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I placed a call to the FBI cold case division and spoke with a sullen Agent Nolan who had no time for paranoid victims. Later that week, a knock at my door, and there stood the sullen agent, case file in hand.
I was his first official cold case.
Rhys claims that what changed his mind was one thing: victims rarely get the chance to tell their story. So many times he wished he could ask the dead their secrets. Now, this was his chance.
Maybe I should’ve been offended about the comparison. But I was, in fact, neither dead nor living when we met. I was found on the lake’s muddy bank. That dirt never washed off. By the time I left for good, I was the mud.
But, I had answers that could help solve my case, even if I didn’t realize it.
After our first meeting, where he asked questions to help fill in the gaps, Rhys returned to Quantico and across the distance, we worked tirelessly on my case.
He re-interviewed witnesses from the Dock House and the Uber driver. He spoke with the local PD in my hometown, questioning the detectives assigned my case. He pored over the images of my attack. He memorized my wounds. The placement, the degree of the injuries, the depth of every laceration. Each contusion and the abrading on my skin.
Near the three-month mark of the reopened investigation, Rhys knew my scars as well as I did.
But despite our exhaustive search, we were no closer to solving the mystery as to why I was targeted one night in March. It appeared I was a victim of chance. Although the facts of the case did pull up similar MOs across the country, Rhys theorized that I might have been the perpetrator’s first victim. A stranger selected because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was possible that, if I had been the first, the killer’s MO had since changed.
I can’t admit aloud how hopeless that possibility makes me feel.
On the one-year anniversary of my attack, Rhys convinced me to return to Silver Lake.
I had vowed never to go back…not until my attacker was apprehended…and it was a painful vow to break. We retraced my steps. From the campus to the driveway of Drew’s previous home (where Chelsea told me about the pregnancy). From the apartment I shared with my roommate (where Drew and I argued and the police took my statement) to the Dock House (where my roommate tried to help me forget). Then, to the pier of the lake, not far from the Silver Lake community where my parents still live.
Rhys and I stared at the rippling reflection of the crescent moon on the water.
Lotuses blanketed the lake with a iridescent sheen.
I listened to the crickets’ chirr, a haunting melody that I had no memory of from that fateful night. The wicked sound of frogs croaking filled the otherwise calm air. A desolate and eerie quietness that froze my bones.
That was the moment I revealed him to Rhys. The secret I’d kept from everyone—that twisted belief I had wrestled with, wanting to believe in my phantom hero some days, to deny his existence others.
The man who pulled me from the water.
The only memory—real or not—that I had from the night of my near demise.
In that moment, I wished I had Rhys’s training. I wanted to look at his face and read what he was thinking. But then, I was also terrified to know.
His actions have always spoken louder than his words. His silence sliced at me like the weapon used to carve my body all those nights ago. His weighted stare bled right through me, and when he cupped my face and placed a kiss to my brow, I dissolved under that comfort.
It didn’t matter if he believed me or not. Whether I had imagined it or not.
I was alive.
Man or animal, ghost or angel—whatever fished me from the lake—I had not drowned.
It was time to live.
The roll of the car engine awakens me from my post-flight trance. Inside Rhys’s rented sedan, I reach for my seatbelt and buckle in, pushing the heaviness from my chest.
“Ready?” he asks.
Deep breath. I twist the band around my wrist. “I am.”
5
Book of Cameron
