Chapter Twenty-OneThiago
She turned pale, and her hand started to tremble ever so slightly.
“Why are you here? Did he send you? I did everything he asked.”
I paid close attention to those words. To the way she talked to me, and how she immediately got so defensive. But that’s not all, it’s how scared she was. The fear behind her eyes told me everything I needed to know. She couldn’t hide it. Something bad had happened. And I wasn’t going to like what I heard.
“Amelia, it’s OK…relax.” I tried to sound calm. “I’m not here to hurt you. I promise. I’m here to find out about Jules because something tells me he’s dangerous, and I’m worried he might be about to hurt someone else.”
Amelia looked around and stood up.
“Sorry, you’ve got the wrong person,” she said. I put my hand on her wrist to stop her and tried to stay calm. I didn’t want to scare her.
“Please don’t go,” I asked, “I’m scared that a friend is in danger because of him, and I need to know what’s going on before I make the wrong decision.”
She looked at me doubtfully.
“Please,” I repeated. “All I need to know is what he did and why you asked for a restraining order against him.”
Surprised now, Amelia sat back down. Not because she wanted to talk to me, it seemed, but because she was worried her legs wouldn’t hold her up much longer.
“How do you know about that?” she asked.
“Does it matter? Look: Jules is a new student at the school where I work as a coach. I had a feeling I’d seen him before and—don’t let this weird you out—I had. We met in jail one day when I was a little younger, we both got arrested, and we were assigned the same holding cell. Don’t be scared. I got in a fight, nothing serious. It was a dumb mistake. But I remember meeting him there and that he used to go by a different name. At the school where I work, everyone calls him Julian Murphy.”
“Jules is crazy,” she said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“What did he do to you, Amelia?”
She looked out the window, picked up her cup, and took a sip.
“He was a sweetheart at first, OK?” She spoke without looking at me. “I’m a good student, but I’ve always struggled with math. It’s been that way since I was a kid, and someone told me Jules was tutoring people for free. So I got in touch with him and started lessons. At first, he gave them in the library, but eventually he was like,Oh, you should come to my house or let me come to yours, and that made sense because it was more relaxed and we could meet whenever we wanted. We got along, and he’s good-looking too. I was the head cheerleader then, and he was kind of a nerd, so…you get it, I wasn’t used to being seen with people like him. When we first started going out, we kept it a secret. I know that was wrong, I know now, but it’s high school. I didn’t want people to know I was with some math geek. Especially because Liam… Liam’s the captain of the rugby team and he ended up being homecoming king that year; he was intome, and I think people sort of hoped we’d end up being a thing. I know Liam did.”
All these details seemed irrelevant, except for the fact that I might as well have been listening to Kam describing herself. Amelia seemed a little more superficial, but they had more similarities than differences.
“Go on,” I encouraged her.
“We hadn’t been together for long before he turned super demanding. He kept asking for more and more. I could have been nicer to him, I admit that, but it’s just that our lives were so different. He used to say all the people at school were assholes, that I was better than them, that I shouldn’t even bother hanging out with them. He never wanted to go anywhere; he just wanted to hang out in his room. And soon he… I don’t know how to explain it, but he managed to drive me away from all my friends. He’d be there waiting for me outside the door of all my classes; he’d pick me up and take me home from school. People found out about us, of course, and some people thought it was weird.”
Who cared what other people thought? I wanted to ask her that, but I held back. I was starting to get what kind of girl Amelia Warner was. Although they had some similarities, this girl couldn’t compare to Kam. Then, Amelia started getting nervous, and tears streamed from her eyes.
“I wanted to break up with him. Once we slept together, everything got worse. He turned obsessive. He wouldn’t leave me alone for a second, and he started threatening to hurt my friends. He said they deserved whatever they got because if I was so superficial and empty, it was because of them. And he always knew everything! I don’t know how, but he kept track of who I talked to, who I saw…” She glanced at me a moment and her cheeks flushed an even darker crimson. “Then, the last time we slept together…he took it too far. He liked to experiment, and at first, I was OKwith trying new things. He had promised if I didn’t like something, I could just say our safe word and he’d stop. But he didn’t… He tied me up, hands and feet, and he brought out a video camera…”
I tensed up when I heard that. “He recorded you?”
Amelia nodded.
“He recorded all of it.” She wiped a tear from her face with the back of her hand. “He told me he was going to post it online, and that’s when I called the cops. People figured out he was a psycho. You can’t imagine the stuff he was into. He knew everything about everyone, and I found out it wasn’t just me he was blackmailing. It was my friends too, even people who just kind of knew me.”
“So why didn’t you end up pressing charges?”
“Because he threatened to put the video online,” she said simply. “The police couldn’t do anything about something they weren’t even sure existed. They arrested him because I told them what he’d done to me, but I withdrew the charges when I found out that, if he wanted, that video would be all over the internet, haunting me for the rest of my life.”
That piece of shit.
It was him.
My instincts had been right the whole time.
