A regular man. A neighbor. A teacher.
Her throat burned. Not from the cold—something deeper.
“You should’ve been there,” she whispered. “In the front row. With a lawyer beside you for civil damages. Not here.”
Snow clung to the top edge of the granite, to the carved letters of Lauren’s name. Sara brushed it away gently with her glove, like wiping hair from a forehead.
“I thought about you when he walked in,” she admitted. “Sinclair. Hands cuffed. Orange jumpsuit. No tweed. No books.”
“He didn’t look at me,” she said. “Not once. Not at Tessa either.”
But I watched him. I wanted him to see it on both our faces—that he didn’t win. Not with you. Not with me. Not with her.
Silence settled around her—heavy, close.
“I read your journals,” she whispered. “In that room—when I was trapped there.”
She swallowed.
“I felt like I was trespassing.”
“I’m sorry,” she added quickly. “I know you never meant for anyone to read those pages. But they helped us understand you—and him. They helped us find Tessa before it was too late.”
“You were so brave,” she whispered. “Scared. Angry. But still writing. Still… you.”
She shifted her weight.
“I keep thinking about that,” she admitted. “About how you wrote to stay sane. To stay you. How he took that and twisted it into something he could feed on. And then he tried to do it with me. With Tessa.”
Her gaze lifted, unfocused, to the sky.
“It wasn’t enough to take your body,” she said quietly. “He wanted your words, too. Your voice. That’s what makes me angrier than anything else.”
“We made it out. Because you kept writing.”
Snow fell a little harder. Tiny specks melted on her eyelashes.
Her voice thinned.
“I keep running scenarios. If I’d gone to campus sooner.”
She let the sentence die in the cold air.
After a moment, she crouched, knees protesting the chill, and set the white rose in the snow at the base of the stone.
“I can’t fix it,” she said. “I can’t give you back what he took.”
The words were simple.
“But I can do this much,” she promised. “I can show up. I can testify. I can look him in the eye in that courtroom and tell every damn thing he did. To you. And I can make sure your name isn’t a footnote in his story.”
She closed her eyes.
“He thought only finished stories mattered,” she whispered. “He was wrong.”
She reached out and rested her gloved hand against the cold stone for a second.
“You mattered.”
