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When I pry them up, I’m holding my breath. It’s dark in the compartment beneath, but when I shine the light from my phone, I catch a glimpse of a small antique safe I recognize immediately. It was from Adam’s grandfather’s house.
“Well, that’ll make it easy,” Ace grunts as he joins me and peeks over my shoulder. “Let’s just take the whole fucking thing.”
He helps me to heave it out, and it’s surprisingly heavy for its size. Ace meets my gaze as a silent thought passes between us. It wouldn’t be this heavy if it were empty.
We set it upright, and I make quick work of replacing the floorboards and the cupboard that sits on top of them.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here, brother,” Ace says.
He helps me haul the safe to the door before he stops to grab his bag of tools. It’s a long slog back to the truck with our bounty, but we make it work. We don’t waste time fucking around once we’ve loaded the safe. Ace drives us to the remote spot where we set up camp for the night, and I don’t feel like I can breathe until we finally get there.
Cracking the safe takes longer than I’d hoped since neither Ace nor I claim to be professionals in that arena. But we figure it out, and when the door finally gives, I have to pause to get my shit together. My head is all over the place, and I’m trying not to get myself worked up. There could be nothing of value in here. If I’m going by what Tori said, I’m honestly not expecting much more than some old pills. But there’s also the small chance he wanted to hide something else. Something to give me a clue about what happened the night he was murdered. Regardless, this has been five long years in the making, and I need to know one way or the other.
“You’ve got this, brother,” Ace says. “Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”
I nod, steel myself, and open the door. And then I just fucking stare. I was expecting more by the weight of it, but all that’s sitting in the bottom is a lone hard drive.
“What do you think that’s about?” Ace’s voice is tinged with the same disappointment I feel. Adam used to do a lot of technical shit on the computer when he was taking advanced classes, and I suspect this is just a remnant from those. But then again, I don’t know why he’d need to hide it in this safe.
“Only one way to find out.” I walk around to my side of the truck to grab my laptop and USB cable.
We set up shop on the tailgate as I connect the external hard drive to the laptop. It’s going to take a while for everything to load, and the number of folders only leaves me with more questions.
“What the fuck is all that?” Ace leans closer. “There are thousands of files on here, and they don’t have names. Just dates.”
“I don’t know.” I sort them from oldest to newest and give them a few more minutes to load.
When I open the first folder, it turns out to be a bunch of naked pictures of random women. I find more of the same as I go through the next five folders. I recognize a few of them, but when I get to the folder with images of Tori, I immediately delete them and move on to the next. There are hundreds of photos of parties, sporting events, and random other shit, too. It’s a time capsule of Adam’s life. As I go through them, he grows older, and it leaves me with mixed emotions. Because I know his timeline ends at some point, and looking back, it’s hard not to remember him this way.
I believe what Tori told me, and I know there were sides to Adam he didn’t let me see. When I came back home from Bethesda, I had a glimpse of a completely different brother than the one I knew. But when he was dead, it was easy to forget those things and focus on the good memories. Maybe it was my guilt, but I felt I owed him that much grace after my betrayal.
That grace is gone now, though. My eyes are open, and I’m not anchored by my remorse as I excavate the next stages of his life. There are so many folders, I start skimming through them until I get to another one containing images of Tori. Only these ones are different.
She’s staring at the camera with a hollow expression, her face streaked with mascara and her arms and throat covered in bruises. But that isn’t even the worst of it. The worst part is there’s a video too, and when I open it, you can hear Adam taunting her as he records her. He’s laughing as she cries. Calling her a worthless whore, a slut, a cunt… every name he can think of. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he takes a marker and writes those same insults all over her body. When she doesn’t react the way he wants, he slaps her around, and I have to stop the video because he isn’t here, and it’s too late to beat his face in.
