Page 75 of Bound to a Killer
Some things refuse to stay buried, no matter how hard you try to forget them. They haunt you, lurking behind familiar faces that look at you a little differently, whispering rumors you pretend not to hear, and fraying connections that can never go back to how they were.
Nothing’s been the same since I got back.
It will never be the same.
Nerves twist inside me as I slip through the halls of Hillside Academy alone. Whispers trail behind,“That’s the girl from the headlines,”digging under my skin, making me wish I turned around and went home.
But there are only so many times I can ditch school. I can’t avoid people forever. Eventually, life slipped back into a forced routine, fragile and nothing like before. I’ve trudged through each day, pretending I still belong here, even though it’s obvious to me and everyone else that I stick out like a sore thumb. I can’t go back to navigating the world quietly, slipping through the days like I don’t exist. I’m all anyone can talk about now. It made trying to forget the past harder. Impossible. What’s worse is I have no one I can talk to about it.
This will be something I have to carry with me to the grave. I’d promised, and like I told Ledger, I mean to keep it. I’ll never tell.
The thought of him tightens in my chest like fingers digging into a tender bruise. It’s sharp and sudden, flaring the ache of his absence.
He’s probably miles away by now, somewhere far beyond reach. I know I’ll never see him again. That he’ll never want to see me again after what happened at the warehouse. After all that I cost him.
I still can’t believe he brought me back here. For weeks, it’s all I’d longed for. What I kept clinging onto during my darkest hours. The chance to come back home.
Now that I’m here, though, I can’t fathom why I was so desperate to return in the first place. There’s nothing here for me. There never really has been.
My first night back was hard, not at all how I’d imagined it to be. Which was strange. I should’ve felt relieved. Grateful, even.
I’d forgotten what it felt like to sleep alone without the warmth of someone beside me, steady and soothing. I’d grown to find comfort in it.
Without him, it was dark. Lonely. Even the familiarity of my own bed offered me nothing without his presence there. Everything about it felt wrong.
Some nights, I’d jolted awake, drenched in sweat, heart racing, the cold settled deep inside me. Sleep never returned.
By the time the sunlight broke through my window, I’d already be dressed, dark circles concealed, the night erased as best I could.
If people are going to gawk at me, I might as well give them nothing to see. No cracks, no weakness, no signs that they’ve gotten to me. I’ll keep my perfect mask in place until the end of the school year when I can finally leave this all behind. Go backto living on my own, away from society. Away from the whispers. Away from judgment.
There was a time when solitude felt like safety. No one could hurt you if you didn’t let them in, right?
But I did let someone in.
A sharp ache pulls in my chest again, harder, the same kind I get after waking from a nightmare, reaching for Ledger and finding only an empty space instead.
He’s gone now. Forever. Clara, too.
Our severed friendship is my fault. I’m the one who pushed her away. Iced her out.
Every time she brought up that night, it felt like tearing open a wound that still hadn’t closed. And I couldn’t share any of it with her.
“Where were you?”she’d ask.“You went missing, and no one had a clue where you were. What happened?”
The guilt was unbearable.
She had questions. Of course she did. And I wanted to answer, to be able to tell her anything. But I couldn’t.
Heartbroken and barely holding it together, I spent most of that first day back answering twenty-one questions from two officers that came banging on my door.
I nearly spiraled into a full-blown panic attack the second I saw them. I wondered if they knew. If somehow, they’d pieced it all together.
They asked calmly, but every question felt like a trap, like they were just waiting for me to slip up. I imagined them snapping their fingers, shouting,“Aha! I knew she was in on it.”
Of course, I stuck to the script. The same well-rehearsed story Ledger drilled into me on the ride home. It rolled off the tongue so effortlessly that even I thought it might’ve been the truth for a second.
They scribbled into their little notepad, angled just high enough that I couldn’t read a single word. I held my breath.
