Page 91 of Little Shattered Dreams

“What are you talking about?”

“Toward the end of the note, there was a curious sentence, something that I couldn’t stop thinking about after I read it. A line that says, ‘It’s a genuine regret, a careless error on my part.’ Seems like a strange thing to say.”

“She felt guilty after the murder. She knew she’d made a mistake, and there was no way for her to take it back. It was a careless mistake, and I’m just sorry she made it.”

“Except she didn’t make a mistake ...you did.”

“I don’t follow.”

“The sentence was so odd, I started toying with the words and letters in my mind. I’ll read the sentence again: ‘It’s a genuine regret, a careless error on my part.’ Remove some of the words at the beginning and end of that sentence and you’re left with ‘genuine regret … a careless error.’ Now focus on the first letter in each of those words.”

G for Genuine

R for Regret

A for a

C for Careless

E for Error

Her face went white.

I continued.

“Now look at the first word in that sentence: ‘It’s.’ Take out the ‘a’ after it, and what’s left? It’s Grace.”

CHAPTER48

The moment the revelation came, Grace shot out of her desk chair, pointing an all too familiar gun at me. My gun was aimed at her in turn.

“Simone will be expecting that back,” I said.

“And she can have it,afterI’m done.”

“I’m not sure what you think is going to happen here, Grace. But I can tell you this, I'm an excellent shot. If you care to test me, go ahead.”

“What does it matter now? Seems I can’t find my way out of this, no matter how hard I try.”

“You’re right. The least you can do is tell me why you did it. I have my suspicions, but hey, if you’re going to shoot me, you owe me that much.”

Hands shaking, she readjusted her grip on the gun. “Lori Parker and I had been best friends since kindergarten, back when I was shy and quiet and afraid of the world and everything in it. It was Lori who brought me out of my shell. Lori who taught me not to be afraid of life, to embrace it, to accept it. And I did.”

“You did until you didn’t.”

“You don't understand. Quinn didn’t just take my godson from me. She took Lori. When he died, she died along with him.”

“And you spent all these years trying to find her so you could exact revenge?”

“I tried to move past it, but then something would always happen, a moment I wanted to share with Lori but couldn’t—because she was dead. So I’d search again, not knowing what I would do or how it would feel if I found her.”

“And then you did, and you broke into her home to leave a message. But the message wasn’t enough, was it? She’d moved on, lived her life, while your friend’s life was cut short. Must have driven you crazy. You portray yourself as a person who’s so much more enlightened than the rest of us, and you’re not. You’re a hypocrite.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m right. You’re a fixer. At the end of the day, you wanted to fix everyone.

But there was one person you couldn’t fix. You couldn’t fix yourself, could you?”

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