Page 108 of Rent Free

“Anyway, so he found out, and I started pushing him, taunting him. And he got a bit… upset.” She laughed then, as if getting hurt by a man was hilarious to her. “When I fought back, he started acting a bit… unhinged. I forced him to hit me at first, but it took me shooting his dog to get him to do it.”

All of us gasped.

“You shot his dog?” Pepper cried.

I saw my son jerk at the sound of Pepper’s voice raising, and I caught her hand and pulled her back.

“It was an old dog.” Sage once again brushed her actions away.

I felt sick.

This was the person I’d been defending for the better part of a year.

“And so he beat the shit out of you, as he should,” Wendy guessed.

“Yeah,” she shrugged. “I was leaving after he punched me in the face one too many times—getting hit in the face hurts too much—when I heard a bulletin go over my phone about a serial killer in my area. I went online and started looking into it, because you know I find that kind of stuff interesting, and heard that they were looking for a victim. It seemed like the perfect opportunity.” She looked at me. “It was my luck that you came down the road I was already walking on.”

Sick.

I felt utterly sick.

Even worse, another victim was dead because she’d lied about who she was.

“What about the victim who was an actual victim?” Everest asked softly. “Do you not care that by saying you were the victim, the actual victim likely died out there, scared and alone?”

She shrugged and headed to her car. “I have to get back to Dallas. I have a friend that’s a little out of sorts now that she had her son stolen from her.”

I waited until she was gone before I pulled out my phone, stopped the recording, and sent it to my family’s group chat.

“I have a camera.” Everest sounded excited.

“No you don’t,” Wendy grumbled as she walked up to the ‘camera.’

Except the camera was completely destroyed. It’d been hit with the rock that was now lying on their porch floor.

“Fuck!” Everest hissed.

“Don’t worry,” I said as I wiggled my phone at them all. “I got it all. But even if I hadn’t, we’re all very reliable witnesses. We can all testify.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Wendy gasped.

“That she’s going to spend a really long time in jail?” I asked.

“Yes,” Pepper breathed.

I squeezed her hand. “Then yes. I have her on identity theft, wasting police resources, and so many other things with that one video. She’s not getting out of this one.”

The three of them whooped in excitement.

My boy woke up with an angry wail.

And we went to bed an hour later, all three of us in the bed, and tried to ignore how fucking thin the walls were.

The next morning, the arrest of the fake serial killer victim was the front page of Dallas Morning News.

I can remember almost every lyric from every 90s song, but I can’t remember why I just walked into the kitchen.

—Atlas’s secret thoughts

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