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It was the only way she knew how to survive.
If she let her emotions become too strong, then she was afraid she would end up doing what she had tried and been unsuccessful at when she was thirteen.
Despite what Michael had said, it hadn't been just a cry for help. Shehadwanted to die. And for a long time afterward, she had been so upset that she had survived.
She had left school early one day, Fin was supposed to go to football practice after his final class, and her grandmother had bingo. She had gone through the medicine cabinet, taken whatever was there with a glass of water then gone to lie down in her bed to wait to die.
Only she hadn't died.
She had passed out. She remembered her eyes growing heavy and feeling sleepy, so very sleepy.
Then the next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital.
Apparently, Fin had skipped football practice because he had a party he wanted to go to that night and had come home to find her passed out. He’d called an ambulance, and she had been rushed to the hospital where her stomach had been pumped.
Her brother had been so angry with her, he thought that she had tried to abandon him like everyone else in their lives had, and he wasn't wrong. She’d been sent to a psychiatric facility where her therapist had taught her bonsai as a way to find the peace and tranquility she needed to learn to deal with the mess of emotions that lived inside her.
Even fifteen years later it was still her go-to.
But today she couldn’t even summon the strength to do that.
She might not have suicidal thoughts anymore, but that didn't mean she always knew how to deal with her emotions. Often they overwhelmed her which she guessed was why her body had developed the defense mechanism of turning her numb.
“You’ve hardly eaten anything,” Michael said, startling her out of her thoughts.
“Could you eat if you’d just gotten someone horribly murdered?” she asked dully.
“You didn't get anyone killed.”
“Really? Because that’s not what he said. He said that unless I gave myself up to him, he would kill someone, and that’s exactly what he did.”
“You are not responsible for his actions,” Michael said fiercely, his brown eyes practically glowing with pent-up frustration. She knew it wasn't directed at her, it was directed at the stalker. Samara knew that he was angry because as well as killing innocent people the stalker was hurting her.
She didn't want to keep having this conversation, it was just going to continue going around in circles. She would keep saying that the stalker was killing because of her, and Michael would say that she wasn't responsible for someone else’s actions,neither of them was going to change their positions.
Absently, she stuck her fork in the piece of lettuce she had been playing with and lifted it to her mouth. Samara knew that Chloe and Tom were working as hard as they could to catch the stalker and they very nearly had. Today’s victim had been killed only minutes before they managed to find her car.
So close.
They had been so close to saving that woman’s life and catching the stalker before anyone else got hurt. They had found the café, they had found out who the woman in the photo was, they had found out what car she drove, they had even managed to find the car.
And yet none of that had done any good.
She had been murdered anyway.
This was hopeless.
The stalker knew everything about her, and she knew nothing about him. He was going to keep picking random people off the street and killing them, and there was nothing they could do about it. How did you stop someone like that? How could you get ahead of them when there were too many potential victims out there?
This was hopeless.
The only way to stop him was to give him what he wanted.
Her.
If she gave herself over to him, then no one else had to die at his hands.
What other choice was there?
