The first time I became aware of her, she was just Twiggy Gentry. Skinny little kid who should’ve been in high school but had this big, incredible brain. The name didn’t fit the brain, if you asked me.
Her real name—her given name—was Tallulah.Thatname fit—polished, heavy, something her father could use in sentences that started with “my daughter” and ended with “Harvard” and “consulting” and “legacy.” She was part of his décor, an ornament on his carefully curated life.
I liked her that way.
Useful. Contained. Controlled.
But she was too fucking clever.
People always talk about “the one that got away” like it’s romantic. Nostalgic. For me, it isn’t the girl who ran or the girl who fought. It’s the girl who sat behind a screen and dug until she found seams in the story she was never meant to see.
Lucy Falls wasn’t random.
It was ours long before anyone in this state started whispering the name Henry Thurston like a campfire story. Jason and I were brought here as kids, folded into Beatrice Thurston’s neat little house on the hill like we were charity cases instead of warning signs. Her town. Her family name on half the mailboxes. Old money. Old sins. Old secrets.
We grew up learning where all the cracks were.
Later, when we came back as men, we didn’t “choose” Lucy Falls off a map. We were reclaiming a stage that should’ve belonged to us from the beginning. Jason wanted the hands-on work—the chase, the tears, the mind games. I wanted the structure, thestaging, the way the town held its breath when it realized there was something in the dark.
And I wanted the kill.
It was supposed to be ours.
Now Jason’s in a cage with a DOC number instead of a life, and everyone pretends that means the story’s over.
All because a girl behind a screen decided to get clever.
I tap the steering wheel, counting the beats.
It’s not grief that burns in my chest when I think about him getting caught. We weren’t that kind of brothers.
It’s irritation.
He was useful. He liked the parts that took him right up to that point of no return, that line that, when it was crossed, there was no pretending you were a good guy.
We weren't good guys. I was always okay with that. He liked to pretend.
Now everything…all of the parts…are my responsibility. Lure. Logistics. Execution. Cleanup. Every step an extra weight because some girl behind a laptop “figured it out.”
I had to leave after that.
Not because I was afraid, but because the stage was ruined. Too many eyes. Too many uniforms. Too many people wandering around in shock, flinching at shadows.
I went quiet. They thought that meant I’d stopped.
I hadn’t. I was just…traveling.
There was a girl off a highway in Tennessee who thought nobody noticed when she left work alone at night. Another in a motel three states over who liked to prop her door with the ice bucket while she smoked. A woman jogging through a suburban park in a town that barely made the news, where the local police were so convinced it was her ex-husband they never thought to look at anyone else.
I had to practice on all the parts Jason had taken care of before. The finer points of stalking and abducting, for example. Those girls were experiments.
They were fine. Functional. Neat.
Forgettable.
None of them had history. None of them had stood in front of me at a window with my brother on their conscience. None of them had changed my story halfway through.
I would lie awake in cheap rooms and think about her sometimes.
