Because what goes around really goes around.
—A quote from Wicket Tate’s blog, KarmaBitchSlap
Yeah, so I guess this is the part where I talk all about how I rode off into the sunset or whatever. Except there is no sunset and there’s no riding, unless you count trips on Griff’s motorcycle. I’m not going to bother changing any names to protect the innocent. They’d probably be mad if I did.
Lily’s started cheerleading. Yeah, exactly. You read that right. Cheerleading. I asked her if she was sick. She asked me if I was a bitch. We both about died laughing.
Then I watched Lily do her dance routine, and I understood. She loves the music and the movement. I would never have guessed, and maybe I don’t really get it, but I’m glad. She’s trying things she would never have dared to try before.
I guess we all are.
My dad’s not coming back. Ever. The police caught him with so much evidence he ended up taking a plea deal—not that it’s going to do him much good. He’s still looking at almost fifty years behind bars. It makes me sound vindictive, but I’m glad. And relieved.
Todd confessed too. Turns out he had been carrying this craving for as long as he could remember, but it wasn’t until the past six or seven years that it became unbearable.
He used Bren to fix himself, marrying her because she was successful and couldn’t have kids. He thought it would be perfect . . . until Bren wanted children. They moved to a family community, became involved with the church. Suddenly he was surrounded by the very thing he wanted to avoid. He couldn’t get away. And then, slowly, he didn’t want to get away because there was Tessa.
God, poor Tessa. I don’t think he wanted her because she was beautiful, but because she was broken. It drew him, or at least that’s what Norcut says. She thinks that in that horrible moment when Tessa found the courage to say no, Todd found himself, his real self. He discovered he enjoyed inflicting pain, and the man he was afraid of becoming was exactly who he wanted to be.
I guess we’re all figuring out who we want to be. Bren’s dealing by divorcing him and expanding the business. Our adoption papers went through last month, and we’re thinking about moving. Turns out the local folks don’t really understand how you couldn’t know your husband was a psycho. They’ve been pretty ugly to her—well, everyone except for Mrs. Waye.
We ran into her at the lawyer’s office and instead of screaming, instead of melting down, she just touched Bren on the arm and told her how sorry she was, how bad she felt for Bren’s loss. I thought that sounded a little Dr. Phil, but she has a point. The girl Mrs. Waye loved is no longer here. The man Bren loved never existed.
I don’t know. Maybe Tally just asked Mrs. Waye to be nice. I guess I’ll never know, but it meant a lot to Bren, and for that, I’m grateful.
Everyone else in town is blaming her. They think Bren knew and turned a blind eye. But other people’s choices—your dad’s, your husband’s, your sister’s—don’t make you who you are. You make you. I know Bren still feels guilty, though. She thinks she should’ve known. Sometimes, late at night, I catch her still awake, still mining little details of their married life, looking for clues.
“It’s going to be okay,” she tells me. “It will be.”
Bren repeats it like she’s convincing me, but really she’s convincing herself. Usually this kind of panicked positivity makes me nervous, but she looks so lost, I stick around. We sit on the cold kitchen floor with her hand wrapped around mine and I tell her that of course it will be okay.
The lie is so smooth it might have some truth to it. So what else? Oh, turns out Mr. Waye kept coming by our house because he suspected Todd. The night I came down to confront him, he thought he saw Carson’s car approaching, panicked because he knew how nuts he’d look, and took off.
He said he suspected Todd because he had “fatherly premonitions.” I hate that description. It makes him sound like a good guy. But maybe he isn’t entirely bad, because when Waye heard what happened, he came up to the hospital to check on me. Forgiving him didn’t feel right, and neither of us knew what to say, but he stayed.
So did Griff. He has to be the only person who can make me grin just by thinking about him, and I’m sure I have stupid cartoon hearts in my eyes every time I look in his direction. It’s nauseating . . . and awesome. I’m lucky. It’s like I got my very own happy ending.
Or I would, if Carson would let me go. The police chief gave him a promotion—like he did any of the work—and now he has his own team. Between his suspicions and what Todd must have told him, Carson knows I hack, and he says he’ll devote the rest of his life to proving it . . . unless I help him.
It’s been pretty easy stuff so far, but now the detective has a new target he wants me to investigate: a local judge. Carson knows the guy’s dirty, and I have my own reasons for agreeing with him, but I don’t want any part of it. The judge’s assistant was murdered. Stabbed to death. But before the killer dumped her body, he carved:
REMEMBER ME