This, Kesley, is how our tragedy ended. With snow drifting outside and piling against my barred windows.

Time passes strangely when you are in a mental hospital. At the beginning, everything was a blur, but as the days lengthened into a month and then two, my life settled into a routine.

I woke. I took my medication. I saw my therapist.

My mind was split, tainted by crimes that would never wash away. No matter how many apologies I uttered, no matter what drugs they hooked me on, she’d always be there. Lurking like a black shadow, waiting, waiting. Waiting to uncoil herself from my mind. That bitter girl who’d stood up to you for those awful things you did to me, the one who lured you to the lake to choke you.

Margo, they’d said her name was. Such a pretty, innocent name. But all she had been was a suppressed emotion. A cold, coiling fear that had blossomed into defiance. And with that defiance had come a spark that caught fire and destroyed a life. Your life.

Margo was brought out during hypnosis and psychotherapy, where my psychotherapist encouraged us to coexist. To fuse together. It was never about destroying her—as much as I wanted her gone. Margo was, for better or worse, a part of me.

I was told later that Margo confessed to killing Kesley not only for the things she’d done to me but also because she’d been getting close to the truth about Margo. Margo had taken root in my mind and wanted to stay there.

My therapist suggested I try painting again. She thought that, like writing this letter, it might help purge some of the terrible thoughts in my mind. She told me it could be used as a safe way for Margo to let herself be heard.

Eventually, I was allowed visitors. That was the hardest part. Our mother—I can only think of her as Diana now—came first. A case had been opened against her, and she had been found guilty of child neglect. She was allowed to see me with strict supervision after entering a plea bargain, pending my therapist’s and my own approval.

She’d perched on the edge of my bed and stared at me the first time, not speaking. So I did. “Why did you lie for her? Cover for her? I don’t understand.”

She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

“She hurt me,” I said. “Your daughter. In more ways than one.” I could feel the anger rising again, but I shoved it viciously down. If I got angry, the orderlies would come and restrain me. They’d done it before, when I first came here. I didn’t remember any of it, so it must’ve been Margo.

When the anger came, she came with it.

“I’m sorry,” Diana said, and tears dripped steadily down her cheeks. “I thought… I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten, Ava. Not until it was too late. I didn’t think it would amount to all this.” She waved her hand around my room a little hopelessly. “So many times, I thought of…of doing something—but what could I do? Go to the police? They would have taken you and Kesley away from me. You know I always wanted children. Always. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get pregnant. I just couldn’t. So I chose foster care. Then I found you and Kesley, and you were perfect. And then Kesley…she did that terrible, horrible thing, and I just…I didn’t know what to do. How was I to choose between my children? What was right and what was wrong? It all stopped before your seventh birthday. I thought maybe, maybe with time you would forget. You were so young. I’m sorry, Ava. I’m so sorry.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “sorry isn’t good enough.”

“Maybe one day,” she said softly, “it will be.”

I hoped she was right.

What she did—did that make her a terrible person? Or just a broken, confused person? She could have gotten you help. She could have done something instead of watching me suffer. She didn’t have to turn her back and pretend that nothing was wrong in her fairy tale life, and she didn’t have to live in denial. But life, I realized, wasn’t made up of rights or wrongs—only choices that define who you are. Decisions were blurry, often contorted with personal emotion. You might have been the one to start it all. But Diana let it happen.

And I will always, always resent her for that.

I find myself taking a lot of comfort in books. They help to quiet Margo. Besides, books have always kept me company in a way people couldn’t.

After the arrest, there was enough evidence for the police to search my house. Hidden under the floorboards beneath my bed was a box of things I had no recollection of putting there: clothes, newspaper clippings, bloodied pieces of rope, watches…and that note I’d found hidden in the piano. Margo had put it there, I now understood, when I “passed out” or switched personalities.

She’d been the one to plant evidence against Riley too.

Lia came soon after my therapist thought it would be beneficial to reconnect with old friends, but she only stood awkwardly at the door and looked at me as though I were a ghost. She’d come hand in hand with Jackson. He could barely look me in the eye without flinching.

They haven’t come again.

I don’t blame them. How must it feel, finding out you dated a killer and had no idea about it?

And Kesley… I know how it feels to think you know someone, only to have what you thought was true turned upside down and inside out.

My only other visitor is Rafe. I didn’t want to see him for a long time, and it was even longer until my therapist helped me understand that avoiding him wasn’t helping me. “You can run away from your problems,” she’d said, “or you can face them head-on. It will never be as bad as you think it will.”

So the next day, when Rafe came, I let him in.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hey.” It was hard to get the word out.

“Can I sit?”

“If you want.” I watched him take a seat on my bed. I was sitting in the old, moth-eaten chair in the corner of the room, my legs curled underneath me, with a book in my lap. I found it hard to look at him. But Rafe had his bright-blue eyes focused carefully on me, watching. Perhaps to see if Margo was there. She wasn’t.

The longer I took the medication and the more psychotherapy I had, the less I felt her, so to speak. Sometimes, in times of stress or vivid emotion, I felt her lying curled up somewhere in the back of my mind like she was sleeping. Other times I’d wake from a terrible, breathless memory, and I could feel her like a physical presence, telling me to do bad things. When that happened, I closed my eyes and focused my breathing until she fell away. Now it is happening less and less.

That first time Rafe came, things were strained. No, more than strained. How could I ever forgive him for what he had done to me? I told him, “I don’t know why you’re here.”

For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he said, “Because I care about you.”

“If you cared about me, then you would have just told me the truth.”

“If we told you what we knew, what would you have done?” Rafe said, and I looked up to meet his eyes. They were sad, conflicted. I thought about what he was saying.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly.

“Yes, exactly.” His words were blunt, but his voice was soft. He stretched out his hand as if reaching for mine, but I flinched, and he dropped his hand. I looked away as he said, “I’ve told you this before, but Kesley was like a sister to me. I would have done anything for her. Anything. But once I found out what she’d did to you, Ava… God, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t want to believe any of it. I didn’t want to believe she could do something so terrible. All I wanted was the truth and for you to begin to heal.” He blinked away tears. “And I didn’t believe what she’d done—not fully—until I saw Margo that night.”

“Do you think she loved me?” I whispered. “At all?”

“I don’t know, Ava. I don’t know.”

I said nothing to that. Just cried.

He’s come every day I’ve been allowed visitors since then. The good days and the bad. Sometimes, Margo was so present in me that I couldn’t remember those days, but he did, and on occasion, I caught him looking at me with an almost haunted expression in his eyes. I still couldn’t truly find it in myself to forgive him. Not yet anyway.

But he cared for me, and I cared for him.

One day, when my mind was plagued with flashbacks and emotions buried deep, deep, deep in my mind, Rafe came into my room. Without saying anything, he knew it was a bad day.

He reached for my hand, and this time, I let him take it.

So that’s it, Kesley. Our story splayed out in a notebook in front of me, but I think we both know it doesn’t end here. Will it ever end? Maybe, maybe not. Because I know that even at my last breath, all three of us will be there: you, me, and Margo.

Right until the very end.

Love eternally,

Ava.