LILAC
Although he insistedon driving me after work, Caylon doesn’t take me to Zach’s home. He detours into the hills, driving too fast and too reckless before pulling into a rest stop with a clear view over the city.
The lights twinkle and sparkle beneath us, impossibly pretty. So much nicer to look at than the video playing on the phone in my hand.
I thought it was the same one, at first, just starting at an earlier point. Tessa’s beaming face fills the screen, pouting for the camera. Zach hands her a drink, and she downs it in one gulp before pulling him close for a kiss.
The pulse of jealousy is ridiculous, but undeniable.
I don’t parse which person triggers the emotion. Probably both.
Her eyes glaze soon after she mugs at the camera, but the footage isn’t shot in a continuous sequence, so I don’t know how much actual time has passed. Zach’s lazy smile triggers a wash of desire deep in my belly. Even though I understand why Caylon’s showing me this footage. Know what my boyfriend is about to do on the screen.
What he did, because all of this is from six months ago, give or take.
Tessa is so beautiful. Prettier than I remember, but of course the images I hold of her were tarnished by her later unravelling. In this shot, that’s all ahead. I wish I could step into the frame and warn her.
I press the pause button and the image freezes. Then I skate the cursor farther along the line.
“You’re meant to be watching it,” Caylon growls, but doesn’t stop me.
“Think I know how this goes,” I say lightly, as though my heart isn’t hammering at a million miles an hour in my chest. “And look—they’re done.”
I toss the phone in his lap, staring out at the city and battling my emotions into a state of retreat.
“Robbie would never have dared touch her if Zach hadn’t taught him exactly what to do.”
“Yeah.” My nervous fingers are tapping out a tattoo on my leg. “Thanks. I can connect the dots.”
“Can you?” He tosses the phone back at me because nothing is ever easy. “What about the next video? Want to tell me what you can glean from that one?”
It starts moments before the part I know off by heart. The loop I downloaded to watch, over and over, trying to find meaning where there was none. Trying to find a reason for all the harm it caused. Desperate to understand why it ended the life of the first person who cared for me. To understand the misery that flowed from this terrible source.
That the original video was longer also comes as no surprise. The cuts on either side were too neat to be the actual start and ending.
But I’m done. “Would you like to get to the point? I’m tired. It’s the middle of the night, and I wouldn’t mind getting home for some sleep before the sun rises.”
My mind drifts back to the night. The one I don’t like to dwell on. The one where I murdered a boy or caused him to be murdered or participated in his murder or some other convoluted explanation that wound up with me alive and him dead, despite the odds being stacked in the other direction.
Zach asks me where Tessa is. I tell him she’s dead. He raises the gun and fires.
The phone slips from my grasp and Caylon catches it, returning it to my numb fingers before he turns away. His hands rest low on the steering wheel, eyes blankly staring ahead. “You know why he drugged her like that, don’t you?”
The raise at the end of the sentence is so slight that I barely catch it as a question. My eyes glance down at the phone, then jerk away as the video runs again. Starting from a point just before Robbie decides it’s a good day for rape. Ending with his face bleeding, unconscious on the carpet.
I recognise the swollen fists that beat him.
“I said—”
“Yeah, I heard you.” The words snap out of me, and I clench the phone, wanting to turn it off, wanting to hand it back, wanting to throw it over the cliff edge in front of us and let it smash into tiny pieces on the rocky ground. “Why are you showing this to me?”
He clears his throat and turns his face away. On the screen, far past the point the original upload cut off, Robbie’s face is pummelled, nearly as badly as when I shot bullets into it until the gun was empty.
Okay, not anything like that bad, but shocking enough.
Zach punches him until the only sign of life is a bubble of blood forming at his nostril.
“What did you get out of it?” I stare at the back of Caylon’s head for a good minute, but he doesn’t turn around. Not even when I tug at a handful of his hair. “Trent got to watch, Zach got to fuck her without the fear she’d touch him back, Robbie helped himself. What did you get?”
