"Do you remember what happened the first time?"
Of course I did. Despite wanting to forget it over and over again, I could clearly remember the worst night of my life. "I went to Oliver's house, we had a fight, he attacked me, and—" the words were barely coming out. I didn't want to say it out loud. But I mustered up all the courage I had, and finally, the words came out, "he sexually assaulted me."
Kyle closed his eyes. As if he couldn't believe what he'd heard, or as if the words he'd said had hurt him as much as they had me. I didn't blame him; Oliver had been his friend, and knowing that he'd done this was hard to hear. "And then?" Kyle pressed.
"And then I got in the driver's seat while he was standing on the street smoking, and I crashed into him. I stood there for a few seconds watching him try to get up, glaring at me, and then I just sped off, left him there to bleed out or something... But it wasn't me this time, I swear, I didn't kill Oliver, I came here to my house as soon as I left yours."
Finally, he turned around to face me fully. "I know it wasn't you, Lily. Someone else did it after we left."
I blinked, certain I'd misheard. "What?"
"Yes, and I knew it thanks to this." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone.
"Whose phone is this?"
"That's Oliver's phone. The teacher confiscated it in class the Monday after the party."
My mind was struggling to make the connections he was obviously seeing clearly.
"Florece gave it to me after finding them in a compromising situation," he explained. "I couldn't crack the password at first, but after I found out Oliver was dead, I knew we needed evidence for what was about to happen."
I stared at him, trying to process what he was saying.
"My experience with software security from our presenttimeline came in handy. I remembered there were vulnerabilities in older operating systems that let me access the phone's gallery without knowing the password."
"And what did you find?"
"That Oliver and Florence were having an affair. And he recorded them several times without her knowing. I had seen them together in the classroom, but I thought it was nothing more than kissing until I saw the contents of the cell phone."
"She was sleeping with a student," I said, the full implications sinking in.
"And that's not all," Kyle continued. "Since I suspected you were going to Oliver's house on Saturday, I put a camera in my car before I went there. I wanted to have evidence that anything you did was in self-defense."
"You did what?" I said, a little mad about his confession, but also proud of him for thinking about that. "You were planning to film me committing a crime?"
He rolled his eyes, but kept talking. "My car stayed in front of Oliver's house all night because we left in your parents' vehicle, so I recorded absolutely everything after we left."
My heart stopped. "So we have everything that happened recorded."
"Yup," he responded. “Half an hour after we left, Florence showed up. I guess Oliver had been threatening her about their relationship, probably demanding something, or he’d expose them both. But they just ended up making out in her car. When he finally got out and let her go, Brandy went over to him.” Kyle’s voice was controlled, but I could see the tension in his shoulders.
“Brandy? What was Brandy doing there?”
“She was there before I even got here; she’d been planning to attack him, from what I could see in her threatening messages on this phone. She was the one who killed him by running him over with her car, Lily. You probably didn’t finishhim off enough the first time. You were never responsible for Oliver’s death.”
The room seemed to spin around me. All these years, all this guilt, all the self-hatred and sleepless nights, and it had never been me at all. I remember seeing him on the ground when I left that night, looking at me with disdain. But he was alive. I thought I'd hurt him enough to be dead, but I never realized I didn't actually hit him as hard as I thought.
I started to think about why she would do something like that. Kill a person because she was jealous. Would she have been that desperate? I couldn't even judge her; I was going to do practically the same thing, only mine was defensive and accidental. I didn't even mean to hit him. Which makes me wonder…
"Do you think that happened too in our timeline?"
"I'm sure about it. You never killed anyone, Lily. Brandy did it. Probably after seeing Oliver choose everyone but her, she lost control. She was the one who let Leo take the blame rather than face the consequences of her own actions."
I felt like I was floating outside my body, watching this conversation happen to someone else. The weight I'd carried for so long, the guilt that had shaped every decision I'd made, the reason I'd never been able to trust myself or anyone else, it was all based on a lie.
"I'm not a murderer," I whispered.
"You never were." Kyle sat beside me and pulled me into his arms. "You were just a scared kid who thought she'd done something terrible, and a predator used that fear to protect herself."
