Chapter one
Wounds
Prologue
July 18, 1994
My dearest Remi,
Everyone says time heals all wounds. That I’ll miss you less with each passing day.
I hate them. The people who say that.
They don’t know a goddamn thing.
Fucking assholes.
You should be here.
I’ll make them see.
Love always,
Becky
Chapter two
Hunt
Becky
I came to Ashford University for one reason.
Carrson Ashford.
It takes me three months to finallysee him, and, by then, I already know too much.
This place is deceiving. Century-old brick buildings sit in neat rows, as if nothing bad ever happens here. Spanish moss drips from the trees, sways lazily in the thick, humid air. Church bells clang in the distance, their sound drifting across the quad like a warning no one hears.
Strangers are so friendly that I startle when they approach.
In New York, where I’m from, nobody talks to anybody. Here, they won’t shut up. People stop me in the grocery store, in the mall, on the street, the moment they hear my Yankee accent. My words are clipped. Hard vowels, sharp as a picket fence. Theirs stretch and curl, longSsounds like snakes moving through honey.
They want to know where I’m from. Why I picked a university so far from home.
I give them the same answer every time. Strong academics. A top-ranked psychology department. Access to new technology, the Internet. Email. I tell them you can send messages through a computer now, no paper, no pen, and they nod like that explains everything. As if it’s enough to justify a decision this big.
It isn’t.
Carrson’s like this town, polished on the surface, something else underneath.
From across the quad, he looks like he stepped off a screen. Square jaw. Thick-lashed eyes. Dark hair cut clean and neat. A pale blue Oxford button-down so perfectly preppy I almost laugh.
Heat creeps up my neck as I shove the sleeves of my flannel shirt higher. I lift the newspaper, hiding behind it, which is dumb. He hasn’t even glanced my way. The headline catches my eye again. It’s an old article, from when his dad was still alive. Senator Ashford. A vote against funding pediatric medical research.
There are more articles like it in my backpack. Newspaper clippings. Notes I’ve jotted down, on him, his family, this place. The kind of documents no one reads unless they’re searching for something specific.
At first, it was nothing. Random names. Random outcomes.
