“She lied to everyone! She’s not innocent—she’s a goddamn psychopath! I was trying to protect her,helpher! You have to listen to me!”
The nurse closest to him steps forward, a pill cup in her gloved hand. Jack jerks his head back like she’s trying to smother him with it.
“Get away from me! I’m not sick—she’ssick!”
He bucks hard, the restraints digging into his flesh. He knocks the cup to the floor with a violent sweep of his shoulder, the pills scattering across the linoleum like spilled teeth.
“Just give him the shot,” another nurse mutters.
A third one approaches with the syringe. Jack sees it and screams—a raw, ragged sound, like he’s a dog backed into a corner. But the fight drains from him fast. The needle pierces his skin. Within seconds, he’s slumping in the chair, his head lolling, his voice falling to a hoarse, delirious whisper.
“. . . you don’t understand... it wasn’t supposed to be this way...”
I take another slow sip of my coffee.
It was always going to end this way.
Jack was transferred here—to the psychiatric wing of the correctional facility—after his arraignment. The state psychiatrist testified that he was in a state of “acute psychotic decompensation” during the final incident. A fancy way of saying he’d finally snapped. The kitchen fire sealed it. That footage alone was enough to convince the authorities that I was telling the truth.
They know now he set the fire. They know about the drugs—how he crushed them into my tea, into my food, into my bloodstream—until I was sleepwalking through my own life.
They know he installed cameras in every room. That he recorded me showering, sleeping, crying. That he watched my pain like a hobby, as if he were a god.
They know about the gun in the sink.
And they know what it was used for.
The CEO—Colton Raines—was never just a random casualty. The murder had nothing to do with me. Not at first. It was a dirty business deal gone sideways. My father’s fingerprints were all over it; Jack just did the clean-up. Paid some strung-out street thug to pull the trigger, then planted the murder weapon in our apartment to frame me in case things went south.
They went south.
The cops traced everything—emails, bank transfers, burner phones. Jack wasn’t just sloppy. He was arrogant. He thought he could do anything, take anything, and no one would touch him.
He thought I would stay broken.
That was his first mistake.
I feel no pity watching him now. Not when I remember how he smiled while telling me I was losing my mind. Not when Iremember the bruises I woke up with and couldn’t explain. Not when I remember how he’d hold me after each breakdown—and whisper how lucky I was to have him.
They tried to take me down.
Jack. My father. They wanted me to disappear. Into pills, into padded rooms, into silence. But I didn’t.
Because beneath the confusion, the gaslighting, the drugs, the surveillance... I remembered who I was. And I gathered every piece of evidence, like bones, like a trail leading out of the woods. I built my way back with proof.
Jack may have orchestrated the manipulation. But he never thought I’d take notes.
He never thought I’dfight back.
The security footage. The financial records. All of it. A fortress of truth.
He doesn’t know Aubrey was part of it. That she came to me weeks ago, whispering apologies, a plan. He doesn’t know she slipped me access to another one of his work phones—the one that held every message between him and my father about the hit on Colton Raines.
Jack whimpers in the chair, sweat slicking his temples, eyes heavy-lidded, pupils swimming. He looks up at the glass. He can’t see me, but for one wild second, I imagine he feels me there. He doesn’t scream this time. He just stares. And trembles. A nurse walks into the hallway behind me. She offers a polite nod as she passes, unaware of what’s ticking behind my eyes.
I take one last sip of coffee, now ice-cold. A smile spreads across my face. Because Jack thought he’d committed me. But in the end, I committedhim.He’s the one behind the two-way mirror now. He’s the one whose mind is unspooling.
Forty-Eight
