Chapter Ten
CHAPTER TEN
They don’t arrest me—but they don’t believe me, either. That’s clear in Jackson’s eyes, the watchful squint as another officer presses my fingertips to pads of ink. I consented to this, encouraged it even, supplying my prints as proof of my innocence, because I know they won’t find them on the knife or anywhere in Morgan’s home. A woman in latex gloves plucks hairs from my head, and I focus on the sting in my scalp instead of that knife.
They swab my scratches, too. Snap photos of them. I know what they’re looking for—evidence of a struggle with Morgan. When they’re done, Jackson says he’ll take me back to my car, still parked on Morgan’s street right where I left it, hours ago now, but I decline the offer. I don’t want to share space with a stranger who thinks he already knows me, what I’m capable of.
I call Nina instead, giving her the scantest details. I found a dead body. I was asked to come in for questioning. She doesn’t have a shift tonight, so I’m surprised when it takes her a while to arrive. I’d imagined her speeding through the streets, her urgency like a siren shrieking from her car. She isn’t even out of breath when she opens the door to the station—I’d imagined that, too, how the panic would pinch her lungs until she saw I was okay. Instead, as she approaches me, her face is furrowed with dread, her eyes zipping to my wrists, as if expecting to find me in handcuffs.
“Rosie,” she whispers, “what the hell is going on?”
I rush toward her, collapse into her arms. As she rests her chin on my head, it all floods up in me, the images I’ve tried to hold back: Morgan’s eyes like dull marbles behind his glasses, his body as lifeless as a chalk outline. There’s something about seeing Nina for the first time in a month, coupled with the blood I can’t rinse from my memory, that has me buckling against her. Tears gush, sloppy and slippery, but as Nina corrals me toward the door, she says, “Not here, not here,” which, even in my distress, registers as odd. She’s a natural caregiver, someone who bends over backward to stanch people’s wounds—physical or otherwise—but right now, she’s more concerned with exiting the station quietly than comforting me.
She steers me through the parking lot, then deposits me into her car, where the air freshener greets me with a familiar smell: cinnamon and vanilla, like stepping into a bakery. It’s a scent that’s accompanied us on late-night snack runs, post-movie debriefs, times when Nina took the long way back to my apartment to give us a few extra minutes together before she dropped me off, and now it hugs me as I lean toward my knees, heaving with sobs.
Nina sinks into the driver’s seat, shuts the door with a click that feels too controlled. “Rosie,” she says—her voice controlled, too. “What the hell happened?”
I swipe my hand across my nose. Swallow another sob. “You’re not gonna like it.”
“Uh, yeah, I generally don’t like dead bodies.”
“No, I mean—” I have to tell her everything now, all the times I’ve lied to her the last couple weeks, denied I was still talking to Morgan. But as I look at her, cast in the glow of a lamppost just outside the car, I process what I didn’t when she first arrived: “You changed your hair.”
It’s darker—more like coffee beans than the caramel shade she’s been favoring the last few years. It lacks her usual highlights, too, making her look, just for an instant, like a Nina imposter.
She passes her hand over her hair, as if self-conscious. “Yeah, I’m trying a new style—guess we haven’t seen each other in a while.” She shrugs, almost sadly, but then shakes her head, the movement sharp. “ What is going on? Whose dead body was it?”
“Morgan’s.”
She blinks at me, struggling to process the name. Then her eyes bulge, staring through the orangey dark, before becoming as blank as Morgan’s were.
“Is this a joke?” she asks, but the question is hollow. She knows I’d never joke about this.
“No, he was murdered. There was a knife. In his chest.”
When her face unfreezes, she cycles through a series of expressions—disbelief, shock, fear—like an actor unsure how to play a scene. Finally, her features settle on confusion.
“I don’t understand. You said you found a dead body, so… so you just stumbled across him? Dead like that? Where? ”
“At his house,” I say—and before I can clock another emotion on her face, I confess it all: that I continued to message Morgan on DonorConnect, even though Nina told me I shouldn’t; that we’d made each other laugh—no small thing after all the darkness we’d endured; that he said our messages were a “safe place for heartbreak,” so I shared so much of mine; that for the first time in over a year, all that heartbreak—literal and figurative—had been softened by hope.
“But then I—got confused,” I add, and I tell her about Daphne. The tension between her and Morgan on the podcast. The poetry I read just today, the details from her past that Morgan took for his own. I mention the poem on the postcard, too, the one Daphne wrote like a premonition of her own death, pointing her finger straight at Morgan.
“That’s why I went there tonight. He told me in our messages he wanted to meet in person, and I was going there to be honest with him, tell him I’d known from the start he was Morgan Thorne. And I was going to find out who he really was. Because… because poems aren’t facts. And the podcast thing— I could have been misinterpreting that, and I really—”
“Rosie, what the fuck?” Nina cuts in. Her mouth hangs open like it’s too stuffed with words to properly shut.
“What?” I ask. “Which part?”
“All the parts!” She grips her hair so hard she could yank out a handful, and the gesture is deeply familiar. In the weeks after Brad, when Nina used her spare key to enter my apartment because I wouldn’t answer her calls, she sat on the side of my bed, clutching her head the same way she does now. There have been other times, too: when she listened to me cry about Tyler or Gabe or Jared, answering my descriptions of their hurtful behavior with speeches about how I’m so much better than them, better without them, only to watch me answer their texts right in front of her, the second they appeared on my phone.
“You found all this evidence,” Nina says, speaking toward her steering wheel, fingers still embedded in her hair, “that, at the very least , Morgan treated his wife like shit—and instead of cutting off communication, you tried to see him?”
“I don’t know that it was evidence. All of it could have been explained away, maybe. And that’s the whole point. I needed to talk to him about it. I needed to hear his side.”
“His side ? What if his side was that he did do something to his wife? What if, knowing you were suspicious of him, he decided to hurt you, too? God, Rosie, how could you take that risk?”
I shake my head. She won’t understand how fated it all felt, even though she was the one, kneeling on the floor beside me, watching me sob in my wedding dress, who evoked fate in the first place: Everything happens for a reason . A common mantra for a breakup, and one I initially scoffed at. Her voice had shaken when she said it—with shock, maybe, at how brutally I’d been dumped, the terrible timing of it all—and that quiver only lessened my confidence in the statement. Still, I’d wanted so badly for Morgan and me to prove her right, prove that all our suffering had really been stepping stones straight to each other. Because if Daphne hadn’t died, if my heart hadn’t failed—or if only one of those things had happened; or both, but at different times—our paths would never have crossed. How could I not think, then, that we were meant to meet this way? Meant to help each other brighten the darkness that dwelled in us both. Daphne’s death. Brad. The hospital. Even now, hours after finding Morgan’s body, hours after his blood stung my nose like a chemical, I still think it would have been so lovely, so dazzlingly poetic, if he and I could have forged a future together, become the silver lining of everything we’d lost.
“The risk seemed… worth the reward,” I say—which is something I know quite a bit about. A year ago, I could have died on the operating table. Could have rejected Daphne’s heart. I still could, at any moment. But does that mean I should have refused her heart altogether? That would be absurd—not pursuing something that could heal me, just because it might hurt me, too.
And what was the alternative with Morgan? Ignore his messages? Never find out if our chemistry online fizzed the same in person? I don’t ask any of this, though, because Nina will literally rip her hair out. She’ll tell me yes, that’s exactly what I should have done. I should have walked away. Started over. Waited for someone else to come along.
But starting over—even after just a short time—is terrifying. People say that phrase, start over , like a new start is even guaranteed. Like there’s always someone out there who’s definitely going to love you. But what if you’re stuck at the end of the last finish line? What if your time runs out, and in the end, you’re stuck with only yourself?
“That is not a good answer,” Nina mutters. “This is so fucked-up and you don’t even—” She spins in her seat to lance me with her gaze. “I know we joke about your Rosie-colored glasses, but this time, they could have literally gotten you killed. If not by Morgan, then—” She slaps a hand over her mouth, drops it a second later. “What if whoever murdered him was still there when you showed up? Or even now—what if they think you saw something, some detail that could give them away, and they think they have to get rid of you?”
“Tha-that’s not going to happen,” I stammer. “Nobody’s getting rid of me.” But the possibility slices into me. I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that there even was a killer; it didn’t occur to me that whoever stabbed Morgan could have still been inside the house, watching me discover him. The blood was definitely fresh; in my memory, I see it in motion, welling around the blade.
“You don’t know that,” Nina scolds. “You’re totally vulnerable, you were there, you were at the scene, you…”
My thoughts drown her out, as if I’ve slipped underwater. Because the image of Morgan in the kitchen has surfaced some questions. Who hated him so much they could plunge a knife into his chest? The scene was so gruesome, so jarringly red, and only a year ago, one floor above where Morgan died, his wife bled, too. It’s either a tragic coincidence, or— I touch my temple against a wince of pain. Are the deaths connected somehow? Is it possible someone did murder Daphne and has actually been targeting them both?
Something like relief bubbles up through the nausea in my stomach. Because if that’s true, then Morgan definitely didn’t kill his wife. Which would also mean I doubted him for nothing. My relief mixes with regret before both feelings go flat. It doesn’t matter if Morgan’s innocent, if I questioned his character. I can’t have him either way.
“Wait.” The sharpness of Nina’s voice jolts me back to her, just as her eyes fling toward the station. “ Please tell me you had a lawyer with you while they were questioning you.”
I bite my lip, a wordless response. Nina’s head crashes into her hands.
“Rosie! Oh my god.”
“I didn’t think of it! I didn’t think I was, like, a suspect until suddenly the detective was talking about how there were pink hairs in Morgan’s hand at the scene, and—”
“You touched the body?” Nina snaps her head back up, eyes blaring her alarm.
“No, the hairs aren’t mine. The detective said Morgan’s been emailing his friend about another woman he’s been seeing. In person. Who also has pink hair. And—her name’s Rosie, too, somehow?”
“ What? Slow down. You’re not making sense.”
I knead my forehead with my fingers. “That’s because it doesn’t make sense. I’ve never even spoken to Morgan in person, only through DonorConnect, so obviously that other woman isn’t me. And the police will know that as soon as they test the hair I gave them.” I gesture back toward the station, and Nina’s eyes, still huge, follow the arc of my hand.
“You… submitted your hairs for testing,” she says. “Without a lawyer present. Or without even consulting one first.”
“The hairs aren’t going to match! And anyway, where would I have just… produced a lawyer? I don’t have one to begin with.”
“What about—”
I stop her before she can say the man’s name, which I can’t hear without thinking of Brad.
“I think he’s retired,” I say. “He only did that as a favor to my dad because they were college roommates.”
“You still could have called him for a recommendation! Or called me and I would have found you someone!”
“Neens, I’m telling you: none of that crossed my mind because by the time I realized they were suspicious of me, I’d also just learned about the woman Morgan’s been dating. My head was spinning, okay?”
There was something in that moment—that epiphany that some other Rosie, some other pink-haired woman, had been living the life I’d wanted with Morgan—that felt like Brad dumping me in my dress. The emotional sideswipe of it. The mental scrambling. A cramp in my gut that nearly doubled me over. In a single instant, it rewired my sense of reality. With Brad, I thought we’d been living one story together, only to discover I’d been reading it wrong the entire time. And with Morgan, I believed we were creating something distinct, intimate—that our messages were the start of a romance—only to learn he was already dating someone else.
“A woman… named Rosie,” Nina says, “with pink hair. Who you say is not you.”
“I think I’d know if I’d been dating him, Neens. And if Morgan emailed his friend all about this other Rosie, then he must have written something about her that can help the police identify who she is.”
“And they just let you go,” Nina says, “on your word that it wasn’t you.”
“I surrendered my phone,” I say, and Nina blinks at me as if I’m speaking a foreign language. “Voluntarily! I want them to search it. If Morgan and this other Rosie were dating, then they’ll see that whoever he’s been texting or calling isn’t me.”
“They could have gotten that info from your phone records! You didn’t need to—”
“But this shows them I have nothing to hide.”
“What about those hairs in Morgan’s hand? You’re sure they aren’t yours? Because even the slightest contact can leave DNA.”
“Nina, no—I have never once, in my entire life, touched Morgan Thorne. Alive or dead.”
Dead. The word slips out easily, but part of me still doesn’t believe it. Even with the detective’s questions still ringing in my ears. Even with Morgan’s blood still blazing on the backs of my eyelids. My body is living a truth my mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
I’m not the only one in disbelief. Nina’s gaze is foggy with it, aimed at my face but lost in the space between us. I know, though, that it isn’t Morgan’s death she doubts. It’s me.
I say it out loud, the thing she won’t: “You don’t believe me.”
She hesitates—only a moment, maybe, but it feels like a minute. “It’s just a shock. You were messaging Morgan for weeks, then you showed up at his house without him knowing, and now he’s dead , and you’re a suspect, and— You have to admit: there are some… parallels. To last time.”
“It’s not the same at all,” I snap.
Nina slumps against her seat, cheek pressed to the headrest, looking more exhausted than she does after a sixteen-hour shift at the hospital.
“No, I know,” she says. “But this is crazy.”
She must see it on my face—the flicker of hurt. The searing brand of that word, crazy .
She’s quick to amend it: “Not you. The situation. You need to call a lawyer, okay? First thing in the morning.”
“I will,” I promise—though with my phone in police custody, I’ll need someone else’s to do it. The thought of asking my parents, explaining what I need and why, makes my stomach shrivel. If Nina’s this worried, this appalled by the actions I took that got me here in the first place, I can only imagine how they’ll react—my mother, who has never understood that love doesn’t simply arrive , that sometimes it must be pursued, and that even as the pursuer, you are almost never the predator, almost always the prey; my father, who had to swallow his shame to call his lawyer friend for me, whose hands shook on my shoulders as we sat around the dining room table, reviewing my options.
“I’m late in taking my meds—can you drop me off at my car?” I ask. “I’m parked on Clark Street.”
Morgan’s street, I don’t need to say.
We ride without speaking—a first for us—and after a few minutes, Nina flicks on the radio, as if worried I can hear her thoughts in the silence. Mine keep catapulting back to Morgan. Not just the blood and the knife, but his kindness, his acceptance of me, that beamed from the screen whenever I read his messages. His willingness to meet my darkness with his own. In the past few hours, it’s been easy to forget the rumors, the online comments, easy to let Daphne’s poetry feel like fiction. And now I realize, with a flare of pain in my chest: I’m going to miss him.
“Right there,” I say when Nina nears my car, and she pulls up behind it.
“There isn’t a house here.” She hunches to peer at the trees I parked alongside.
“It’s over there.” I nudge my chin up the street, where vans and cop cars line the curb. I don’t explain why I parked so far from Morgan’s property that you can’t even see the house from this angle. Truthfully, I’m not really sure. Maybe I’m too used to there being something secretive about our interactions. Maybe I’m accustomed to skulking around.
I unbuckle my seat belt. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“Of course. I’d do anything for you,” she says, but there’s no emotion in the response. No undercurrent of care, like I usually hear. Instead, Nina sounds distracted, eager to get rid of me, and it makes me feel so alone it’s as if she’s already driven away.
Still, she squeezes my hand before she lets me go, and when I step out and close the door, I smile at her through the window, my lips pressed tight to keep from crying.
I force a few deep breaths as I get behind the wheel of my car. I turn on the ignition, glancing at Nina in my rearview. I expect her to wait for me to drive off first, but she’s already doing a K-turn, heading back the way we came.
Hitting the gas, I steer in the opposite direction. As I pass Morgan’s house, I ignore the police cruisers, the mobile light like a second moon illuminating his yard, the yellow tape stretched across the columns flanking his front steps—and with all those images smudged and swirled in my peripheral vision, I can almost believe that I’m leaving them behind.