Sickened and destroyed, I stand to leave, but stop to ask the one question that has been plaguing me. “Who was it that you ran after that night?”
Jason’s face goes white. “I didn’t know she was there. I swear I didn’t know.” Tears are thick in his throat. “I didn’t see her until after, until it was too late...”
I can’t say her name and I silently beg Jason not to say it either.
“She hid in my car,” he whispers.
I’m shaking my head now endlessly, feeling my heart break over and over as my brother continues his confession. Laura had followed him. She was always following him. Off bridges, on dates, everywhere.
She was there the whole time, she watched him. She ran when he saw her. All four miles home she ran, and he couldn’t catch her, he kept slipping from all the blood.
I let out a sob and Jason reaches for my hand. Before he can touch me, the ever-present guards bark a warning. Fingers, just inches from mine, draw back.
Another sob slips from my lips.
“Please, Brooke, please.”
I turn my back and all but run from my brother.
CHAPTER 41
I’m early getting home, so early that Mom isn’t even expecting my call yet. I slip inside the house and go upstairs without anyone noticing.
Straight to Laura’s room.
When I open the door, she looks up from where she’s sitting on the bed with Ducky in his cage between her outstretched legs. I don’t give her a chance to react before I’m sliding onto the bed in front of her. I cried myself out on the drive home. All I feel now is broken. Laura moves Ducky’s cage to the floor.
“I didn’t know,” I say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
Laura stiffens when I reach for her hand.
“No, no, please don’t,” I whisper. “Not anymore.”
I didn’t think it was possible to hurt more than I did after Jason’s confession, but looking at Laura, thinking about what it must have been like for her to have witnessed Jason kill someone and then have to endure it all alone, I do.
“I’m so sorry, Laura. I didn’t know.” I just keep repeating the same words until with a full-bodied shudder, she goes limp, no longer holding herself rigid and away from me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I reach for her hand again, and this time, she lets me take it.
She lowers her eyes, but we’re not doing that anymore. I’m not letting us.
“Laura.” I say her name softly, but firmly and she looks up.
“It wasn’t like he said.” Her eyes move between mine, measuring my response. “They didn’t fight. Cal—he—” Her voice breaks and her chin trembles.
And then she tells me.
It was only a week into summer, so hot already that she’d been begging Jason to take her swimming every day since he came home from college. He’d told us that Allison had gone to visit a friend and would be coming down in a few days, so Laura knew her time to have her brother all to herself was limited. After putting her off for the third day in a row, never letting her come along wherever he went each night, she decided to go anyway.
It was easy to sneak into the back seat of his car before he came outside, and she was still small enough that she could curl herself into an undetectable little ball on the floor behind the driver’s seat.
At first he’d just driven around. He’d pick up his phone as if to call someone then throw it down in the passenger seat. And he drove fast, fast enough that even her thrill-seeking heart grew worried. At last she felt him pull off the road, bumping along an uneven path until he slammed his brakes and threw open his door all in one motion, not even shutting it behind him when he got out.
She twisted enough to see from her hiding spot and recognized the tree by Hackman’s Pond. She was about to call out and reveal herself, sure that he’d have to go swimming with her now that they were just feet from the water’s edge, but something stopped her. It was more than the glint of the knife springing open in his hand—that was a common enough sight at that tree—it was the way he held it fisted tight as he stalked to the tree. And then she jerked as he made the first blow, not to carve but to destroy. She knew the place he focused his attack on and the names he hacked at again and again, even if she wasn’t close enough to see them.
His and Allison’s.
And she heard wretched sobs tear from his throat.
