“Maya,” Raven says.
I turn.
“If he contacts you?—”
“He won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
For the first time that night, my voice breaks, and everything I have held back starts to slip.
Raven’s expression shifts.
Not pity.
Something closer to regret.
“He left because he thinks that makes him better,” I whisper. “He thinks if he walks away after doing something unforgivable, then I get a choice.”
“That may be exactly what he thinks.”
“He should have asked me first.”
Raven nods once.
Then she leaves.
I make it to the bathroom before I fall apart.
The door closes behind me. I brace both hands against the marble counter and stare at myself in the mirror. My hair is soggy from the rain. There is dried blood near my collar. My mascara has smudged below my eyes, and for a second I look so much like Alice after one of Leon’s bad nights that I stop breathing.
No.
I grab a washcloth and scrub at my face until the water runs gray into the sink.
Leon is dead.
The thought should feel like relief.
Instead, it sits inside me like poison.
He is dead. He cannot hurt Erin again. He cannot make Heath offer himself up in the middle of a nightmare. He cannot ever touch another woman and tell her it is love. He cannot stand in a courtroom and lie through his perfect teeth.
But he is also gone.
No trial. No testimony. No moment when the world has to hear Alice’s name and understand what he did to her.
I sink down onto the bathroom floor.
The tiles are chilly beneath my legs. I pull my knees to my chest and press my face into my arms, trying to stay quiet as the first sob tears through me.
It is not graceful.
It is not controlled.
It is the kind of crying that comes from somewhere old and buried, somewhere I thought I had already emptied when Alice died. My sides hurt. My throat burns. Every breath feels like it catches on something sharp.
