Write back when you can. I'm curious about your college plans, about the future you're building for yourself.
K.
He's trying to distance himself. I can feel it in the way he's started mentioning my age, my "healing," the normal life he thinks I should want. As if I haven't spent every day since that night understanding more clearly that normal is the last thing I'm interested in.
"Delilah?" Janine's voice drifts up from downstairs. "Are you ready? We should leave soon if we want to get there before the restaurant gets busy."
The restaurant. Another lie in an increasingly complex web of deception I've built around tonight's actual plans. I told her I wanted to have dinner with Jessica and her prom group before the dance, that I'd finally decided to attend my old school's prom as a way of "reclaiming positive experiences" after everything that happened.
Janine was so excited about my apparent breakthrough that she immediately offered to drive me, to help with hair and makeup, to be as involved as I'd let her be in this milestone moment. The guilt of manipulating her genuine care sits heavy in my stomach, but not heavy enough to change my plans.
"Coming!" I call back, giving myself one final look in the mirror.
The girl staring back at me isn't the sixteen-year-old who helped position her father's body with clinical precision. She's taller now, her face more angular, her green eyes holding confidence that comes from months of honest correspondence with someone who sees her clearly. The dress transforms her from a traumatized survivor into something approaching dangerous.
Perfect.
I grab my purse—containing the hotel room key I picked up this afternoon, along with the address I memorized and thecarefully rehearsed explanation for why I'll need Janine's car for a few hours—and head downstairs.
Janine's waiting in the kitchen with a camera and the kind of proud smile usually reserved for actual daughters rather than traumatized nieces she's helped piece back together. She's wearing a soft yellow sweater that brings out her eyes, hair pulled back in a way that makes her look younger than her forty-five years.
"Oh, sweetheart," she breathes, raising the camera. "You look absolutely beautiful. Radiant."
The word hits harder than it should, because I do feel radiant. Not because of the dress or the careful makeup or the way I've styled my hair, but because of what's going to happen in three hours. Because Kent agreed to meet me, because our correspondence has built to this moment, because I'm finally going to see him again.
"Thank you." I let her take pictures, performing the role of an excited teenager attending her first formal dance. "For everything. The dress, letting me use your car, just…all of it."
"Are you kidding? This is the most normal teenage thing you've wanted to do since you moved in. I'm thrilled." She lowers the camera, studying my face with the attention of someone who's learned to read emotional weather patterns. "You seem different tonight. More…I don't know. More yourself."
The observation is more accurate than she realizes. Because I am more myself tonight than I've been in months of careful performances and therapeutic breakthroughs and academic achievements. Tonight, I get to be the girl who understands violence and isn't afraid of it, who can look at necessary darkness without flinching.
Tonight, I get to be the girl Kent writes to, not the one everyone else wants to fix.
"I feel good," I say, which is the first completely honest thing I've told her in weeks. "Ready for whatever comes next."
The drive to the hotel takes twenty-three minutes through downtown traffic that seems unusually heavy for a Saturday evening. I weave my way through streets I memorized weeks ago, toward the Grandview Hotel where I made reservations under a name that isn't mine and paid cash for a room I'll occupy for exactly four hours.
The hotel is elegant in an understated way—expensive enough to feel safe, anonymous enough that no one asks uncomfortable questions about teenage girls checking in alone.
I get out of the car and make my way toward the hotel entrance. My heart hammers against my ribs as I cross the marble lobby, noting the subdued lighting and quiet conversation of guests who mind their own business.
The elevator ride to the seventh floor feels eternal. Room 717 waits at the end of a hallway carpeted in deep burgundy, and I use the key card with hands that shake slightly despite my determination to appear composed.
The room is exactly what I requested: clean, anonymous, with a view of the city that suggests privacy without isolation. I set my purse on the dresser and check my reflection one final time, smoothing the silk dress and touching up lipstick that suddenly feels too bright.
Then I wait.
Kent arrives exactly on time: nine o'clock, as we arranged through carefully coded letters that discussed "meeting to finalize the details of our project." I hear his footsteps in thehallway, pause outside my door, the soft knock that we agreed would identify him.
I open the door, and for a moment neither of us speaks.
He's taller than I remembered, broader through the shoulders in a way that suggests he's filled out in the nine months since I last saw him. His dark hair is shorter now, more controlled, and he's wearing a charcoal gray sweater that emphasizes the lean strength I remember from that night in our kitchen.
But it's his eyes that make my breath catch—the same dark intensity that saw through my father's performance, that recognized something in me worth understanding. They widen slightly as they take in the woman I've become, the way the dress transforms me from the girl he knew into something else entirely.
"Will you make fun of me if I say I'd begun to think I'd made you up in my head?" I ask, my voice steadier than I expected.
Something flickers across his face—surprise, recognition, something that might be relief. "No," he says quietly. "I won't make fun of you."
