enough.”

She shook her head again. “The whole thing was searched after Heidi was killed.”

“And he’s the one who killed her, so he would’ve known a search was coming and removed it.”

Nell tried blinking, but that wasn’t helping, so she turned to Kent.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a good point, though. And, uh … I mean, I guess it wouldn’t take much to imagine you’d cry yourself to sleep in the middle of all that.”

Well, no, and of course she had, but only when she was alone. Nobody had ever come into her bedroom, because the first time Kent was supposed to have joined her there … Nell shook her head, but she couldn’t even begin to voice all those thoughts.

“I’m just saying,” Adam protested patiently, if not gently, “that it’s a question that occurred to me considering the similarity between that particular scene and the interview records on file.”

“You … wait, okay, so …” Nell grabbed one of the pillows on the couch and hugged it. “This guy … Cal, or O’Connell, or whoever … saw me, and fixated on me, and had enough access to bug the apartment? And then … what, he listened in to see how I was taking it?”

Adam nodded. “Someone who thought he was doing all of this for you would also likely look for signs that you were grateful.”

“The late bus and Trevor stealing my parking spot, maybe, but killing my friends?” This head shake was more violent, but she didn’t bother to grab for the loosened hair clips. “He just … he …”

“Escalated.”

They both looked at Kent, who winced, but shrugged. “Kelsey and Ashley were only about a month apart.”

“So were Margaret and Trevor,” Adam pointed out.

“But they weren’t as personal.”

Nell couldn’t just keep shaking her head forever, could she? “Ashely died in a car crash. He messed with her car, not …” Not what he’d done to Kelsey, or what he ended up doing to Heidi. Those were up close. Hands-on. With them, he took his time and was right there when they died.

“He wanted something from you,” Kent said quietly, “and he didn’t get it after Margaret. In fact, he opened things up for Trevor to be more of an ass, so killing Trevor was fixing a problem he’d created. Then …”

“Winter break,” Adam agreed. “Both Kelsey and Ashleigh were during winter quarter. Well,” he added at Nell’s quick breath, flapping a hand to say that yes, fine, he knew Ashleigh’s fatal accident was the day after exams ended. “Break was bad, because you were gone for over a month, and he had to take his frustrations out somewhere. Then you’re back, but you’re spending time with them instead of him, so …

“I wasn’t even the one who had them over!” Nell protested. “That was Heidi! And then he killed her, too!”

Adam nodded again, and God, did she have to keep being right when it came to this kind of thing? “He created problems he thought he could solve for you, and he did.”

“Right, but …” She pointed at Kent. “Wouldn’t you think the long-term boyfriend would be a bigger problem for some random dude on the street obsessed with me? Because, if he had the place bugged, then he had to know Kent existed. Right?”

This time, Adam tilted his head. “You didn’t visit at all until that final weekend,” he said to Kent.

Nell could feel Kent stiffen with the implied critique. “No.”

She reached for his hand without looking away from Adam. “I was the one who went home. Weekends and breaks.”

“Right, but, as Calvin or O’Connell or whoever says, he didn’t go with you for either of the holidays. And …” Adam dropped his eyes and flipped some pages to find a calendar. “Your spring breaks didn’t match up, so Kent didn’t come to your apartment then, either.”

Kent laughed suddenly. “You think this guy didn’t even realize I exist.”

“You’re not in the book.”

“He’s in the book the night Hailey dies,” Nell protested. “She’s out to dinner with him.”

Adam shrugged. “With a friend. It doesn’t have to be male, and it doesn’t have to be a long-term relationship. And Cal doesn’t seem to think Rosie’s the kind to have a one-night stand.”

“But …” Nell closed her eyes and dropped her face into her hands like maybe that would help her headache go away. Like they could really do this, untangle the book between real life and some stranger’s fantasy, and make it work. Make it work enough so that it could all, please, God, go away.

---

from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)

The problem with being resilient is that it means you have to keep being tested. And it’s not an argument to just let people flounder. Kids, for example. I keep hearing “Kids are resilient—they’ll be okay” for things that no one, of any age, should have to endure, and just because you live through something doesn’t mean you really survive it. It doesn’t mean pieces aren’t chipped off.

There was a bad car crash last night or early this morning. Rosie went home yesterday, because exams are over and things are already bad enough around here, but …

They just released the name. It’s Aster.

Rosie hasn’t responded to my text yet. I don’t want to pressure her, don’t want to push her … don’t want to demand more of her when, once again, she’s closer to the center of it than I am. I’m sure she knows by now. It’s another K student, another friend who was over at their apartment.

Aster knew Kayleigh. Aster was one of the girls who turned to Rosie for comfort.

Aster was—and why is the past tense so easy?—also the only person with a higher GPA than Rosie in their entire class. Which, fine, being K, it’s a small class, but Aster would have been valedictorian if she kept her grades up for the final quarter. Rosie was salutatorian, but I’m sure she’s not thinking of that right now.

It’s not the same as Kayleigh. That’s good, because how much tragedy can one graduating class endure? They’re all so damn resilient, it sucks. It’s an accident, and maybe Aster was drunk, but at least Aster was alone. She didn’t take anyone with her.

Rosie wasn’t going to be going home with Aster or anything, but that’s what crossed my mind first: what if they’d been together? If Rosie hadn’t already headed home yesterday, would she have gone out last night? Assuming Aster was out celebrating exams being over, considering the time. She wouldn’t have been driving back to her parents’ in the middle of the night, anyway, so that’s the best explanation. Drunk, maybe there was a deer, the roads aren’t entirely clear …

It’s hard to find that line between caring and overprotective, especially when the person you’re worried about doesn’t take good care of herself. Give her another person and she’s all over it, checking every box and thinking of every possible action, but when it comes to Rosie, Rosie doesn’t know what to do. Most days it seems like she’s lucky her breathing and heartbeat are automatic because, if she had to think about those to keep herself alive, she wouldn’t. She constantly breathes for others and forgets that she needs oxygen, too.

---

Chapter Ten

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Nell texted Kent to let him know she was just going home after work, but she kept an eye on the clock so that, by the time he got there, too, she had the book—marked with more sticky notes—and the legal pad set aside. “How was your day?” she asked before he could pick the topic of their conversation.

Kent blinked but shrugged as he neatly lined his shoes up against the wall and unbuttoned more of his shirt. “About average. Brandon had me going through the stacks to find all the books people push back and hide, so …”

So that wasn’t his favorite thing to do, mostly because the books themselves gave away local prejudice, which was still rampant in Midwest small towns.

“Oh, and some absolutely tiny child who really didn’t look like they should be big enough to walk asked me if I’m a hell’s angel. Pronounced properly and everything.” He sat down on the couch and unbuttoned his sleeves so he could roll them up, showing more of his tattoos.

Nell nodded at them.  “Do bikers routinely have one arm of Marvel and one of DC?”

“I think bikers can have whatever they damn well please, but I told him no, I’m just a friendly library person.”

“Friendly, huh?” she teased.

That made him grin. “It’s usually only the grownups who think I’m going to pull out a tire iron and start smashing kneecaps.”

“Why does everybody always go for kneecaps?”

Kent shrugged as he slouched comfortably back. “As your friendly library person, I can tell you that there are multiple reasons. It’s less likely to end up as murder, it’s incredibly painful, and then whoever you hit is not going to be chasing after you.”

“You’ve had somebody ask you that while you’re on duty?”

He shook his head. “As a friendly library person, I’m simply very well-read.”

“Does anybody ever worry about how frequently you emphasize the ‘friendly’?”

Kent’s grin turned a bit wolfish. “Not yet. How was your day? Which, I note, you’re trying to avoid talking about, because your friendly library person is also astute, but I love you, so we can’t just ignore it forever.”

Sighing, Nell tucked herself up against him. “Art and I talked a bit today. Nothing specific, but … he shared a bit about his childhood, and he just …” She closed her eyes and took a big shuddery breath. “He sees me, sees parts of me, the way Cal’s supposed to see these secret parts of Rosie that everyone else overlooks, but … it’s not the same, at all, and I just … I know Art. I see him back. So …”

“How can O’Connell get so much right when he gets so much wrong?” Kent finished, asking the question for both of them rather than asking if it was the question on her mind. She even felt him nod, his beard catching in her hair. “Yeah, it’s, uh … creepier than I thought it would be. Also I think that’s how we tip Adam over, if he’s actually on the fence.”

She shook her head. “How are you going to prove any of that? And it’s like the murders—sure, it’s suspicious he picked those five, but I can’t be the only person in the world who does all those things. They’re probably, like … God, whatever you call it when medical conditions happen at the same time …”

“Comorbid?”

“Sure. Sounds creepy enough.”

Kent was quiet for a long time, just resting his head against hers. “Maybe,” he finally said, “but we’ve got both, don’t we? The murders and all that stuff about Rosie. They just need to find the guy, and sweat him because they’re finally on to him …”

“Hey, friendly library person?”

“Yeah?”

Nell sat up enough to look at him. “How often does that work? Some serial killer waiting years before taunting the police, without actually confessing anything, and then oh, gee, sorry, officer, let me tell you everything?”

Kent took a slow breath that lasted long enough she wasn’t sure he was going to answer, then started ticking off on his fingers: “They brought Dahmer in for basically kidnapping, and he confessed a bunch of murder. They caught Bundy with burglary tools and he told them he was wanted for multiple murder.”

She shook her head. “They caught Berkowitz because of a parking ticket, but he didn’t confess. He made up his whole Son of Sam story. And they caught Rader because of the floppy disk, but that was directly connected to him. Gacy? Apparently he confessed to his lawyers one night and said he wanted to come clean, but he never did, officially.”

“Yeah, but—”

“That was all evidence,” she persisted. “They found bodies buried in his freaking crawl space and they still had all kinds of issues. There’s no evidence for any of these. That’s why they arrested Margaret’s boyfriend and grilled all of Kelsey and Ashley and Heidi’s exes, because there wasn’t anything connecting them, except for the K thing, and then it was all of us connecting him, and …” Nell tossed a hand at the book. “That is not something made by someone who doesn’t have a plan. The amount of time he put into that, and all the rejections he must’ve received … he’s got his agenda, and he’s not going to break down just because someone puts it together. In fact,” she pushed on before Kent could open his mouth, “if an agent does come talk to him, he’s probably going to feel smugger than ever because yes, the Fairy Godfather is still on their radar, and it’s bugging them enough to read the freaking New York Times bestseller list for clues.”

Kent waited this time to make sure she was done. “So they also get his agent, and his editor, and whoever else has been working on this thing, and start asking them questions. His wife, girlfriend, whomever … his mother … and hey, if one of them runs to the papers to complain about it, then oops, it’s public knowledge and all those advance readers start combing through their copies to prove or disprove it, and the case gets brought up again, and whoever O’Connell is, he’s too much in the spotlight to just show up in Colchester without anyone noticing.”

She opened her mouth to snap at him for looking at a half-full glass through rose-colored spectacles, but it just hung there a moment before she closed it slowly. Knowing who O’Connell was and what he looked like now instead of when he started the readings would certainly be a net gain. Worded that way, his agent might even lean into it, if they agreed with whomever actually said the old gem about saying what you want about him, as long as his name was spelled right. Arguments over whether #FindRosie was romantic or sadistic would generate even more buzz. It would pull in a wider audience—true crime buffs who would’ve ignored a romantic literary piece, true crime podcasters … God, thought about that way, it was still more marketing genius. “It’s going to get him on even more talk shows.”

“It’s going to get him even more uncomfortable questions on those talk shows,” Kent countered. “Even if he keeps saying no comment, that’ll just increase interest in the case. Depending on how he responds to it, the publisher might even dump him.”

Nell wrinkled her nose at that. The final copies were probably already printed and in some warehouse somewhere, just waiting for the shipping date. Even if O’Connell went on trial … he couldn’t make money off of anything related to his crimes, but surely his agent would still want a cut, and the publisher could do something magnanimous by donating the money somewhere.

Unless their legal department decided it was more likely they’d be found complicit in … something.

Kent put a hand on her leg, large and comforting, and gave it a squeeze. “I have my answer,” he said quietly, “so we can change the subject.”

“Don’t think of a polar bear,” she grumbled.

“Okay, so … a distraction.”

Nell tried to smile. “I’m not really in the mood for your usual distractions.”

“Valid, valid. I am, however, a man of many talents.”

She raised an eyebrow, not necessarily because she disagreed with that statement but because she wasn’t sure what, exactly, was coming next.

“For example,” he continued, getting up and going to his bag, “I thought ahead and checked this out of the library for you.” Kent pulled out a Nintendo Switch—well, a Switch Lite, so patrons couldn’t lose one of the controllers—and a game cartridge.

“Which one is that?” The packaging and barcode basically made all games look the same, which was also supposed to prevent people from stealing them and ending up with something they didn’t actually want. Honestly Nell was surprised the library was still renting out consoles and games, but she held out her hands as Kent came back.

“I figured you wouldn’t want anything with too much concentration,” he explained when she opened it to reveal Minecraft. “Plus I had to pick from whatever was still left after the most recent middle school rush.”

And Minecraft didn’t come equipped with an emotionally devastating storyline, so that was another bonus. “Thanks.”

Kent kissed her temple and left her there to play while he went to the kitchen to start sorting out dinner.

---

from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)

It’s the last day of winter quarter and exactly one month since Kayleigh died, which makes today a double-whammy. K students only take three classes per quarter, but that’s because everything’s crammed into such a short amount of time, and their exams are always stressful. Plus that means it’s spring break, and Rosie’s going back to Nana’s for the week, and I can’t blame her.

When she’s here, everybody flocks to her and treats her like the mom friend, except she’s more of the therapist friend. They can’t deal with Kayleigh, and they’re making their inappropriate reactions Rosie’s problem. They come to her and cry about it, but these others only knew her in college. Rosie and Kayleigh go way back, which puts her closer to the epicenter, but they’re unloading on her anyway. They show up, and stay late, and avoid talking about the homework they supposedly came for, so they stay even later, eating whatever Rosie’s got on hand and drinking her coffee and tea without paying for it and crying on her shoulder without paying for that, either.

They had extra counselors available on campus in the beginning, but I guess they don’t have them anymore. Not that any of these children—because they are children by the way they’re handling this—used any of them. They didn’t think they needed to, maybe because they were in shock or they just don’t understand how emotions work, and now that they need them, they’re too used to mobbing Rosie instead, because she looks strong.

She won’t break down in front of Hailey. When she wants to cry, she goes into her room and turns on the fan or the white noise machine and puts a pillow over her head, because she doesn’t want to make her emotions anyone else’s problem. So she’s handling hers, and everyone else’s, but nobody’s helping her handle any of that.

I’m not saying I’m glad Rosie finally cried on my shoulder—cried herself to sleep, as a matter of fact, and it’s a good thing we were in her bedroom at the time so I could leave her there for the night, and leave a note for when she woke up—but at least she shared that with someone. And at least she got to the end of her rope with me, and not someone who would’ve made her bottle it all back up and keep it to herself so they could get on with their own emotional squall.

When Rosie finally let it go, it was a full-on thunderstorm. Once she got started, she wasn’t able to stop. The tears came, and she sobbed them into my shirt, unable to talk and unwilling to lift her head as though it made her any less beautiful.

I had to debate long and hard about leaving, but I’d never spent the night before, and it wasn’t like she’d asked me to. I didn’t want to be there in the morning when she woke up, eyes swollen from the tears, and see that she was shocked or angry or humiliated to find me still there. So I left, and left her a note, and texted her the next morning to ask how she was doing, and things have been okay.

Well. They’ve been the same. But that’s hardly the time to unburden your soul to someone, isn’t it? Especially when she’s already so burdened by other people.

At least now we can get this whole quarter behind us, and she can get a breather and a reset, and we can move forward.

---

Chapter Nine

Catch up on the previous chapters here

It wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be. It was too close for coincidence, sure, but too much of it was pure fantasy. O’Connell could easily argue that he found the reports in back issues of the newspapers and his imagination strung them together, or even show that he lived in Kalamazoo at the time and read the stories as they happened. Or saw them on the news—all of them made the news. They weren’t the only violent deaths in Kalamazoo, but they weren’t a secret.

Kent tried to reason that this was exactly why O’Connell needed to be questioned: out of all the possible murders and suspicious occurrences, he picked the five that spiraled in on Nell. What were the odds that, given the papers or the personal memories, he’d pick those five? A bus driver, a young man sponging off his girlfriend while he tried to make bank off a lawsuit, and three college seniors?

The three college girls, yes, okay. Everyone put them together. And, because of the size of the college, so many people had known all of them and been affected by their deaths: Kelsey’s murder, Ashleigh’s accident, and of course Heidi’s murder. Nell wasn’t the only connection. Nobody was more than a couple degrees from anyone else at K.

Art texted, offering to cover Nell’s Friday morning shift. She thanked him, but refused, telling him that she could use something else to focus on just now. Something other than the fact that this was the supposedly beautiful literary love story Brandon was rhapsodizing about. It just gave Nell the creeps. Rosie was supposed to be too perfect, but really she was too passive, and Cal? He seemed to be trying to play both sides so he didn’t get his feelings hurt by being friendzoned, but he also never went ahead and declared he wanted to be anything but Rosie’s friend.

And she couldn’t figure out who he was. How was that possible? Someone who managed to get so many things right about the apartment building, the parking situation, her relationships … and yet was still so wrong … and she couldn’t place him. The thing was, guys just didn’t come over to the apartment. When they met for group projects, they’d gone to the library on campus, during the day. When Heidi invited friends over, they were mostly women, too.

In fact, Heidi was the reason Kelsey came over. Kelsey and Ashleigh. Nell didn’t keep Kelsey around because she was a friend from high school; she renewed an old acquaintance because Heidi and Kelsey were in the same math class senior year, something gross and advanced and way out of Nell’s league. They studied together, and fine, maybe Kelsey was loud, but so was Heidi. So was Ashleigh, when she joined them and tutored, but it was happy noise. Friends having fun together, despite the math.

God, it was just so normal. College seniors, doing college senior things. They weren’t even the only ones making noise in the building, so … why them? Why come after Nell like that by killing everyone who got close to her?

Everyone but Kent.

Nell tried to stop her thoughts from circling around these same things yet again as she got up, forced herself through her usual morning routine—including breakfast today—and went to work. She unlocked the door and made sure it shut behind her, waved to Colton, and frowned because the light in the office was on and Art poked his head out. “Catching up on paperwork,” he told her with a nod before ducking back inside.

So. That was a lie. Art had never been behind on paperwork in his life, but she could ignore it if it made him feel better thinking that she felt better. Art was here to make sure she wasn’t alone in the café, just in case. Or maybe the lie was for Colton, she mused as she started the coffee and scanned the walls. So he wouldn’t worry his boss was checking up on him, or making sure he wasn’t alone with Nell.

That made her pause, because what did she know about Colton? Except no, she was being silly. He’d started working for Art before Nell did. Before Heidi was murdered, even, so it wasn’t like the baker was playing some sort of long game and magically knew his prey—if that’s what Rosie was to C. J. O’Connell—would also show up and seek employment at this very spot.

Imagine going through the rigmarole of writing a novel, finding an agent, going through edits, and all the rest of it really was Colton and all he had to do was look more closely behind the register on his way out the door one morning. Okay that thought wasn’t quite as amusing as Nell anticipated it would be. She shivered and did up a couple more buttons on her cardigan.

Tomorrow they’d talk to Adam. Kent was sure he’d take it seriously and investigate it with all the passion and fervor of an FBI agent on a television show. Nell wasn’t sure how much to hope for and didn’t even want to think they’d find out who C. J. O’Connell really was. If it was a pseudonym, then publishers and stuff had to protect authors’ privacy, right? And it really didn’t seem like enough for the FBI to get a warrant or something for his true identity. If O’Connell was his real last name, and they found out the rest of it, then maybe some agents would knock on his door with some questions about what he’d been up to in late 2018 and the first half of 2019, but …

But. That was easily Nell’s least favorite coordinating conjunction.

“You’re distracted today,” Mary announced cheerily as she slid three plastic chips across the counter: Roast Beef, Sausage and Egg, and Large Coffee. “Anything good playing in your thoughts right now?”

Nell tried not to snort as she got out the proper wrapped sandwiches and cup. “No. It’s pretty dark in there today.” The sausage and egg bagels were always served hot, so she didn’t ask about that one.

“Darkest just before dawn?” Mary suggested, eyeing the coffee urns as though they weren’t the standard flavors.

“I’m pretty sure meteorologists have debunked that one. First light happens before sunrise.”

“But isn’t first light technically dawn?” the next customer wanted to know. “So it’s darkest before first light.”

Nell only knew this woman by sight, but she shrugged as she took her punch card and passed over the cup for her free drink. “I’m pretty sure it’s darkest hours before first light. So you’d be sitting there, thinking maybe it’s getting lighter, for quite a long time before dawn.”

“Pshaw,” Mary said comfortably. “The whole point is optimism, not meteorology.”

The woman laughed. “My husband does the weather on Channel 5. Everything’s meteorology if you try hard enough.”

Mary rolled her eyes at that, but either the weatherman’s wife didn’t see or took it with good humor, since she just waved and called “Have a good day!” as she left.

Nell thought Mary might add something else as she positioned her breakfast, lunch, and drink to her satisfaction, but instead she seemed to retreat back into herself as she turned to shuffle toward the door. That was fine—Nell knew she wasn’t the only person with problems—but she sighed, anyway, because it was true: it was pretty dark inside her head today, and she could really do with a good spring cleaning and some light fixtures.

Part of it was how she wasn’t actually any more alert than she usually was. Nell’s eyes darted to the door every time it opened and quickly assessed the person coming in: known, unknown, and yes, threat level. By this point most people were known, even if just from the bus or the library or elsewhere in town, and strangers were generally identifiable as a little lost and clearly out of their depth. Which, yes, fine, could all be an act, but the most smooth confidence she saw came when Gary met his Tinder dates here in an attempt to convince them he was harmless—which he was, at least mostly; Nell couldn’t say she vouched for his STD status—before they went back to some room or another and got up to what Gary really wanted.

It was just that, usually, Nell wasn’t aware of being the kind of person who constantly assigned strangers threat levels and made minor modifications in her behavior because of it. All of that normally happened somewhere behind her conscious thoughts, and she didn’t usually feel this exhausted.

Art’s shoes clomped on the floor, and today she had the presence of mind to think that he did that on purpose. That he could’ve moved silently, but instead he didn’t want to sneak up on her. “You haven’t been this bad in a while,” he said softly.

Nell took a slow breath and deliberately turned away from the front door to look at him.

“I’d say my dad was abusive,” he continued in that same tone, “but I don’t like calling him that. So let’s just go with ‘the sperm provider.’”

She blinked. Art never talked about his parents. She’d formed her own ideas about his past, of course, but …

“I had to watch my mom go through it. Well.” Art leaned on the doorway, hands shoved deep in his pants pockets, and let his eyes drift away. “I guess I went through enough of it myself, but she’s the one he actually touched. He beat her. Put her in the hospital a couple times. I thought he’d put her in a casket first—nine years old, and I was sure the guy everyone called my daddy was going to kill my mom—but she packed us up, and we left. Still, for years after …” Slowly he brought his gaze back to hers. “I’d watch her do the same things you do.”

Nell swallowed, not sure if she wanted him to list them or not.

Art tilted his head. “When your back’s to the door, your eye’s on the mirror. Some people come in—mostly men, but not all—and you’re ready to fight or flee. If you think they’re coming after someone else, like Mary, or one of the others …” He shrugged. “It’ll be fight, because it’s not yourself you’re defending.”

She tried to quash the urge to cross her arms and hunch her shoulders, but it was a strong one. “Do you always see people so clearly?”

He shrugged. “You recognize your own. Don’t you.” And his raised eyebrow meant You recognized me.

Nell tilted her head, but the bell over the door jingled so her eyes went to the convex mirror before she turned around, smile in place, to see what she could do for these customers.

---

from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)

Rosie’s the kind of person who always returns the shopping cart. Not just to the corral in the parking lot—to the store. Some people who always put it in the corral will take it into the store when it’s raining, but Rosie just does it every time. It’s something she factors into the trip: not just getting groceries, but the extra steps back inside.

When she highlights something for class, which she does conscientiously, she starts with the last words of whatever she wants to highlight, then goes back to the beginning and picks up the rest. If she starts at the beginning, then she just keeps going, because it’s all interesting to her. She has to do it backward so she knows when to stop, and half the time her lips form the words as she highlights them, because they’re just that important.

Rosie likes a schedule. When she wakes up in the morning, she likes to know how her time’s all blocked out for the day. If she has to shift things around, either dig her car out of the snow or because someone cancels on her, she doesn’t like it. She tries not to show it, because Rosie’s number one rule is never show your annoyance at someone who’s still in your life, but it’s there, if you look for it. Most people don’t look. And, when it’s snow, there’s not really anyone to get mad at, so that frustration is just … there, without direction, but at least that’s one she can work out by shoveling.

She doesn’t sit properly on a chair with both feet on the floor. Even if she’s in a hard plastic chair that means she can’t curl up like usual, she’s got her ankles crossed and one foot off the floor. She can’t be bothered to be tethered like the rest of us. Her head’s just that much further in the clouds, and it belongs there. The kinds of things she thinks and says and writes … they’re grounded just enough, by a single foot, and it’s perfect. She’s a dreamer with a plan.

Rosie listens so you feel heard, which explains Kayleigh, but it also makes it strange that she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Maybe all the guys she’s met just want one-night stands or friends with benefits instead of a real relationship, or maybe none of them listen back. That one seems most likely. Rosie’s spent so much of her life giving—her time, her thoughts, her emotional labor—that she doesn’t need another leach. Especially one who feels like he has all the rights to her. At least she’s aware enough of her giving tendencies to cut that one off before it starts.

Everywhere she goes, Rosie likes to arrive early. It’s a sign of respect: if you’re giving her your time, she wants you to know how much she appreciates it. That’s why the bus was such an issue earlier this year. The bus, and number 17, taking her spot: no respect. Rosie doesn’t necessarily go for “If I want it done right, I have to do it myself,” but it irks her when things are out of her control and make it look like she’s the one being rude. Rosie’s simply never rude.

I wonder how much it would take her for make that choice.

---

Chapter Eight

Catch up on the previous chapters here

Nell made a noise before she realized she’d meant to, causing Kent to look up from the laptop. He had it in the kitchen, which was within sight of the living room if he turned around, trying to save his back from hunching over it and give her space at the same time. “Which part?”

“Kelsey.” She was Kayleigh in the book.

Kent nodded.

Nell wrinkled her nose and slouched further. “It’s … too much fiction.”

“What, the part where he comforts Rosie after her high school friend gets killed because she wandered drunk into the bad part of town?”

“Yes.” The comforting part. The rest had actually happened, which was suspicious as hell, because Kelsey had no reason to be anywhere near where she’d been murdered. That was a Wednesday night, she had an 8am class on Thursday, and yet she’d gone out—no one had been able to say exactly when—and been found murdered, without her wallet, and with a BAC higher than any of her friends could credit.

The only way any of it made sense was if the Fairy Godfather was playing his long game, latched onto Kelsey because she’d spent so much time at the apartment hanging out and studying with Nell, and somehow convinced her to come out with him, forced her to drink something strong, and killed her. But her murder had never been solved, and now Nell wasn’t sure that this book would work as a confession.

The only guy other than Kent who’d comforted her after Kelsey’s death was her advisor. College seniors were not equipped to deal with that kind of a thing, and most of them tried to just … ignore it. Make jokes about it, even. Announce their superiority because the girls would only go out in pairs and the guys would make sure to accompany any unescorted female, said unironically, like it didn’t make any of the females present want to vomit.

“It’s too fake,” Nell repeated.

Kent, though, shrugged. “He’s got a lot of details about the murder.”

“Newspapers …”

“I don’t know. That’s something for Adam to check.”

But even then … unless there was a specific detail that only the murderer could have known … maybe it was all fiction.

It couldn’t all be fiction. There were too many coincidences for that, but …

But.

Kent looked at her, then checked the time. “You need a snack.”

“Honey …”

“Nope, you need to get your blood sugar back up.”

Like low blood sugar was the only reason she was feeling so damn hopeless.

There was a reason they didn’t talk about this stuff. A reason she tried not to think about this stuff. They were coming up on the fifth anniversary of Heidi’s murder, and the case was just as stalled as it had been five years ago. The cases were cold, heading toward frozen, and Adam’s semi-regular check-ins were basically jokes. About the only thing Nell could be certain of was that she hadn’t taken the killer into hiding with her, and that Kent still didn’t know she’d actually read Monkeewrench during those weird between months where he grew out his hair and they made a plan for a completely different kind of life. Come to think of it, Monkeewrench was the last thriller she’d ever read.

Kent brought her a plate with half a sandwich and a handful of chips, and a glass of Sprite with exactly three ice cubes. Love was knowing how many ice cubes to put in which size glass.

Thank God no one had ever thought to accuse Kent of being the Fairy Godfather. That was maybe the one thing that could’ve made any of this worse: having to wonder if the one person she’d been stuck with—the one who’d insisted on sticking with her—had committed all the murders purely to drive her into the situation where he was all she had. Looking at it that way, they were damn lucky the Fairy Godfather hadn’t killed Kent.

“Eat,” Kent urged her, sitting down next to her and stealing one of her chips. “I’d offer to read it out loud to you while you do, but I’m not sure that would help.”

That story, in Kent’s voice? “No, thanks.” She picked up the sandwich, then paused before she took a bite. “Hey, so what time did you call Adam and how did you convince him to come so quickly?”

“Uh.” He settled back on the couch. “Probably around two. And he said he’d already heard about the book. Actually …” Kent winced and shook his head, then corrected: “He said he’d heard about it because of the whole speculation that the author was using it to try to flush someone out. Like an abused ex.”

“Oh, come on. Do they think the same thing about every novel?”

Kent shook his head. “No. That’s why he was so quick to clear Saturday for us. I think he’s getting a copy before then, too.”

So either the meeting would be quick as he laughed it off and did just enough to placate them and make them think he was taking it seriously, or it would quickly develop into one of the worst days of Nell’s life. There was a lot of competition down there.

“Nell … we’re not jumping at shadows.”

Maybe not, but there was a question they were avoiding, and Nell put the sandwich down before she could take another bite. “Is he trying to find me so he can kill me, too?” Was that the true point of the hashtag? #FindRosie: crowdsourcing the entire country to track down the one that got away … from a serial murderer.

Kent shook his head, though, which meant he’d already thought of it. “He doesn’t want to kill you. He wants to protect you. So … if anyone’s dying here …”

Nell’s own shake was almost a violent jerk. “He didn’t come after you before.”

“I wasn’t actually with you before. Not physically. It just didn’t work out.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Now we’re married. We’re living together. I’m, what, the reason you disappeared before graduation and didn’t end up taking that job and now you’re just a barista?”

“You’re …” She didn’t even know where to start her protests.

Kent reached around her to tap the book. “You see how he keeps twisting all of it. He’s got his own idea of who Rosie is and what makes her happy. The Fairy Godmother went after the people he thought were holding you back, based on what he decided you wanted. I’m the one who dragged you to the middle of nowhere in Iowa, made sure you couldn’t use your degree, and stopped you from doing something with your life.”

Also the one who turned his back on everything he’d done, his degree and job and all the rest, to be there for her.

“Babe.” Kent gently touched her cheek. “You’re not thinking about it the way he is.”

Of course not. Who’d want to?

“He was helping you. He was the only one who was helping you. I took you away from him, so everything I did was wrong.”

Except even that wasn’t entirely true. “You didn’t take me—”

“That’s not how he’d see it.”

Nell picked up the book and shook it. “You don’t even exist in here!”

“Exactly. It’s his fantasy.” Kent shrugged again. “Rosie’s perfect and pure. She’s too good-hearted and won’t stand up for herself, but that’s a minor flaw. So he steps in, except he doesn’t want her to know he’s the one who did it, and then he comforts her in the face of tragedy, until …”

She snorted. “Until?” He was acting like he didn’t want to spoil the ending, but she already knew about Heidi, thanks.

“He doesn’t know what happened to her. That’s why it’s a literary piece, not a romance.” Kent shrugged again, both uncomfortable and defensive in the face of her raised eyebrow. “A romance needs the happily-ever-after or the happily-for-now. It’s a generic requirement, or else it’s not a romance. It’s a romantic other genre.” He tapped the book she still held up. “This is romantic, because of all the stuff Brandon was shouting, but after the roommate dies, he doesn’t see Rosie again. He assumes she’s been hustled off to family or friends or something, but everywhere he asks, he gets stonewalled. Nobody will tell him where she is or even if she’s alive somewhere.”

Nell frowned, but somehow she couldn’t get that to make sense.

“I did some more Googling,” he continued, still defensive. “Most of the advance readers don’t post with spoilers, but some of them do. There’s this one theory that Hailey actually killed Rosie and mutilated her so Hailey could go off and start a new life, and yeah, someone says maybe Rosie got put into witness protection while they looked for the killer, but it’s just so open-ended. It’s this mysterious encounter Cal has with Rosie for a handful of months, but he’s not even sure she’s real. Which,” he added almost reluctantly, “seems to be the most common conclusion. Cal dreamed her.”

She opened the book again without really meaning to, going past the advance praise to the epigraph O’Connell had chosen: “Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath. It was a villanelle, one of those strictly-formatted poems where two lines kept repeating throughout, so that the narrator kept saying “(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

It was one of Nell’s favorite poems.

“Yeah, see?” Kent shifted so he could put his elbow on the back of the couch and prop his head on his hand. “It looks like he’s setting it up to be a dream, so even if someone actually finds ‘Rosie,’ it wasn’t his intent. It’s just a marketing gimmick so people want to buy it and do a close reading and get the bragging rights if they figure it out, but oh, no, he never actually asked anyone to do it.”

“Hey, wait, so—if the FBI’s already got half an eye on him, then do they know his real name?”

“His real …?”

“Because I’ve never known anyone named O’Connell,” she pressed on. “Our FacMan at the apartments was actually a woman. Genevieve. Remember?”

Kent’s eyes drifted. “… yes.”

“So, like, that part’s wrong. And I don’t think I’ve ever met a Calvin, either, but with the way he’s been twisting the other names … finding something sort of close, but not …”

“I’m sure Adam will have someone go over everyone who had access to your apartment building, no matter what letter their name starts with.”

Like that hadn’t been done before. And like there was any chance of Adam finding something new after all this time.

Kent leaned over to pick up her Sprite and encourage her to drink some, kissing her temple again before he headed back to their laptop and whatever search he thought might be worth his time next.

---

from Since You Went Away by C. J. O’Connell (Penguin, 2024)

The first thing I hear on the radio this morning is about a murdered woman found somewhere in Kalamazoo. I wake up to the radio, because it’s better than the blare of an alarm clock, but it’s usually music, not some disc jockey trying to play out this tiny tidbit of news for as much time as he can. It’s not even suspense, because there’s not enough information for that. Woman found murdered. More whenever he gets more.

It’s not Rosie. It can’t be Rosie. Rosie came home yesterday afternoon once her classes were over and decided to just stay in, because it’s a weeknight, and that’s her usual choice, anyway. But part of me worries that it is Rosie somehow, and I’m grabbing for my phone and texting her before I can think that she won’t be awake yet.

It’s not technically my first stop today, but I head over to her building, anyway, and it gets worse. There’s a police car in the parking lot, empty, lights dark, but it’s there and that’s a problem. There shouldn’t be a police car here, not in a spot that makes it seem like they could be headed to Rosie’s apartment, and I haven’t heard from her.

God help me, I think Let it be Hailey before I’m out and headed that way, ready to check on her and just … make sure she’s okay.

It’s not Hailey, because Hailey’s the one who answers the door when I knock, paler than usual but otherwise fine. And it’s not Rosie, either, but she’s on the couch with Kleenex clutched in both hands, her nose and eyes red because it’s Kayleigh, and why does she have to have friends with such similar names? It’s Kayleigh who’s dead, Kayleigh who’s the reason these policemen came knocking so early, Kayleigh who’s making Rosie cry because she decided to get drunk and go out in a bad part of town.

She didn’t have her purse with her or anything. It turns out Kayleigh’s been arrested before, so they had a record of her tattoos. On the one hand, it’s not really a surprise that someone like Kayleigh would have a record, but on the other … this is the friend Rosie couldn’t let go? I don’t know what she was arrested for, but come on. Her ink was in the system, so when they found her body …

The police officers don’t like me being here. They want Rosie alone, all to themselves, to grill and needle and who knows what else. “He doesn’t have to be here for this, ma’am,” one of them tells her, clearly meaning Tell him to leave. Tell your roommate to leave. We want you alone and vulnerable.

Rosie sniffles but focuses directly on me, even though I’ve tried not to tense up. Tried not to show these boys in blue that I see right through them. “Don’t you have to work?” she asks, but that’s not really what she’s asking.

I shake my head. “I can stay.”

She reaches for my hand. I sit down next to her on the couch and let her hold on to me while they finish asking their questions.

---

Chapter Seven