"Of course I do. More than you could possibly understand."
He didn’t know that I understood it better than anyone. Better than he would ever know.
"What do you expect me to do about it, Leo?" I asked carefully, even though I knew I shouldn't. I knew this was the question that had made him feel responsible for my actions when everything fell apart.
But I couldn't help myself. I needed to hear him repeat it. I needed that final push toward what I already knew wasinevitable. Needed the permission that would make this feel less like murder and more like justice.
"I know you can't do anything to change him," he said, his voice small and defeated. "People like Oliver don't change. They just find new victims."
"But if there was a way?"
"I want you to make sure he can never hurt anyone ever again."
There it was. The permission I'd been waiting for. The justification I'd been seeking.
In that moment, I realized the truth I'd been running from all along: I wasn't here to prevent Oliver's death. I was here to do it right this time.
"I love you, Leo," I whispered into his hair. "And I'm going to fix this. I promise."
I didn't tell him that fixing it would cost me everything. That I would become a monster to kill the biggest monster. That he would have to live with the knowledge that I'd done this for him, even if he never knew the full truth.
CHAPTER 46
Kyle
Humans love to be right.Our ego thrives on it. No matter what circumstance or setting we're in, knowing that our theories are exactly correct makes us feel superior, validated, and important.
I'm definitely one of those people. I love winning arguments. I love being proven correct. I love the moment when people have to admit that I was absolutely right all along. It feeds something deep in me that probably isn't very healthy, but it's undeniably there.
But sitting here in my car, watching Lily drive her parents' vehicle toward Oliver's house, made me realize that this was the one time in my entire life when I desperately wanted to be wrong. I would have given anything, my pride, my ego, my need to be right, to have my theory be completely off base.
I won't deny that part of my heart shattered with this discovery. Not because she was responsible for something so terrible, but because she'd never had enough trust in me to tell me the truth. Even now, after we'd traveled back in time together and supposedly resolved all our differences, she still couldn't confide in me about the most important secret she carried.
But I couldn't even blame her for that silence. I knew I'd been a complete piece of shit in the past.
I started thinking about how I'd reacted when everyone began pointing fingers at Leo ten years ago. I never truly listened to her desperate pleas. I never wanted to support her when she insisted on her brother's innocence. I simply closed myself off to any possibility except the obvious one: my friend was dead, and someone needed to pay for it.
I was so consumed by my own grief and anger that I couldn't see beyond what was directly in front of me. I was young, scared, and traumatized, but that didn't excuse my willful blindness.
I wondered how drastically things might have changed if I had just listened to her. If I had trusted her enough to believe she was telling me the truth. If I had stopped to think about why she was so certain of her brother's innocence.
Now I could finally understand all the resentment she'd harbored toward me for years. Leo was locked up because of me. Because I was a key witness to the bullying he'd suffered and testified against him in court. Because I was never able to doubt what my eyes had supposedly seen.
But now I knew I'd been wrong about everything.
All that remained was to discover what would happen next, and what circumstances had driven Lily to make such a devastating choice in the first place.
Would she go through with it again? Would she actually kill Oliver? What had pushed her to that breaking point?
I began observing everything from my hidden position in the car. Every instinct screamed at me to jump out and run toward her, to intervene before things went too far. But doing so now would ruin whatever was about to unfold, and Ineeded to understand the whole picture if I wanted to prevent it. I had to be patient if I wanted to catch the truth.
Lily parked in Oliver's driveway and just sat there for several minutes, not moving, not getting out, just staring at the house.
What was she thinking? Was she summoning the courage for what she was about to do? Was she going over her plan step by step, rehearsing every detail? Or was she having second thoughts, wrestling with her conscience one final time?
I felt like I didn't know her at all anymore. Everything I thought I understood about her motivations and impulses had been turned upside down. She'd left me entirely in the dark.
Sometimes you think you've known someone your entire life until they take an action that makes you question everything you believed about them. I thought I knew Lily inside and out, her fears, what made her laugh, what triggered her anger, the dreams that kept her awake at night. These past six weeks, I'd been trying to rediscover her, to fill in the gaps from our ten years apart.
