Page 82 of Stay Away from Him

He shook his head, his eyes seeming to go out of focus. He was panicking, Melissa was pretty sure, realizing he was caught—realizing Melissa had him trapped.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s true, I was supposed to meet her fifteen minutes ago. She might have assumed it was me at the door. But I was running late.”

“You’re a liar,” Melissa said. “You’ve been lying from the beginning. I know. I know about you and Rose. I know you had sex withher. And that after you got caught and she tried to break it off, you stalked her.”

Derek started moving into the kitchen again, slowly closing the distance between them. His hand held out, trying to calm Melissa.

“We did have sex. Once. Only once. And I did follow her after that. But I wasn’t stalking her. I wasworriedabout her. I could tell there was something not right at her home. I thought Thomas might be abusing her somehow. That she was in danger. And Melissa, I wasright. Don’t you see? With all the evidence against him?”

“Then why did your bosses fire you?” Melissa asked. “Why did they drop the charges and then treat you like something they had to hide?”

Derek kept inching closer. He’d come around the end of the island now. Melissa had backed away from him so far that her shoulders were pressed against the far wall. There was nowhere for her to run.

“Rose did report a stalker,” Derek said. “She reportedme. I panicked, got into the reports and altered them so my name wasn’t on them, went to Rose and told her not to do that again. I threatened her, scared her. And I’m ashamed of that. But I didn’t kill her. And when she went missing, and I caught the case—Thomas didn’t recognize me. Didn’t know my name or my face. He didn’t know it was me who Rose had cheated on him with. One of his daughters had seen me, but I always assigned someone else to talk to them.”

“You hid the truth,” Melissa said. “On purpose.”

He shook his head. “I wanted to run a clean case. To find Rose—or find the person who killed her. And I did. We brought charges against Thomas, and they were solid. But then his lawyer went digging, found the stalker police report. When my bosses looked, they could tell it had been doctored, and they figured out that I’d done it. They only fired me to avoid the embarrassment.”

“They should have investigatedyou,” Melissa said. “You’rethe one who should be in prison right now.”

“You don’t think they tried?” Derek says. “For a while after they dropped the charges against Thomas, I was their prime suspect. But they couldn’t find anything to prove I killed Rose. Because I didn’t do it, Melissa. Thomas did.”

“No,” Melissa said, trying to sound more certain than she was. “Because you destroyed evidence. Covered your tracks. Framed Thomas.”

Derek had been inching ever closer as he spoke. He made a loop around Kelli’s body—careful, Melissa noticed, to keep the soles of his shoes out of her blood—and now he was inching toward her, looming larger with each step.

“Stop there,” she demanded. “I’ll cut you if you get any closer, you hear? I’ll do it.”

Derek shook his head, gave a thin smile that chilled Melissa to her marrow. “I don’t think you will. I don’t think you have the guts.”

The knife still held out, Melissa reached in her pocket for her phone, took it out, and tried to open the emergency keypad one-handed—but she fumbled it, and it clattered to the tile.

Both Derek and Melissa dove for the phone at the same time. In the scramble, Melissa caught one of Derek’s elbows in her face, and her vision went white for a split second, a dizzy explosion of stars. Blinded, she slashed out with the knife and heard Derek yell out.

“Fuck! You fucking bitch!”

Melissa blinked, her vision coming back, and she saw Derek scrabbling away. Blood was oozing from his cheek, from one of his hands. Melissa grabbed for the phone and finished dialing—911.

“911 what is your—”

“I’m being attacked!” she shouted out. “A man killed my friend and now he’s trying to kill me. His name is Derek Gordon.” Melissa gave the address, staring hard at Derek while she spoke, watchinghis eyes grow panicked. There was no escaping now, no covering up what he’d done.

“Is your attacker in the room with you right now?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

Derek stood and walked a few steps away, then began running. He was gone. Melissa was safe.

“Just send someone,” Melissa said. “Send someone right away.”

“Units are on their way, ma’am. Just stay with me.”

She leaned back against the wall, rested her temple against it. Everything in her went loose, all the tension of the confrontation with Derek seeming to exit her body at once. The fear she felt and had been holding back. It washed over her all at once, then broke, like a wave against a rocky shore.

Her shoulders began to quake. She let sobs wrack her body as the sound of sirens filled the air.

Rose

Somehow everything has gotten even worse since I last wrote in this diary. I write this with a head aching from a concussion, squinting at the page through eyes nearly swollen shut, a cut on my lip, another on my cheek. I probably shouldn’t even be writing—the doctor at the ER told me I should rest when he discharged me. But I need to get this down.

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