Page 4 of Cross My Heart

A year later, she was dead. Walked into Lake Michigan, leaving me nothing but a scribbled letter of tear-smudged apologies.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t go on like this. It hurts too much, not knowing.

Forgive me.’

I swallow back the lump in my throat and keep on running. I turn off the main street and back through the Ashford gates, nodding my hello to the uniformed security guys that mind the front entry. The ‘Ashford College’ sweatshirt I’m wearing seems over-the-top, but I figured it would bring me the fewest questions as I come and go.

Sure enough, they wave me through, as I head past the quad, all the way to the back of the buildings, where a path winds off, down to the river. I roamed every inch of the place, the first days I arrived, and found that the college grounds sprawl out a couple more miles beyond the main dorms and libraries—into woodland and fields, so still and pretty in the dawn light, it could almost calm the storm raging in my chest.

Almost.

Who did this to you, Wren?

That’s the question that’s been haunting me, to the point of obsession. No, way past that point. Tovengeance. Ever since Wren showed up on the front steps of my apartment building, barely a few months after she’d left for Oxford. She’d quit. Come home early. And for the longest time, she wouldn’t say why.

I knew something terrible had happened, I could pinpoint it to the day. Her calls and FaceTime chats from Oxford had started out so happy, brimming with stories of her amazing lab partners, and all the history and architecture here in town. She was making friends, having fun, devoted to her work.

And then… Something changed. Her calls grew less frequent, and when we did talk, she seemed strained. Hollow. She still tried to keep up the act, pretending like everything was going great, but she couldn’t fake it with me.

I knew her better than anyone.

The Oxford job was supposed to be for two, maybe three years, but suddenly, it was Christmas and she was there in Philadelphia, on my doorstep with a lame story about losing her direction and burning out after too much work.

There was something burned about her, alright. Ashen and brittle. Dark shadows under her eyes. So tense, every slamming door made her flinch. And the cheerful, hug-loving, ambitious, ‘glass-half full’ sister I’d known all my life?

She was gone.

This Wren, I didn’t recognize. She stayed out all night, partying with strangers. Drinking to the point of oblivion—and more than just alcohol, too. Pills that glazed her expression. Powder that made her shriek with too-loud laughter. She was quick to anger, and she burned with resentment.

A stranger I couldn’t look directly in the eye.

The trees blur past me as I reach the end of the footpath, and I finally slow to a stop. Bent double, gasping for air. My heart pounding in my ears as I look out over the riverbanks, remembering that night too clearly.

The night she finally broke down and told me the truth.

I was supposed to be working, a late shift bartending at a dive down the street. But the owner never showed, and I didn’t have the keys, so I left the place closed and headed home.

Wren was on the bathroom floor, wasted out of her mind. A razor blade sliced through her left wrist.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified, seeing her body crumpled there, pooling blood. But she was breathing. Somehow, the cut wasn’t that deep. I managed to get her bandaged and in a cold shower to sober up, and when she finally surfaced, red-eyed and shivering, I made her tell me everything.

It had been a night out with her friends, at the end of her first semester. Just a fun drink at the college bar, the way she’d enjoyed a dozen times before. But someone knew someone else, who’d heard about a big blow-out party in the countryside; Wren justhadto come. It would be an adventure.

And that was all she remembered—everything else after that was just… Gone. Who she’d left with, if they’d even made it to the party at all… Wren’s brilliant mind, that could hold dates and facts and figures like it was nothing, was now a black hole, empty of every detail that might have helped. She swore she hadn’t been drinking. One glass of wine, maybe. I believed her. Back then, Wren was always the designated driver, the cool head that made sure everyone else got home safely; held back your hair while you were sick and supplied the morning-after coffee and snacks.

Just one glass of wine, but that was all she remembered. She woke up back in her room at the college, sprawled out on her bed in her best party dress. Her body aching. Bruises on her wrists and thighs. Her roommates didn’t know where she’d gone to after the bar, they couldn’t even recall who she’d been with, if they’d been strangers or friends.

A whole twenty-four hours had passed.

A full day.Gone. For my sister, so used to knowing everything, planning everything, that was the part she couldn’t get her head around. What had happened? Where had she been?

With whom?

She took herself to the ER, but whatever drugs had been in her system, they didn’t show on any tests. A rape kit was inconclusive. The nurses gave her a lecture about drinking too much and sent her on her way. She tried to retrace her steps from that night, but nobody had been paying much attention, too caught up in their own deadlines and romantic dramas, and a fun night on the town. Everywhere she turned came up blank.

And then the flashbacks started.

Nothing solid, no names or faces, or anything she could hold onto. Just brief images. People in formal wear, dancing in a garden. A dirty cell somewhere, no windows. A bare mattress. Restraints on her wrists and ankles. A man, looming over her, with a distinctive tattoo on his thigh: a crown wound with a serpent.

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