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“Was Miss Martin’s death the first time you’d had a vision?” Agent Jones asks, and bless him, he manages to keep a straight face.
“No. I’d had them all my life, but nothing like this. I’d seen my grandfather die of a heart attack when I was around eight or nine. But other than that, I’d never seen anyone die. My parents thought I had an overactive imagination, but then I saw my sister die, too.”
“I’m sorry. We have very little here on your sister, which is odd, given how she seems to be connected to all this.”
“I didn’t know she was connected at all until Nathan attacked me.” I touch my fingers to my still-bruised throat. “Hope was my twin. We were identical, but we were as different as night and day.”
“How so?” Davis asks.
I start telling them about myself as though I’m describing my sister and fight the urge to scream. “She was quiet, moody, kept to herself. But she was opinionated when she wanted to be. I was the opposite. I was outgoing and popular, always involved in some group or charity. I even dated the quarterback. When we were fourteen, we went to a New Year’s Eve party thrown by the football team of one of the local high schools. I’m still not sure to this day why Hope wanted to go. It was never her scene to begin with.”
“Maybe she was meeting someone.”
I nod. “She had a crush on one of the players. I knew him but didn’t know him. I only had eyes for my boyfriend at the time.” I sigh and rub my hands over my face. “We got separated the second we arrived. I saw her a few times throughout the night, and each time, she was downing whatever was in her red plastic cup. I saw her dancing with all the guys on the team. They were getting handsy. She had boobs, and they had beer. That’s all anyone cared about.”
I try to keep the bitterness out of my voice, the lies tasting like ash on my tounge.
“I tried to talk to her, but she didn’t want to listen. I drank water all night and hung out in the corner with my friends, until I made the rookie mistake of leaving my drink unattended when I went to the bathroom. It didn’t take long for me to start feeling sick, so my boyfriend took me home early. I didn’t know anything was wrong until the next day.
“When Hope said she was raped, I believed her because she was my sister, and I mean, who the fuck lies about being raped? But she did. She lied.”
“Why do you think she lied?”
I cross my arms over my chest as Valen massages my shoulders. “The person she accused of raping her had an alibi. I know because he left early with me and my boyfriend. He was the one who drove us home. The police got involved. My parents took her to the hospital, and the doctor said there were signs of intercourse and some tearing which could happen the first time. There was no conclusive evidence that the sex she had hadn’t been consensual and there were no defensive wounds.”
It’s my biggest shame that I didn’t fight back harder that night. I remember how weak I was, the drugs in my system making me lethargic. I struck out, hit something hurting my hands in the process but it obviously wasn’t hard enough to leave bruises. I was terrified, in pain, and drugged to high heaven, butstill, shouldn’t some kind of higher power have stepped in and given me the strength to fight them off? There are many things I wish I could go back and change, but none more so than that. Even though I know it wasn’t my fault, I’m still mad that I didn’t fight harder. And that set the tone for every attack that came after. It was only the thought of losing Valen that snapped me out of it and made me push back.
I was broken but I wasn’t dead but Valen was like the oxygen in my longs and without him I would be.
“The guy’s parents… I’m sorry, I can only remember his first name. Paul. Anyway, his parents were rich and insisted on having Hope committed. They didn’t trust that Hope wouldn’t try to ruin Paul’s reputation with her lies.”
I roll my eyes and silently curse myself.
“You don’t agree.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that they’d already decided she was guilty before they’d even spoken to her. They looked down their noses at her and, by extension, me because we looked the same.”
Everyone’s quiet for a moment before Agent Jones gestures for me to continue.
“I don’t know much more. Like I said, I was fourteen, and my parents and I had to sign an NDA. That NDA meant we didn’t talk about it, and the guy’s family paid for Hope’s stay at Briarwood House. We rarely spoke about Hope after that. My parents pretended she didn’t exist, and everyone who knew her thought she’d moved to England to stay with some distant relatives. I didn’t forget her, though. She was literally my other half.”
“She died while staying at Briarwood House?” Davis prompts.
“Yes. I went to visit her every week without fail, even though she didn’t want me to. She changed more and more each time I visited, until I just didn’t recognize her anymore. She hatedeveryone and everything. And eventually, it became too much for me to deal with, so I stopped going. Six weeks after my last visit, she hung herself in her room.” I swallow and tip my head back, looking up at Valen so I can draw from his strength.
When Davis clears his throat, I look back at them.
“How long was she in there for?”
“Just over two years.” I wrap my arms around myself, remembering each and every torturous second of it.
Briarwood House, on paper, had been a mental health facility that catered to the children of the rich and reckless. I was neither. I was just a plaything. Nathan and Paul’s parents, Tom and Kathryn, were extremely wealthy, though. When they proposed to my parents that they would fund my stay at Briarwood so I could get the best possible care, my parents jumped at it.
Tom knew what his son had done. Paul, that is. I never told anyone except Valen about Nathan. What was the point? Nobody believed me about Paul, so why would they believe me about Nathan?
Knowing his son was a monster and I was the victim did nothing to Tom’s conscience, though. He didn’t want his family name ruined, so he hid me away from the world and let the vultures pick away at my carcass.
“You said in your statement that Detective Hask mentioned how things started with her. Do you know what he meant?” Jones looks up at me.
