He lets out a quiet laugh, low and humorless, and something in it makes my stomach turn. “Is that what you think?” he says. “You didn’t know her as well as you believe you did. She confided in me too. More than you’d like to admit.”
My pulse stutters.
“She was worried about you,” he continues, watching me carefully now, gauging every flicker of reaction. “About your state of mind. She told me how you cut ties with your family, how you walked away from them and never looked back. She thought you believed you were better than them.”
“That’s not true,” I say quickly, but the words land unevenly, weaker than I want them to be.
Because there is a version of that story that could sound like truth, depending on who is telling it.
And he knows that.
Phillip sees it the second the doubt crosses my face, and he leans into it, his voice smoothing out, almost reassuring in a way that makes it worse. “She loved you,” he says, “but she was concerned. She thought you were slipping, that you were starting to see things that weren’t there. Reading too much into things, making connections that didn’t exist.”
The anger in me flares again, but it is no longer clean. It is tangled now with something else, something colder, something that settles deeper and refuses to move.
Confusion.
Doubt.
Was she worried about me?
Did she say those things?
No.
This is him.
This is what he does.
But even knowing that, the words don’t let go. They linger, slipping into the spaces I can’t quite guard, making everything feel just slightly less certain than it did a moment ago.
“She was scared of you,” I say again, forcing the words out, but I can hear it now, the shift in my own voice, the hesitation I can’t quite hide. “Maybe she was going to leave you. Maybe you couldn’t handle that. Maybe you lost control.”
“So I what?” he interrupts smoothly, his tone edged with quiet amusement. “I killed her? Is that what you’re suggesting? That I got rid of my wife and somehow thought no one would question it?”
I open my mouth, ready to push back, to say something thatwill force him to react, but nothing comes. The certainty I had just moments ago feels less solid now, less sharp, as if he has reached inside my head and rearranged something I can’t quite put back.
I know what I read.
I know what Whitney wrote.
I know what I felt in those pages, the fear woven between the lines, the things she didn’t say outright but left just visible enough to be understood.
So why does it feel like it’s slipping?
Phillip steps closer again, his voice dropping just enough that I have to focus to hear him. “If you want to ruin both of our lives,” he says quietly, “go ahead. Take those journals to the police. Tell them everything. But understand this. Once you do, there is no undoing it. No controlling what comes out. No stopping what follows.”
The implication lands before the words fully settle.
He knows.
Or at least, he suspects enough to gamble on it.
My breath catches, the weight of it pressing in all at once, and I hate that he can see it, hate that he can read me well enough to know exactly where to apply pressure.
Because he’s right.
If I go to the police, everything comes with it.
