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I keep the wallet, and we destroy each other—but I will have, technically, gotten what I wanted.

There’s only one obvious choice.

“If you leave right now,” I say, “I won’t tell Mrs. Keating anything. I’ll shut up about all the little secrets you told me. That’ll give you a fighting chance, right?”

A chance to survive the inevitable fallout of what I’m going to do—a chance to get a head start on escaping the Sutherlands. A chance to prepare before it gets bad for them all over again. See? I’m not a monster. This is my version of kindness, because what happens to them after this is none of my business.

It isn’t. It can’t be. I can’t afford that. Not now.

“You’re a liar,” Felicity rasps.

“Sure,” I say. “But not right now.”

They don’t move.

I say, “You have thirty seconds before I change my mind.”

They look at me. The wallet. The knife. The door.

Felicity Keating chooses the door.

This is called a shutdown.

When an autistic brain implodes in on itself. Instead of exploding outward, breaking plates and pulling knives from kitchen blocks, it collapses. Blue-screens. Flatlines. Processes I’ve spent years building—speaking, showing my emotions, existing without staring blankly like a broken doll—go offline in a snap. My limbs are lead. Every synapse that manages to fire is a sluggish drawl. It’s too bright in here, too warm.

There’s too much blood on my hands.

I drag myself to the sink. I have to wash it off. I turn the water up as hot as it’ll get and don’t even hiss when it slams into the open wound.

First Daniel, then Vincent, then Alyssa, then Felicity. Each one of them is the rung of a ladder that’s snapped out from underneath my foot. And Felicity—Felicity knew all along. Every time they texted me, kissed me, reached for my hand, god, when they pulled me into their bed, they knew. They saw me stumble out of the elevator all those years ago. They were ten years old and they couldn’t tell anyone that their sister was dead, because otherwise they’d end up dead, too.

They were ten years old, and so was I.

This is what I get for trusting someone. For trusting anyone. I should fucking know better.

But I won. I blew up every relationship I’ve managed to cobble together, gave Felicity Keating every reason to ruin my life, and stuck my hand in the vat of acid, but I won.

Finally, when the cut feels clean enough, or whenever I can convince my body to move, I turn the water off, drag my body to the dusty couch, and collapse.

According to Mom, and what little my brain has managed to retain, I was always an angry child. Lashing out and fighting at the slightest provocation. But the trial changed me. So much attention with no outlet short-circuited my brain—turned me completely and utterly unresponsive. I only ever spoke on the stand or when Alyssa misunderstood Leah’s attempts at communication. I barely moved, never smiled, refused to eat until I made myself sick. A doctor tried to convince Mom to give me an AAC device, one of those little touch boards with a hundred pictures, but she refused. I swear she got worse in those months, as if she could rage-bait me into returning to the aggressive animal-child she recognized.

That’s what it feels like now. The same head-pounding exhaustion. Every movement and thought a struggle.

I don’t know how long I lie there until I hold the driver’s license and the old picture up to the light. Long enough that the sun’s angle over the Potomac sends glittering reflections across walls and bloodstains.

And then, long enough that the sun starts to set.

Hours.

Because I can’t move, or think, or do anything. Until I can claw my way to the surface of whatever freezing river this is.

What now, then?

What do I do with this, now that I have it? I can’t make my thoughts connect to each other. Do I take it to my mom? The producer? Beg them: Look, I found her. I have her name. Would Dad do this? No, he wouldn’t. See? I’m not him. I’ve proved it. Do you believe me now? Do you?

I turn Felicity’s switchblade over and over in my hand, held limply over the side of the couch. The movement cracks open the tenuous clotting between my finger and thumb.

I won, but I can’t go home. Not like this. And with Felicity and their podcast gone, my avenue to put this out in the world destroyed—