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GWEN

“Ialready had the rope in my hand,” Evan said. I still sat in front of him on the chair, maintaining a perfect poker face. “And I was—I was just so mad. All those things she said. About me, about Ava… About our baby—I just lost it.”

Finally looking away, I stood.

“Why’d you change her shoes?” Sebastian asked.

“She, uh—” A sob quaked through him. “She threw up. While I was… When I…”

“When you were strangling her.” Heart in my throat, I did my damnedest not to picture it, but I couldn’t stop the mental image. “You loosened the rope for a second, she puked, it landed on her shoes, all over the ground, and you knew you were screwed. She’d go to the cops if you let her go, and you’d get attempted murder. So you decided. Kill her, clean up the mess, and change her shoes so it looked clean. Like she hung herself.”

He sobbed.

“Who covered for you?” I headed for the workbench as I spoke. “You clocked into work the next day, and you wouldn’t have had time to with all the driving.”

“I work construction,” he made out between weeps, finding partial composure. “I got in late, but I was alone at the site, so I filled out my time sheet like I always do.”

“So no one else took part in the cover up,” I said under my breath, eyeing the weapons on the tabletop. “Good.”

“I wish I could take it back.” He spoke hardly above a whisper, tears staining red-streaked paths down his cheeks. His swollen lips quivered, snot pouring from his nose like a faucet. “I would do anything to take it back. I swear I would.”

As if he hadn’t had the opportunity to stop when she was puking.

“But you can’t.” My voice stayed as steady as it had been since he awoke. So steady, so calm, I almost didn’t recognize it as my own. Compared to where I’d been when Delilah—or Allie—died, it was hard to believe that I was even the same person.

He only sobbed in response.

I’d heard all I needed to.

My sneakers squeaked against the concrete as I made it to the workbench. Sebastian and I had discussed all of our options, and we hadn’t landed definitively on any of them. He’d insisted we could make them all work, regardless of which one I wanted, so he had laid them out in preparation for me.

A metal baseball bat. A knife the length of my forearm—a machete, maybe. And a rope.

I grabbed the rope.

When I turned around with it in my hand, Evan screamed. Not a sob, not a cry, but a pathetic, almost heart-wrenching scream. The kind I’d only heard before in horror movies.

And maybe leaving my own lips a time or two.

Sebastian stood from his seat on the floor. Rubbing a hand against his jaw, he hooked a thumb in a gesture toward the door. He had faced Evan head-on throughout his entire confession. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to see this. I didn’t either.

I gave Sebastian a nod and waited for the metal door to clink shut behind him.

Evan kept screaming, pleading, as I walked around the room.

When I stood behind him, rope held out between my two tightened fists, I expected to feel something. Anger for my dead friend. Grief, at the thought of her life cut short. Shame, for what I had already done and what I was about to do.

But I felt nothing.

Just like the night I’d killed David.

No thoughts passed through my mind, no anxiety trembled my fingers, no chill went up my spine.

I felt nothing.

Not until I lifted the rope and tucked it beneath his chin.