Or maybe Valencia is right. Maybe all the Easton stuff is a way to let me keep hiding in plain sight.
The sirens are getting closer. Lights flash down the street where the road curves.
Miles gives me a questioning look.
I turn back to Valencia. “We need to get our stories straight.”
Epilogue
Okay. I’m done.
I hit send on the text message and roll off my bed. As I head out the back door, Valencia calls to me and I stop. She pokes her head through the kitchen doorway.
“Still feeling up to...” She pauses. Tentative, as though she doesn’t want to say what she’s asking, and who could blame her? She finally seems to settle on something and says, “This afternoon?”
“As long as you are.”
She sighs and it sounds like she isn’t, but still she nods. “Now or never, and never really isn’t an option.”
True. “I’m going to talk to Miles and then we can go.”
She gives me a loving smile and I head out to the fence where he’s already waiting for me, pulling anxiously at his fingers.
“So?” he asks before I even reach him. “Did you hate it? Do you hate me?”
I laugh and something twists in my stomach at the thought. Because I don’t think I could ever hate him.
“I did not and I do not.”
In fact, listening to his voice for seven hours has made me realize how much I missed him over the past few weeks. Even after our housewas no longer an active crime scene, Miles said we all shouldn’t be seen together until the cops stopped coming around. And we definitely couldn’t text anything about what happened, in case they figured out our lies somehow and subpoenaed our phone records.
“You’re saying that to be polite.” He says it like he’s joking, but I can see in his face he thinks I really might be. So I shake my head.
“I promise you I’m not. I mean, I did hate listening to myself.” The interview he did with me was the only time I’ve really seen him since everything with Easton went down. But the interview for his podcast was fake. And so was the story we told.
Creating the lies that followed the fire was harder than actually selling them. Probably because Easton didn’t have a chance to cover his tracks this time around. He’d left Agent Grant’s body in the kitchen. Easton had planned on framing me as the psychopath, leaving no one alive to counter his version of events. Unfortunately for him, Valencia, Miles, and I all told the same general story.
Miles told the police he was planning a true crime podcast about my kidnapping and had showed up to interview me when everything went down. We told them that Easton confessed to killing JT, so his family knows the truth. We used that as the reason I contacted Agent Grant. They did ask why Easton would kill Grant in front of me but not kill me and Miles right then and there. We said it was because he planned to frame me for the murders, leaving himself as the only survivor.
From there, Valencia sold most of it. She confessed all the warning signs she ignored in Easton as a child. And how he learned to mask them as he got older. She also used Nate’s disappearance as anexample of how he didn’t respond the way most kids would to such a situation.
But for the police investigating the deaths of Agent Grant, JT, and now Marcus Beaumont, that seemed to be enough. They stuck around for a few weeks, returning on several occasions to ask us follow-up questions—with our lawyers present—and then, last week, the case was closed.
That was it.
It almost felt too easy, but then Miles reminded us of how the police work. For them, it was a numbers game. They had an open case, a dead suspect, and three eyewitnesses who gave the same story. Even if the story was batshit, it meant they could close the case and be done with it. Then put a tally mark in their imaginary case-closed column. And it could become an interesting story for them to tell at parties: the psycho kid who tried to kill his family. And let’s be honest—without us telling them what to believe, they wouldn’t be able to do it on their own.
Who could blame them? Is it easier to believe that a ten-year-old killed his little brother, got away with it, and almost ten years later, a queer homeless kid stole his brother’s identity? Or is it easier to believe that one kid with psychopathic tendencies snapped and killed a few people after his missing brother returned, upending the life he’d had for the last ten years?
I know which was easier for the police.
“No one likes their own voice,” Miles says. “But you promise you didn’t hate it?”
“Yes. Why are you so worried?” I know my relationship withMiles is new, but he isn’t the type to be modest or even feign modesty to get a compliment.
He bites his lip and shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess because... I might be having some second thoughts.”
“On?”
