The night before I leave for college, I sit in what used to be Delilah's room and pack the last remnants of my old identity. Letters from Kent that I've read so many times the creases are wearing thin. Crime scene photos I printed from news coverage of my father's death. The confession tape that still sits hidden in a jewelry box, sixty-three minutes of truth that could destroy half the police department.
Evidence of who I used to be, carefully catalogued and preserved like artifacts from an archaeological dig. Not because I want to remember, but because forgetting would be strategicallyfoolish. The girl who fell in love with a killer might have been naive, but she learned valuable lessons about the nature of power and the cost of vulnerability.
Lessons that Lila North will never forget.
I find one last letter at the bottom of the box—an envelope addressed in Kent's careful handwriting, postmarked two weeks after he left me in that hotel room. The return address is a P.O. Box I don't recognize, probably chosen to maintain his operational security even as he tried to re-establish contact.
I've carried it unopened for four months, weight in my pocket and in my thoughts. Part of me has wondered what he said, whether he regretted walking away, whether absence made him realize what he'd thrown away.
Now, sitting in my childhood bedroom for the last time, I tear it open with steady hands.
Delilah,
I hope you'll read this, though I understand if you don't. I hope you're building the life you deserve, finding people who can give you what I couldn't.
What happened between us was my responsibility, my failure to maintain appropriate boundaries. You were everything I said you were—remarkable, intelligent, capable of understanding things most people never encounter. But that understanding doesn't change the mathematics of our situation.
I made the right choice walking away. For both of us, but especially for you. Someday you'll meet someone your own age who can appreciate your complexity without being threatened by it. Someone who can love you without calculating the cost of that love in bodies and destroyed lives.
Don't write back. Don't try to find me. Build something better than what we had, something that doesn't require secrecy and moral compromise and the weight of carrying deadly truths.
You deserve light, not darkness. Choose light.
K.
I read the letter twice, noting his assumptions about my future, his confidence that he knows what I deserve better than I do. The paternalistic tone that reduces our entire relationship to his "failure to maintain appropriate boundaries" rather than acknowledging it as genuine connection between equals.
Then I tear it into small, precise pieces and drop them in the wastebasket beside my desk.
Delilah Jenkins might have treasured those words, analyzed them for hidden meaning, carried them like a lifeline to someone who understood her. But Lila North recognizes them for what they really are: one more attempt by a man to control a woman's choices by disguising cowardice as protection.
He's wrong about what I deserve. I don't deserve light—I deserve power. The power to make my own choices without someone else's approval, to understand darkness without needing anyone's permission, to become dangerous enough that no one will ever again make the mistake of thinking I need saving.
I close the box of memories and tape it shut with surgical precision. Tomorrow, Lila North leaves for Yale University to begin studying the minds of violent offenders. She'll learn everything there is to know about predators and their victims, about manipulation and control, about the psychology of abandonment and the cultivation of emotional distance.
And in nine years, when she's Dr. Lila North with credentials and authority and the kind of professional respect that makes people listen when she speaks, maybe she'll have occasion to use that knowledge.
Maybe she'll encounter a case that requires her particular understanding of methodical violence and careful positioning. Maybe she'll recognize a signature that matches methods she learned about through seven months of correspondence with a killer who thought he could save her from herself.
Maybe she'll have the opportunity to remind someone that abandonment creates exactly the kind of monster they were trying to prevent.
But that's a fantasy for another day. Tonight, Delilah Jenkins dies quietly in her childhood bedroom, suffocated by the weight of her own naive belief that understanding someone means they won't leave you.
What rises in her place is something harder, colder, infinitely more dangerous.
Something that will never again make the mistake of needing anyone's approval to exist.
***
I wake up on move-in day feeling nothing.
Not excitement about starting college, not nervousness about living away from home, not sadness about leaving Janine and the life we've built together. Just cold, clinical assessment of the day's logistics and requirements.
Lila North approaches the world like a chess player studying the board—every interaction calculated for maximumadvantage, every relationship evaluated for potential utility, every emotion filtered through the question of whether feeling it serves a strategic purpose.
It's remarkably peaceful, this detachment. No messy feelings to navigate, no vulnerability to manage, no risk of caring enough about someone that their abandonment could destroy you. Just pure, focused intention directed toward clearly defined goals.
Janine drives me to the train station with tears in her eyes and advice I pretend to value. She hugs me goodbye with the desperate intensity of someone who senses she's losing more than just physical proximity, that the girl she helped raise is disappearing into someone she doesn't recognize.
