Chapter Twenty-Four
Shae
By dawn, there are deputies at the gate and flashlights cutting through the gardens like search beams in a cathedral.
They find Declan’s truck parked crooked on the gravel. They find the bell tower door half open, one hinge snapped clean, the rust flaked like old blood. They find a smear on a stair rail where someone grabbed too hard. They find his phone below the tower, screen spidered, still buzzing with missed calls.
What they don’t find right away is a body. The brush is thick. The drop is mean. The wind in that canyon knows how to keep secrets.
Evelyn panics in private. Lawyers appear like angels with billing codes. Blake films everything he’s allowed to film and some things he isn’t. The town whispers my name like a prayer and an accusation in the same breath.
By the second day, the story hardens: Declan Ridge—former guard, disgraced, obsessed—followed me out here and attacked me. He fell. Tragic. An accident. The kind people like because it lets them feel safe again.
The true-crime crowd doesn’t like easy stories. Watcher fans go feral. They freeze-frame my face. They measure my sobs. They thread theories through comment sections like rosaries.
So I give the town something else to hold.
On the third night, I host a candlelight vigil in the courtyard, under the saints and the broken fountain. I wear white. I keep my voice soft. I talk about grace and boundaries and the danger of misunderstood men. People cry. People reach for my hands like I’m a relic.
Blake films all of it. Evelyn eats up the footage like gospel. The optics are immaculate—a grieving woman framed by holy stone and candlelight, a “survivor” offering forgiveness to a town hungry for something simple to believe in.
Sheriff’s deputies come in plain clothes. A couple of women from the nearest church with rosaries wrapped around their wrists like tourniquets. Neighbors who pretended they didn’t recognize me at the market but can’t resist the pull of a tragedy with a photogenic lead. A local reporter hovers near the archway, phone held at chest height, recording the soft parts like they’re contraband. Someone brought a casserole. Someone brought a guitar they don’t know how to play. California grief always wants to be a community event.
The true-crime tourists arrive too—two women in oversized sunglasses who keep turning their heads like they’re scanning for hidden cameras. A man with a lanyard and the posture of someone who thinks he’s the smartest person at a crime scene. They stay near the back, whispering into each other’s ears, eyes flicking to the bell tower every few seconds like it’s going to confess on its own. I feel them measuring my face for cracks. It’s sweet. Like watching toddlers try to open a locked cabinet.
And then there are the ones who don’t know why they’re here. The soft-hearted. The lonely. The people who hear the wordvigiland think it means they’ll leave lighter. A youngcouple holds hands so tightly it looks painful. An older woman keeps dabbing at her eyes with the same tissue until it’s disintegrating in her fist. A teenage girl with mascara tracks down her cheeks watches me like I’m the only adult in the world who understands what it’s like to be afraid of men and still want to be wanted by them. I let my gaze rest on her a second longer than necessary. She shivers. She thinks it’s spiritual.
When I speak, the courtyard becomes a mouth. Every breath turns communal. People nod before I finish sentences. They swallow my words like medicine. I saysafetyand they hearsalvation. I sayboundariesand they hearpermission. I saymisunderstoodand I can feel half the crowd deciding, in real time, whether Declan was a hero or a predator—whether he died trying to protect me or died because he finally met the kind of woman he couldn’t control.
I step back from the microphone and let the candles do their work. The wind slides through the cracked fountain basin and the dry leaves whisper across the stone like they’re praying. Behind me, the bell tower stands black against the stars, and somewhere up there, something loose catches the breeze—metal on metal, a soft complaint. It sounds almost like a chime if you want it to. People glance up. People cross themselves. People make stories where there should only be physics.
“Did you see that guy lingering under the Joan of Arc statue?” Blake hums at my shoulder.
“I did.”
“Do you know him?”
“No. Do you?”
Blake grunts softly, shaking his head. “You think he’s going to be a problem?”
I shrug. “Wouldn’t be the first one, won’t be the last.”
Blake chuckles. “You’re a natural under a pressure.”
“Forged in fire, baby.” I bump his shoulder in a moment of levity.
“I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Thanks.”
Blake moves off into the crowd, gathering his close-ups: trembling hands, wet lashes, my white sleeves brushing fingertips like I’m blessing them. Evelyn will cut it into a montage so clean it could pass for a commercial. Together, the three of us are the holy trinity of salvation as content—camera, cut, and confession—turning grief into proof and proof into profit.
They fall in love with me right there, wax dripping onto their fingers, the bell tower looming over us. Hero or predator—Declan becomes whatever they need him to be. And I become what I’ve always been best at: the icon everyone thinks they discovered.
And tomorrow the town will wake up feeling morally superior for having shown up—because nothing makes people feel safer than choosing a side at a vigil.
Especially when the side they chose is me.
