Page 103 of Am I the Only One

I can’t do anything to draw attention to myself after what I did. For God’s sake, there’s a dead girl out back.

Shortly after I had cleaned up all the glass and blood, I mustered up the courage to go out onto the dock to find that her body had sunken and was no longer on the surface. Morbidly, I breathed a sigh of relief, which was short-lived when I got back inside to see I had an email notification. Someone had accessed our security cameras and emailed the video of me killing Emma. What was worse was that it came from Tripp’s campaign email address.

Seeing that video threw me into a maniacal anxiety attack that took me a while to claw myself out of. Once I calmed down, I realized that whoever had sent that footage was also likely the same person who’d broken in. So, I pulled up the footage from the cameras and that was when I discovered that it was Luca. He was on the dock, he was inside the house, and then he was staring straight into the camera. He knows, but who else has he told? He doesn’t have access to Tripp’s campaign email ... but Olivia does.

I’ve been on edge ever since. There isn’t a single person in my life who I can trust anymore.

Olivia knows Luca, who knows Emma, who knows Margot—or, should I sayLiz?

It’s a tangled web there’s no escape from.

My hands are tied. I can’t do anything about the break-in. Luckily, I was able to get someone out the following day to replace the glass, and when Tripp came home a few days after, he was none the wiser.

But things only got more complicated when Detective Arroyo showed up at my university office last week. Being Emma’s advisor and therapist, it made sense that he would want to talk to me. I was taken down to the police station and questioned. I answered the best I could, lying when I needed to, and when it was over, he let me go home. I haven’t heard from him since. I figure they are calling in everyone who was linked to her in for questioning.

Much like my neglect in telling Tripp about the break-in, I didn’t tell him about my trip to the police station. If he’s been called in for questioning, he isn’t saying anything either.

As far as the police are concerned, at this point, it’s a missing person case.

I don’t know how things got so out of hand so fast. Honestly, I try not to think about it because what’s done is done, and overanalyzing it won’t bring Emma back.

I killed her. In a strange way, it doesn’t even feel real. I know it happened, I know what I did, but it still doesn’t feel as if I’m the one who did it.

To distract myself, I’ve been focusing my energy on being a better wife. Tripp and I have made love more in these past two weeks than what we have this past year. Our fighting has lessened, and we’re finding our way back to each other. But with that being said, there’s still the ever-present cloud of calamity that hangs overhead. I wonder if it’ll always be this way, if I’ll ever escape the horror of that night.

“I just got off the phone with my mother,” Tripp says as he strolls into the living room where I’ve been sitting and watching a cooking show.

It’s Sunday, and I was able to convince my husband to take a day off from the campaign. So today, we are simply hanging around the house, being lazy.

“What did she have to say?”

“When I told her that we didn’t have any plans for the day, she invited us over for dinner. What do you say? Do you want to go to DC tonight and have dinner with them?”

I paste a smile on my face and lie, “Yes. That sounds wonderful.”

“Okay, I’ll go give her a call back and let her know.”

After he leaves the room, I pick up the remote, shut the television off, and head outside. The sun is shining brightly for a change, and when I get to the bottom of the porch steps, I tilt my head back to soak in the faint heat through the bitter cold. Needing more of the fresh air, I decide to walk down the long driveway and check the mail. After I collect a few letters and the university newspaper that I have delivered to me, I make my way back toward the house.

When I hit the steps, I startle when I see the crab trap that should be on the dock sitting next to the porch swing. Turning around, my eyes dart around the property, but there isn’t anyone there. I take the last two steps up to the porch and slowly walk over to the trap, trying to figure out what has been haphazardly shoved inside it. Slowly, I approach it, and then my heart catapults.

My silk cami.

The one I couldn’t find after having sex with Luca is shoved inside, tangled in the wires. I panic, the pit of my stomach hollows, and I quickly maneuver the cage, find the opening, and shove my hand inside, dropping the mail from my other hand. The fabric gets caught on a wire as I try to fish it out, and I panic a bit more, well aware that Tripp is on the other side of the door. When my fingers get close enough to fist the material, I rip it out. Rankled in white-hot anxiety, I grab the trap and toss it over the railing onto the side of the house. Wadding up the tattered cami, I lift the lid to the large trunk where I keep a few gardening supplies and bury it toward the bottom.

After I pick up the scattered mail, I wipe a bead of sweat from my forehead, take a deep breath, and glance down my driveway before going back inside. Tripp is in the kitchen, riffling around in the fridge. I do my best to get my heart rate under control as I reclaim my spot on the couch and slip the rubber band off from around the newspaper.

This is my new life, I guess, Luca taunting me and me having to deal with it and play normal. I’m not sure how much longer I can go on constantly looking over my shoulder, knowing that he knows. Not only does he know but he also has proof. The fear of being exposed as a cheater doesn’t even compare to the fear running rampant in me of being exposed as a killer.

When I open the paper, I’m reminded, once again, that there’s no escape for me. I stare down at the headline that reads: “Georgetown Student Still Missing.”

Her photo takes up most of the page, and I swallow hard against the terror that’s silently erupting inside me. Her fibrous eyes stare up at me, haunting me, and I jump when Tripp enters the room.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he says with a light chuckle and then takes a seat next to me. He leans over to see what I’m looking at, reads the headline, and then asks, “Do you know that girl? Was she one of your students?”

My eyes fly to him as he stares at the photo of Emma, but it’s when he looks up at me that something inside me shifts—my intuition.

I scan his face for some sort of tell, a hint of something—anything, but there’s nothing, and I go cold.

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