Meera rears back, horrified. “Talia, please—”
“Someone help me! This woman tried to kill me!”
“Please, Talia.” Meera takes a tentative seat next to her bed, letting out a small groan as she does so. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Talia takes a deep breath, tempted to release a fresh round of screams, but what is the point? No one is coming to help her. No one here believes her. “What do you want, then?”
“I just want to talk to you. I just want to know why you did this to me.”
Here Talia is chained to a hospital bed with a hole in her leg, and Meera still wants to throw a pity party. “What do you think I’ve done to you, Meera?”
“Well, for starters”—Meera pulls aside her own hospital gown, showing a bloodied bandage on her hip—“you fucking shot me.”
“In self-protection.”
Meera stares at her for a beat too long. “Do you really believe that?”
“You broke into Townsend’s condo to hurt me. Maybe even to kill me. So yes, I do believe I was protecting myself.”
Still Meera continues to stare. “Oh, my God. You’ve convinced yourself that it was all real, haven’t you? In your twisted mind, you actually believe I posed as Amanda and sent all those messages and threats just to screw with your relationship.”
None of Meera’s words are making sense. “Amandadidsend those messages.”
“Amanda is dead,” Meera snaps, “and you know that. What I want to know is when you decided to frame me for her supposed crimes.”
“I don’t. I didn’t.” There must be drugs in this IV bag. Something malicious is running through her veins, muddling her thoughts. They want to confuse her.
Meera continues, undeterred. “I trusted you more than anyone, and you betrayed me in the worst kind of way. You cost me my livelihood and my daughter. What did I do to deserve that?”
Is Amanda the real stalker, or is it Meera? Talia can’t keep track anymore. Either way, Meera is frightening her. If only Townsend would appear and make her go away.
As though reading her mind, Meera says, “I just don’t understand why you would do all of this for Townsend. You caused so many people so much grief, and for what? For a guy who cheated on you?”
Pain shoots through her limbs, stinging worse than when the nurse pressed down on her wound. “He’s changed. He loves me. Amanda meant nothing to him, and he regrets what he did to me every day.”
“Then why did you feel the need to kill her?”
Blood pumps so loudly in Talia’s ears that she can barely hear her own response: “Because she almost ruined everything.”
That’s when everything goes black. Did she have a stroke? Did Meera kill her? Shivering, Talia clenches her hands into fists and squeezes her eyes shut, praying for that glorious moment when she’ll wake up in Townsend’s bed, having realized this was all a bad dream.
But then: the squeak of shoes on linoleum. Someone new has entered the room. No, two somebodies. “You have the right to remain silent,” a voice says. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to talk to a lawyer for advice ...”
Still Talia doesn’t open her eyes. To open them would be to acknowledge what’s happening, and she’s not ready to do that. Instead, she mutters to herself the few things she knows to be true, as though the words will absolve her and make this all go away:
I had to do it. I had to do it for Townsend. It would be like she never existed. We could be happy. I deserved to be happy.
I had to do it.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Meera
The police found a body in Town Lake.
According to the news, they actually found it three months earlier in May, but they weren’t able to identify it at the time. Without knowing where Talia disposed of the body (she maintains that she has no memory of what happened), compounded by advanced decomposition and a failure to locate the necessary dental records, the Jane Doe was presumed to be Amanda.
Meera doesn’t like to think about this—about Amanda’s bloated, mutilated corpse sitting on the bottom of the lake, unrecognizable from the vibrant woman she’d been in life. She doesn’t like to think about all the half-naked young people who floated above her body while drinking beers in boats, unaware of what lay beneath the water’s surface.
