Page 146 of A Smile Full of Lies
I watched them tuck him inside the family tomb like he hadn’t murdered three people, orphaned Knox, and torn my life to pieces in the process. Like his ashes didn’t belong in the fucking gutter with the other trash.
And still… I felt it. That awful twist in my chest. That pang of sympathy.
Because Ihatedhim. I would never stop hating him.
But I still felt sorry for his family because they were mourning someone who never really existed, and they had no idea what was coming.
I didn’t stay long after they sealed the tomb.
Didn’t wait for the prayers or the final words or the carefully curated sobs for a son they didn’t know. The minute the urn disappeared behind polished stone and the crowd began to gather closer, I slipped away — quiet and invisible — the way I’d learned to be.
My feet moved on instinct, cutting through the older part of the cemetery where the gravestones were worn and the trees arched low, like they’d been carrying the town’s secrets for too long.
I ended up near Knox’s family plot.
Not close enough to make a scene, but close enough tofeelit, that cold ache in my chest that never quite went away. Three names etched in granite. A mother. A father. A nineteen-year-old girl who would never go to college, never fall in love and get married, never get the chance to grow up and learn that monsters didn’t always wear masks.
Sometimes, they wore letterman jackets and charming smiles instead. And with Thayer? That bastard contained multitudes. He was both kinds of monster, all in one.
I sank onto the stone bench a few feet away from their graves, legs trembling, lungs tight.
The wind shifted, carrying faint voices from the other side of the cemetery. Laughter. Reminiscing. Talking about the good times, the funny stories, how ‘full of life’ he’d been.
I wanted to scream. I wanted toshatterthe air with the truth.
He wasn’t full of life. He was full of poison, and Knox’s family paid the fucking price for it. Henry, Victoria, and Ava all died at his hands.
My fists clenched in my lap. I blinked up at the sky, hot tears slipping down my cheeks.
He wasgone— really, truly gone. The boy who had ruined my life. The boy who stole my future, who used me, who murdered the only people Knox ever loved.
They’d just put him in a mausoleum like he was some kind of fucking saint. And nobody knew the truth. But they would, very fucking soon.
I didn’t go hometo Knox… not right away.
Not even when my hands started shaking so bad I could barely grip the steering wheel, or when my throat locked up with the weight of everything I couldn’t say at the cemetery. I just drove.
Nowhere specific. Just… away.
Away from the mausoleum.
Away from the sympathy that didn’t sit right with me.
Away from the ghost of a boy who ruined my life and only paid for it with his life. Somehow, that didn’t feel like enough.
I ended up at the overlook off Old Sawmill Road. The one that looked out over the water, where the Spanish moss dripped from the trees like veins and the air always smelled like pine and mud and memory.
I used to come here in college. When Gran and I fought. When Thayer got too intense. When I needed to breathe.
Now I could barely manage that.
I shut the engine off and let the silence crash over me. My phone buzzed in my lap — Alyssa again, probably, checking to see if I’d made it back yet — but I didn’t answer. I didn’t even look to see who it was.
I stared out at the wide stretch of the delta, the rippling black water reflecting the last light of evening, and I broke.
Not loud. Not violent. Just quiet and raw andreal. Tears slipping down my cheeks one by one, like each one carried its own piece of the weight I’d been hauling for too long. I thought I’d cried it all out at the river house, but I hadn’t – not by a long shot.
He was gone. Thayer was gone. And still, somehow, he was everywhere.
