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“I’m not. I’m pretty much a coward.”
He shook his head. “I wish you could see yourself the way the rest of us see you.”
There was still just one more thing I had to do as Hope. One final loose end to tie off. “I need a phone. A new number. Can you register it to the new name?”
“Easily.” He patted my shoulder.
Later that afternoon when he handed me the phone, he’d programmed a lot of numbers into it. I scanned through, noting Zeke’s was in there. Zeke. Layla. Bridget. But no Max. That was perfect. I’d never learned his digits, just having relied on it being in my phone. This was like a detox. Sort of.
I could be done with Max soon. After I sent Zeke a message. Michael had discussed my name change with Zeke. They all knew who I was going to pretend to be.
Hi, it’s Amelia. That was so strange to type. Can you find out how much Max would need to pay off his investors?
There was a pause, and he answered me.Are you sure you want to do this?
Final step.Sometime in the future, we can talk about what I did to him, but I need to finish this first.And I didn’t really particularly feel like I needed to explain it to anyone anymore.
Right before I went to bed, he pinged me with a number. A huge number. More than I currently had in my bank account, but I knew how I could get it.
Michael had gone to bed hours ago, so I shot him a text he could get in the morning.I need to sell something. Can your guys do it for me?
Three months later
I’d thought it might feel huge, overwhelming. The day that I had the bank anonymously wire the money to Max’s investors so they were paid off, I put an end to a time that was feeling further and further away from me. But it actually didn’t. Selling my mother’s painting hadn’t been as monumental as I thought it would be.Septemberhad belonged to the old Hope. It came to represent a time I was leaving far behind.
Everything about my life was different moving forward. My therapist said the move was probably cathartic. I liked that word. It was a good one. He’d be free to have the life he should have had before I’d come out of nowhere and disrupted it.
The news blasted in the room to give me background noise while I wrote my paper, due at nine in the morning, that I’d just started. I’d forgotten what a procrastinator I was in school.
Done yet?Bridget texted.
Nope. I answered her.
We still hadn’t talked about Michael. I’d kept my secrets, so she was entitled to hers, even if I itched to ask her every time we spoke or texted.
You should have been working on it all week.
I rolled my eyes. If I procrastinated, Bridget had always been annoyingly early in getting all of her work done. Her nagging me wasn’t helping.
“And in other news,” the reporter said. “A sad story today. Shawn Callihan Junior, the son of Senator Shawn Callihan, drowned while out on his boat. Seems the young lobbyist was swimming when he must have gotten a cramp and drowned. His body was recovered earlier today. A spokesperson on behalf of the senator says…”
I couldn’t hear any more words. Shawn was dead. The asshole who drugged and raped me was dead. My hands shook so hard, I could hardly hold my phone to text. Tears fell from my eyes.Relief. Yes, sweet relief. I should never wish dead on anyone, but I wouldn’t have to see him anymore, wouldn’t have to face the possibility of watching him run for office or even bump into randomly at any point for the rest of my life.
Shawn’s dead. I texted Bridget and Layla at the same time.
I just saw, Layla texted back.Was just texting you.
What?Bridget answered a second later.How are you? Are you okay?
I’m shocked. I think.That was the best I could do.
At three in the morning, with my paper badly done, I listened to my ceiling fan when my phone dinged again.Do you think he really drowned?Bridget asked.
I dialed her number. If she was up and texting, she could talk. “Why wouldn’t I think he drowned?”
“I don’t know. It just seems…strange. He drowned. After all this time. Was he out on the boat alone? Swimming by himself?”
No one had mentioned a thing about it being strange. “Maybe that’s a thing that he did. I mean…people swim.”
