I stay quiet. This isn’t a question meant to be answered.
“What makes me better?” she continues. “Why was Lily born with less? Why was she less protected? Less insulated from thecruelty of the world because she didn’t have the means to build walls high enough to keep the monsters out?”
Her voice doesn’t waver. But something tightens in my chest.
“What makes me more special than her?” She whispers.
I don’t respond. I can’t. Because I’ve asked myself the inverse of that question my entire life. Why my sister? Why my family? Why us?
Bethany exhales, slow and controlled.
“If you knew Lily,” she turns back to me, “you’d understand. I might have more money than she ever did. But she’s richer than all of us combined.”
She doesn’t say it lightly.
“She gives. She doesn’t hoard. She doesn’t measure worth in what she owns or what she’s owed. She’s grounded. Here.” Bethany presses her palm lightly to her chest. “And if the world had even a handful more people like her—people who gave without keeping score—we wouldn’t need places like this.”
Her words land hard. Because I know what I became when no one helped me grieve. I know what grows in the absence of care. Anger. Obsession. A hunger for justice that curdles into vengeance when it’s left alone too long.
I look around the church again.
At the space that exists because someone like Lily Snow refused to let suffering remain solitary.
And for the first time, I wonder—not with hope, but with painful clarity—who I might have been if someone had caught me before I became this person.
33
JUSTIN
Istand in the corridor and stare at my phone until the screen dims.
Everything about today is wrong.
Not the violence. Violence is common. Predictable. People do horrible things when they think they’ll get away with it.
The wrong part is the way the pieces don’t fit.
William Scott-Evans collapses at a public event with witnesses everywhere. Not in an alley. Not in a private room. Not in a place where a quiet hand could finish him without anyone asking questions. Because I’m pretty sure whoever poisoned him meant to kill him.
And the dean… the dean has been acting like a man with a knife to his throat. It’s not just concern - it’s fear. Real fear - the kind that slithers into your bloodstream and lays dormant, waiting for the next tragedy to strike.
He didn’t just want answers. He wanted control over the answers.
I scroll through the preliminary report Silas sent again, even though I know it well enough to recite from memory.
Scott-Evans is a problem. That much is obvious. His namesurfaces again and again in quiet complaints stretching back to his time as a student at St Augustine’s. Too many girls changing dorms halfway through a semester. Too many parents calling administrators, only to be soothed until they stopped calling altogether.
The university operates like a machine designed to protect itself. They should have called Goliath back then, when Scott-Evans was still a minor threat roaming campus. They didn’t. Someone intervened. The volume of withdrawn complaints and internal cover-ups during that period is higher than at any other point in the college’s history.
Someone was protecting him.
And yet I’m still standing here, trying to put the puzzle pieces together, returning more questions than answers.
Something doesn’t sit right with me.
Rowan couldn’t save her sister. So she went looking for a system she could punish. That’s what she hoped to accomplish, isn’t it?
Not for payback or to get her revenge. She wanted proof. Proof that the universe isn’t random and that men like Scott-Evans are not untouchable. Because if she can touch him, she can touch all of them.
