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Silence hangs in the air for a moment as I process his words. They’re going to tell me about Emily?
I nod slowly, then take a bite of my dinner. I’m almost worried that if I say something, I might scare them off.
“When we were in high school, Rich was trying to get us to think about our futures,” he starts. “We all had this burning desire to make our community a safer place, especially after the Haven Center was closed. It wasn’t very long after that things started to go downhill and the last of the Serpents started poking around.”
“We didn’t know how we wanted to change things,” Dominic adds. “Just that we wanted to protect our town. We came up with the idea of going to the police academy together and becoming cops.”
“I wanted to be a detective,” Caleb interjects. “But yeah, we were going to ‘save’ Caspian Springs and drive all the bad guys away.”
“What happened?” I ask curiosity aroused. I can’t imagine the guys as cops, it just seems so weird.
“The county tried to cut funding for school lunches,” Caleb says, a distant smile on his face. “Rich was pretty upset about it, so we went downtown and joined a big protest. That’s where we met Emily. I had just graduated.”
“She was at the protest?” I ask.
“She was leading the protest,” Bastian corrects me. “She was really into community activism and stuff, and she had this charisma that got everyone fired up. When we went to sign her petition, she managed to get us to sign up for a bunch of volunteer shit. One thing led to another, and she started coming here to the house to hang out.”
“Oh, when did you get the house?” I ask.
“We bought it with the life insurance money from Grandpa’s will after Dom graduated,” Bastian explains. “Emily hung out here all the time and we told her about our plans to join the academy, but she convinced us that we could do better for the community by doing activism with her. We told her about the Haven Center, and she wanted to help us get it started back up again.”
“She pushed us, made us see that we could do a lot of good with the Haven Center. We had so many big plans,” Dominic reminisces. “Emily was like a breath of fresh air to us, someone from outside the community who saw the potential of it.”
“Did you guys get funding?”
They nod. “We secured a grant from some interested organizations. It was hard but Emily studied stuff about non-profits when she was at school, so she helped us,” Caleb says.
They tell me more about the plans they made for the center, and how she helped them along.
“We started getting feelings for her,” Dominic confesses. “All three of us. It was easy to fall for someone like her.”
I feel like I should be jealous, but it just makes me sad that they lost someone like her. “So what did you do?” I ask.
“We decided that it wouldn’t be fair for all three of us to compete for her, so we figured if she was down for it, we could all share,” Bastian says. “So we talked to her about it and surprisingly, she was fine with the idea of sharing. It worked out great. There was no jealousy, no competition, just us all growing closer.”
I feel a profound sense of sadness well up inside me. “It sounds like you really loved her.”
“We did,” Caleb says, twisting his fingers together under the table. “We thought everything was perfect. Plans for the center were coming along and we got a timeline together for reopening it.”
“But then we noticed for some reason Emily was spending a lot of one-on-one time with Rich,” Bastian says, expression darkening. “She was avoiding us, growing distant. When we confronted her, she didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I didn’t understand,” Caleb admits. “I pushed her to tell me what was going on, but she just said that she couldn’t tell us yet.”
“That’s when Rich came to us,” Dominic says, expression haunted. “He told us that he and Emily had been out talking about plans for the center and drinking wine; they got drunk. She seduced him, and they slept together.”
I gasp. The man who was like a father to them their whole lives slept with their girlfriend? My hand flies to my mouth. “No.”
“He said it was a mistake, that he was so sorry,” Bastian says, voice thick. “He kept apologizing. Told us that he let her down gently, but she didn’t take it well. She screamed at him for using her and stormed off. He didn’t know where she went and her phone was off.”
I feel tears sting at my eyes. This must have been so devastating for everyone involved.
“Two days later, her landlord found her body,” Dominic says, voice hollow. “She hung herself. Left behind a note that he gave to us.”
Caleb squeezes his eyes shut and wipes the tears away furiously. “She said she’d fallen in love with Rich after all the time they spent together. That she … she felt too guilty about her affair and couldn’t live with herself, or without being able to be with Rich.”
Tears stream down my face. This explains so much. I can’t believe that I thought the boys were just mad at Rich for something petty. The truth was so much worse.
“We could never forgive ourselves and we blamed it on him,” Caleb says. “I can’t look at him the same way after what happened. I feel sick.”
