I shouldn’t have looked at the autopsy report.
I knew better. I knew it would be a mistake. And I did it anyway.
No one was willing to hand it over without a fight. No one except Geena Morris.
She was my last option. My only one. Every other door I knocked on stayed firmly shut, bolted from the inside by fear, money, or loyalty to the wrong people. But Geena opened hers. Slowly. Carefully. Like she knew the time had come to finally let someone else carry the heavy burden with her.
She warned me first. Told me some truths aren’t meant to be uncovered, that once you see them you don’t get to put them back in their box. That answers come with a cost. I listened. And then I stayed.
I think she saw it in me—the refusal to back down, the way my defiance had calcified into something unmovable. She knew I wasn’t leaving without the truth, not after everything it had already taken from me.
So she gave me what she had. And in doing so, she became the only person ever, aside from her husband, who didn’t try to protect the lie.
I thought I was ready. I told myself that after six years, nothing could hurt more than the night she died. I was wrong.
I didn’t make it to the end.
I got halfway through the descriptions—the injuries, the bruising, the tearing, the way they catalogued her pain in neat, clinical language—and a chillslid through my gut. I barely made it to the sink before I threw up. I was choking, gagging, gasping like I was drowning. I couldn’t breathe then. I still can’t.
They hurt her. They violated her. Broke her down piece by piece. Took what they wanted and left her ruined. And when they were finished, when she wasn’t useful anymore, they threw her into the river like garbage. Like the water would rinse her clean of what they did. Like it would wash their fingerprints off her body and carry their guilt somewhere far away.
And the police let them. They protected them.
The report might as well have stamped their complicitness in bold letters across every page:
SHE DID NOT MATTER.
But she mattered to me.
She mattered so much that I still wake up hurting every day. Like my life stopped the night hers ended and everything since has just been echoes. I live in the shadow of what they did to her. I breathe it. I carry it. It’s stitched into my bones.
I want justice so badly that it terrifies me. I want answers. I want to see their faces. I want to look them in the eyes and know—really know—whether they regret any of it. I want them to hurt the way she hurt. I want them to feel the fear, thehelplessness, the moment when hope drains out of you and you realize no one is coming to save you.
The truth is, my sister didn’t just die that night. They killed something in me too. And whatever is left is sharp, and angry, and done waiting.
I slamthe page down and drag in a breath through my teeth.
Rage sparks under my skin — hot and raw. Dark obsession. The kind that sinks in fast and deep and doesn’t politely ask permission.
I shove the pages back into the envelope where they belong.
There’s a whole stack of them, and I couldn’t get through four fucking pages. No wonder Rowan walks around like nothing scares her — she’s already lost everything. What is there left for her to lose?
The anger hits fast.
Not hers.
Mine.
Now I know what happened to her sister — at least enough to understand the damage done to Rowan. I have the names of the boys who walked free. The ones who were protected. The ones she identified who still managed to escape prosecution. And every thing starts to fall in place.
She was a kid.
And no one gave a damn.
21
ROWAN
