Page 121 of Shattered Veil

“So, like Claire,” Luke questioned in a harsh tone.

“No,” he replied, gritty. “Not like Claire.”

Luke countered, “Oh, you didn’t blackmail this girl, then?”

I could have sworn that I heard Claire swallow while Colton looked at him in horror.

“Do you think I didn’t learn my lesson?” he asked in a murmur, not waiting for Luke to respond before saying, “I did. I did the second that shit started going downhill with Claire and Travis—”

Luke began to interrupt, “I’m sure—”

“I’m not done yet!” Colton snapped, and Luke let out a shaking breath as he crossed his arms. “I’m not gonna get into my fucking feelings,” he touched his chest briefly, “but I can promise you that I did. And no—I didn’t blackmail her. They took her.” We all remained quiet while Colton’s voice trembled, “Not because of me. Just the luck of the goddamn draw. But they took her. I looked for her for months…I wound up finding her in the obituaries. She’s fucking dead.”

The gravity—the finality of his last choked word was heavy to the point that it weighed down the room.

Claire’s expression was pained as she consolingly spoke, “Colton, I—”

“Don’t make me talk about her,” he begged. “You wanna know why I’m hellbent? It’s because of her. You wanna know why you can trust me and believe that I’m one million percent in with this? It’s. Because. Of. Her. Please don’t make me talk about Peyton.”

Claire nodded, whispering, “Okay.”

While Luke appeared to glance at him with a shocked, begrudging, silent apology, Colton looked down to his right, meeting Zoey’s somber face, and he gestured to the screen once more:

“You, ah,” he cleared his throat roughly, “you Google that last number? Any idea who it was?”

It was a rapid deviation back to the topic that I had been itching to return to, but couldn’t because the need for trust in whatever we were continuing to do with Colton was paramount.

And I couldn’t be sure if trust was present…but any hostility toward him had rapidly dissipated because it was abundantly clear that he was telling the truth. That his quick, previous explanation of his behavior being related to the work of a vigilante was true, despite the group’s skepticism…but his determination to seek justice was not solely driven by his desire to turn his life around. I didn’t really know Colton as a person, and though he was quickly side-stepping his emotional outburst because there was no more to be said, I could still see it in him—feel it in the room amongst us. There was no arguing it:

This woman’s death had broken him, and he was doing it all for her.

Yes, his shift back to questioning Zoey about the phone numbers on the laptop was a sharp left turn—and we all went with it.

“Oh.” Zoey shook her head as if to clear it, her glasses slid down her nose, she pushed them up with an index finger, and she responded to him, “Yeah, um—family member, I think,” she replied quietly. “This website came up—rapid people search dot net? You can put in a phone number or someone’s name, whatever credentials, right? Basically pulls up public records.”

He nodded. “Does it seem accurate?”

“Well, I checked mine,” Zoey remarked. “Has all the addresses I’ve lived at since I was eighteen, my full name, my age…all that.”

“Jesus,” Claire muttered. “It cannot be that easy to find out where people live.”

Colton shrugged. “Public record—it’s not like it’s a secret.”

Zoey typed once again, loudly tapping the last key, and told her, “Yours checks out, too.”

Luke’s eyes bugged as he looked Zoey’s way. “Seriously?”

“I mean, it still shows 2A as our current address,” she clarified. “Not like any of us signed papers when we started subletting to Jay, but…current public record. Yeah.”

It was the first time I had spoken in a while when I ushered her, “Well, check more. Who knows who else 2D was talking to.”

“Try the guy that was getting pissed at him,” Colton suggested with another point of his finger to the screen.

“Yeah, yeah-yeah,” Zoey mumbled, and a rapid mess of clicks later, she narrowed her eyes at the computer.

Her skepticism made my stomach roll, and I pressed, “What?”

My questioning came out in a croak, and Zoey’s eyes snapped to mine.

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