Influenced by Eva Robinson (best free ebook reader TXT) 📗

in Cambridge anymore, wasn’t on a porch, wasn’t a police officer. She was a teenager in a cemetery in Lexington, staring at her twin sister with a gun held to her temple. Ciara’s knees were going weak, and she could only hear the harsh sound of her breathing.

Focus, Ciara. The pain of it all made her heart race. She needed to put a bullet in Stella’s head right now. She desperately wanted to glance back down at Michael, to see if he was okay. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Jess.

Not Jess. It’s not Jess.

Luke lurked behind Stella in the shadows, his hands raised, his face a bemused picture of innocence. Ciara tried to narrow her focus to the two people in front of her, though half her mind was still on Michael, half on Jess fifteen years ago.

Stella’s eyes looked empty. “Luke thought I could kill everyone and blame it on Hannah, but it got out of control. I can’t keep killing everyone.”

Luke shook his head, his expression sympathetic, like his friend had lost her mind and he was feeling a bit distressed about it all.

And yet Ciara’s heart was beating so wildly that she could hardly think straight.

One way or another, she had to end this now. Because Luke was a wild card. He looked far too calm for this situation, and that deeply unnerved her.

Luke’s head tilted, nearly imperceptibly, to warn Stella. Then he started whispering.

There it was. The wild card. Ciara could just barely catch a few phrases: “Everyone will know it was you… your name in the papers… only one way out…”

Sweat slicked Ciara’s palms, but she just caught the movement—the slight shift in Stella’s gun. Ciara fired before Stella had the chance. The gunshot echoed across the pond.

Ciara stared as Jess crumpled to the ground, a bullet hole in her forehead. All the air left Ciara’s lungs. Stella, she reminded herself. Not Jess. But her whole body was shaking, and she wanted to throw up.

Michael had dragged himself up the stairs and stood next to her, aiming his gun at Luke. Blood poured from his shoulder, but he seemed lucid.

Ciara closed her eyes for just a moment, trying to clear the image from her mind—the one of blood spilling through blond hair, of a skull blasted open at the back.

When she opened her eyes, Michael was handcuffing Luke.

“She lost her mind,” said Luke. “I had no idea. I did try to stop her. I had no idea what she was up to.”

Ciara turned to cross down the stairs, legs still shaking as she called the dispatcher. They needed an ambulance here, fast. She wiped a shaking hand across her mouth.

When she reached the gravel path, one of the women was still living, moving her head. “They’re trying to kill me,” she said, her voice choked.

“It’s all over,” said Ciara.

Forty-Three

Sixteen swirls of the spoon in his tea. The bullet had hit Michael in the front of the shoulder, fracturing his clavicle and ripping through his muscles. The fall, luckily, hadn’t broken anything. But even weeks later, that fall kept replaying in his mind. It could only have been a short amount of time, just a moment. But it had felt like it stretched out, with enough time for him to wonder if he was about to die, and with the certainty that he’d botched his life up. That he hadn’t finished what he was supposed to do.

As to what it was that he was supposed to do, he still had no idea.

That wasn’t the only moment that had stretched out through infinity that night. After he’d landed, after he’d assessed the situation and realized he was still alive, everything had seemed too quiet. Ciara had run up the stairs, but she hadn’t immediately shot Stella. There had been a long moment there that he still didn’t understand.

Sun streamed through the trees in Harvard Yard, the breeze rushing through the leaves. Students and visitors sat on the grass between the old brick buildings, drinking coffee, reading books in the late summer light.

From here, he could see the old boundary around the yard—the brick wall, the iron gates.

When he let his mind go quiet too long, another memory slammed into it—Stella, her pale eyes staring lifelessly at the night sky. Ciara wouldn’t admit it, but something about that night had disturbed her beyond measure.

An infuriating, irrational part of his brain wondered if everything would’ve gone better if only he’d been able to tap the door sixteen times before he’d left the car. Instead, two women lay dead.

The rational part of his mind told him that was only how he processed anxiety—with superstitions that gave him the illusion of control, that narrowed all his fears to one simple thing. And he didn’t want to be a superstitious person—not like Ciara, with her “terrible events leave an imprint” theory of the world. He didn’t want to pretend that the Enlightenment had never happened.

But the allure of distilling all your fears into just one thing…

Ciara had told him something about the wilderness outside the city walls—it was where the Puritans had hung the gibbets and built the gallows. Outside the gates, they believed, primal terror dwelled in the wilderness—a devil who wore a tall hat and consorted with witches. And when things went wrong, you could blame it all on him, so you never had to wonder if you’d made the wrong call, if you’d done something wrong. It was all his fault.

Michael watched Ciara as she walked through the gate into the yard, her earbuds in, sipping what he was sure was a triple espresso. As she approached, her ginger curls bounced over her shoulders. She beamed at him and pulled out her earbuds.

She sat down next to him. “I heard you were here.”

A heavy silence fell over them. Michael’s shoulder still ached.

“So do you believe my theory now?” she asked. “That terrible events leave an imprint on a landscape? Peter died there, and then two more