Chapter Twenty-Three
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Not so fast, Rosie.”
I’m still crouched, hand on the door, when I look up to find Blair holding a gun.
She didn’t scramble for it. Didn’t fumble at a locked cabinet. She must have had it on her this entire time.
She jerks the gun to the left, motioning for me to step away from the door. My hand has already slipped from the knob, too slack to keep its grip. I follow the path she traces, shuffling closer to the middle of the room.
“It was you,” I say, “in my apartment. You—” I glance at my bandage, which Blair asked about when I arrived, as if she weren’t the one to cut my arm in the first place. “We were gonna go to Piper’s, interrogate her about the attack, when the whole time it was you who—”
“Jesus, you’re so gullible. We were never going to talk to Piper. I have no idea who that woman is or where she lives. But it got you over here, didn’t it?” Her thumb pushes forward— click —releasing the safety on the gun. “You should’ve just let Edith take the fall.”
I’ve never had a gun aimed at me before. The single black eye, staring at me from the end of the barrel, makes it even harder to process what Blair means. I start simple: Piper is not her neighbor. Piper didn’t do any of this.
“You killed Morgan,” I say. “You murdered your best friend.”
“Don’t give me that look. I didn’t plan to kill him.”
“Just like you didn’t plan to kill Daphne?”
Blair squares her shoulders. “Yes. Exactly like that.”
“Except you didn’t push Morgan and cause him to fall. Unless you’re saying he fell onto that knife?”
“Shut up, I didn’t want him to die,” Blair spits out. “I love him.” Her voice breaks around it, love , tears icing her eyes. She sniffs hard, blinking them away, then flexes her finger, nearly touching the trigger.
“Does your fiancée know you’re in love with him?” I ask, but in my peripheral vision, I scope for a weapon, a way out.
“It’s not like I cheated on Vanessa. I love her, too, you know. I’m not a monster . And anyway, when we first started dating, it wasn’t even— I just wanted to wake Morgan up. He was so messed up after Daphne died. He needed to see me with someone else, realize he couldn’t bear to lose me, too. But he was too deep in his guilt over Daphne. And in the meantime, I fell for Vanessa.” Daphne shrugs one shoulder, as if it’s so casual, falling in love. “But it’s not the same as what I felt for Morgan. Morgan was my home. My family. Better than family, because he actually loved me.”
“He loved you so much that you killed him?” It’s antagonistic, but she seems to be responding to that. This is the woman who stabbed and strangled me. Stabbed Morgan. Shoved Daphne. She clearly likes a fight.
“I was giving him one more chance,” she grinds out, adjusting her grip on the gun. “I’d gotten engaged so Morgan would know I was serious—but he called my bluff. Acted all happy for me. Tried to talk wedding plans. It was like a game to him. One of us would have to blink first, and I swore it wouldn’t be me this time. But then Rosie came along.”
She hisses the name. My name. But I know she’s not talking about me.
“Right away, he rubbed their relationship in my face, just like he used to when Daphne was alive. It amused him, making me jealous. You saw the emails; he never spared any details. I know every kiss he and Rosie had.”
I almost nod—I did see the emails. But according to Edith, none of those kisses actually happened; their first wasn’t until their last moments together.
Judging by the pained set of Blair’s jaw, the fiction in Morgan’s emails is still achingly real to her. And maybe that was the point. It was like a game to him. With Blair as the toy.
“Then, when I went to his house that night, Rosie was there ,” Blair says. “I saw her through the doors in the back, kissing him in the kitchen with her stupid pink hair—no offense—and that only emphasized the urgency of what I’d come to do.” She runs the back of her wrist across her forehead, wiping invisible sweat, then drops her arm to her side. Her aim on me slackens a bit, slipping from my head to my heart. “I couldn’t let Rosie be another Daphne, luring him away from me. But then they seemed to be arguing—she left in a hurry, all upset—and I thought: great, even better timing.”
“Better timing… to kill him?”
I’m not good at this, provoking her, prompting her to keep speaking. My words sound wooden, coated with a meanness I don’t even recognize. Blair blasts me with a cold stare, returns both hands to her weapon—and I wonder if I miscalculated, if this will be the comment that convinces her to pull the trigger and end the discussion altogether.
My eyes dart toward the door, then the wide picture window. It’s dark out now, and the living room lamps blaze, allowing the glass to reflect the scene: Blair with her feet planted, shoulders back, pointing a gun at an unarmed woman. It should be easy to see from the sidewalk. Maybe someone walking out there will glance our way and alert the police. Maybe Vanessa will come home early and stop her fiancée. Maybe I still have a chance.
“Hey, get away from there!”
In looking at the window, hoping for witnesses, I’ve drifted closer to it. I step back, letting Blair steer me with the gun until we’ve switched positions and she’s blocking the door.
“And stop looking at me like that,” Blair demands. “You’re still acting like I wanted him dead. I’m devastated he’s dead.”
Again, her voice splinters, eyes shining in the light.
“Then how did it happen?” I ask, forcing a softer, more empathetic tone.
She swipes a stray tear. “I told him I was still in love with him, and if he didn’t admit he felt the same way, then I really would marry Vanessa. And do you know how he responded? He said, ‘Come on, Blair, you know that’s just puppy love.’ Puppy love! ” The phrase whips into the air, making me flinch. “Like I was nothing but a kid with a crush. And then he laughed, like I was crazy for thinking the man who called me his best friend, who shared his biggest secrets with me, might actually want to be with me, too. And it just—it broke me. My brain. My heart. I don’t even remember picking up the knife. It was just there, on the counter, and then it was in my hand. And I—”
She thrusts the gun forward in demonstration. Then she stares at the weapon, almost awed by the memory.
“It felt like instinct.” Another tear slides down her cheek, but this time, she doesn’t bother wiping it.
Her eyes linger on the gun, her hand. She tongues the tear, now at the corner of her lip. “I pulled the knife out, almost immediately. But that was a mistake. The blood just… gushed out of him.”
I shake my head, the image appalling—but not aligning with the scene I stumbled upon. “The knife was in his chest when I found him.”
Blair nods, pulling in a shaky breath, her gaze unfocused now. “He was suffering. So I put him out of his misery. Put me out of mine. It was a kindness, really. To both of us.”
Her arm sinks, as if growing heavy, the gun drifting lower. I move a step away from her. Then another. Somewhere, in the back of the house, there must be another door.
“I told you not to look at me like that!” Blair shouts, freezing my feet.
“Like what?” I ask—anything to keep her talking.
“Like you think I’m demented. As if you’re so perfectly sane and stable,” Blair scoffs. “Two nights ago you were sleeping in a wedding dress! Why’s that, Rosie? I’ve been dying to know.”
I shouldn’t feel smacked by another revelation. I always knew the person who attacked me must have been the one to button my dress. But there have been so many pieces to Blair’s confession, so many horrors to absorb, that I’ve been slow to snap the whole picture into place. And I won’t let her turn this around on me when she’s the one who still owes answers.
“Why were you even there? Were you planning to attack me that night, and then—what? Got distracted by the dress? Decided to freak me out instead?”
“Well, it really was quite the distraction. You were passed the fuck out, in a wedding dress , and I’m sorry, Rosie, I just couldn’t help it. It was too easy to fuck with you.”
I don’t know why I’m surprised when she ends the explanation there. This is the same woman who admitted to “fucking with” Daphne. She seems to thrive on manipulation. Power. Maybe that’s due to the lack of power she felt she had with Morgan. Or maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me rationalize her decisions. Maybe still, even now, my Rosie-colored glasses are on.
“But no, our scuffle in your apartment happened when it was meant to,” Blair says. “That first night was just to scope out your place, find the best way in—and what do you know, you gave it to me yourself.” She fires off a chuckle. “The key was right in the lock. As if you wanted me to make a spare.”
She grins like she expects me to applaud her. “And actually, it was you who gave me everything. Not just the key. I’d seen Rosie—sorry, Edith —through Morgan’s back door, but I didn’t know how to find her again. Which obviously I had to—she’d make the perfect suspect. So I went to that stupid gathering at the green, thinking she’d show up, but then: you were there instead. A different Rosie. Not the one I’d seen kissing Morgan—her hair was shorter than yours. And when you couldn’t figure out who Fake Rosie was from the emails I showed you? Fine. All I had to do was watch you until you inevitably crossed paths with her.”
Watch me. She means stalk, of course. Because that day on Sweet Bean’s patio, when we ran into Edith and Piper, I’d felt someone’s gaze on me, grazing my face as palpably as a hand. I dismissed it first as Nina’s, then Edith’s. But it must have been Blair’s. She was there, lurking somewhere—just another thing, right in front of me, I missed—and she must have recognized Edith as the woman she’d seen at Morgan’s.
“From there, the plan became simple: give the cops a reason to investigate her. They’d take some DNA, find it was a match to the hair you told me they found, then assume she was some kind of psycho who murdered Morgan and killed the woman she’d pretended to be while dating him.”
My eyes narrow. “Except I wasn’t killed.”
“Well. Yeah. I didn’t get the timing exactly right. Edith was supposed to stumble upon a much different scene.”
I stare at her until her meaning crystallizes. My hand drifts to my neck, where one night ago, Blair’s arm clamped, tighter and tighter, until I couldn’t breathe.
“Someone had to go down for Morgan’s murder,” she adds, “and obviously it wasn’t going to be me. Might as well be Edith, who’d twisted him around her little finger, given him new ways to torture me, got him thinking of ways to use her in his writing when he’d known her all of five minutes. And you! You’re not even grateful, are you? That Morgan saw your story, your transplant, as something worthy of his art. What makes you so fucking special? He never even met you. But I told him every cruel thing my parents have done to me, every heartless thing they’ve said, and I never once made it into his books. And if my pain wasn’t enough—if I wasn’t enough—then why the hell were Daphne and Edith and you ?”
She widens her stance, glaring at me down the barrel of the gun. Her finger twitches on the trigger.
“If you kill me,” I blurt, “your whole plan will be for nothing. The cops will arrest you anyway.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Blair says. Then she softens her gaze, shifts from smug to scared, speaks in a shaky voice. “It was s-so terrifying, Off-officer. Rosie just—came after me tonight. I had to fight back, but oh god, I didn’t want to kill her!”
She imitates a sob. Then the fear disappears as quickly as she conjured it, a tiny smile returning to her lips.
“They’ll have no evidence against me. They’ll have DMs where I invited you over because I was determined to know who killed my best friend. And—” Her face transforms again, back to the trembling, traumatized expression from seconds ago. “Officer, I don’t understand it. She told me she was suspicious of Piper Bell, but she started accusing me of attacking her. I think… I think Piper was just a ploy to get to me.”
“They’ll see you didn’t even know Piper. That she’s not your neighbor. That you used her as a ploy to get me here.”
Blair hesitates—but only for a second. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”
There’s a chilling finality to the way she says it, like she’s done offering explanations, like she’s just as aware as I am that her fiancée could return while I’m still able to talk.
She flexes the hand bracing the gun.
Of all the ways I’ve envisioned I would die—gasping for breath; cut open on an operating table; boiling with infection; whittled to bone by cancer; alone in a hospital bed, my hands unheld—I never saw it ending like this.
I struggle for one last way to stall: “Did you—” I swallow and try again. “Does Vanessa know what you’ve done?”
A muscle jumps in Blair’s jaw. She opens her mouth to answer—and I lunge for her.
I claw for the gun, slam my shoulder into her chest, feel the stunned whoosh of her breath explode against my cheek.
My life will be shorter than others’—that’s the deal I accepted in receiving Daphne’s heart—but I can’t let it end tonight. Because if I die now, the truth dies with me.
I have no choice but to fight. For Daphne. For Edith.
And for me, too.
Our bodies crash to the floor, and it’s a repeat of last night—only this time, Blair and I both scramble for the weapon, and I’m not running for the door. We twist and tumble, gritting our teeth. When she rakes her nails against my bandage, I cry out but I don’t let it stop me.
I can’t.
I’ve barely begun my second chance at life, so consumed by fears of a lonely, loveless future. But right now, faced with the desperate glint in Blair’s eyes, I know what I’m up against is worse: no future at all.
I reach higher as Blair holds the gun above her head, my hands scrabbling up her arm to her wrist. I graze the gun at nearly the same instant I feel it slip out of reach. Then Blair’s fist bashes my side and I fold inward at the flare of pain. She scrambles to slide away from me, but I latch on to her.
“Get off me!” she snarls. “You’re not going to—”
Sirens blare through her sentence. We freeze, my hand wrapped around hers, both of us wrapped around the gun.
Lights bounce outside, casting the room in red and blue. The colors dance on Blair’s skin—a blush, a bruise. Then footsteps pound toward us, and I scurry off her, just as she points the gun at the door.
Three hard knocks rattle the windows. “Police, open up!”
The gun quivers in Blair’s hand. Her eyes blaze as she attempts to steady it.
“Put it down,” I warn her.
She shakes her head, mumbling something I can’t make out.
“Blair. You have to put it down.”
She looks at me then, tears coating her eyes like resin, hardening them into an impenetrable sheen. “No. This isn’t fair. None of this would even be happening if he’d—” She blinks in time to two more knocks. “I just wanted him to love me. I just wanted us—”
I never hear the end of her sentence. The door bursts open, splinters spraying out like the air has shattered. Three officers rush into the room, guns pointed at Blair.
“Drop your weapon, now!” one shouts.
Blair doesn’t so much as flinch. Her gaze is still pressed to mine. “Everyone’s going to say I went crazy. But I wasn’t crazy. I was hurting .” The word scrapes out of her, raw and ragged. “I still am. Right here.” She places the tip of the gun against her chest, her heart, and I suck in a breath, just as the police take a synchronized step toward her.
“Ma’am,” one starts, “you don’t need to do this. Just put the gun down and we’ll—”
“Jesus, are you serious?” Blair’s head snaps toward the officer. “I’m not going to kill myself.”
She slaps the gun onto the floor, and I shield myself, cower away from it, anticipating a blast. By the time I uncover my face, an officer has scooped it up.
“Put your hands in the air,” the cop in front orders.
Blair looks at me again, her expression a blend of defeat and defiance.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” she says, raising her arms. “I won’t be with him either way.”
A cop twists Blair’s arms behind her back, clicks on handcuffs, then hauls her to a standing position. Another officer kneels down beside me, but her words come to me muffled as Blair is marched outside.
“Sorry, what?” I ask. The woman’s face is concerned, her eyes pinched with urgency. She repeats herself, but I still don’t hear her, because now there’s a voice outside, rising above hers.
“Ma’am, please stay out here, ma’am—”
There’s a blur of motion as someone runs into the house—followed by a familiar sound.
“Rosie!”
“Oh my god.” I tear away from the officer, struggling to get to my feet, but Nina reaches me first. She falls to the floor beside me.
“What— How did you—” I stumble over the questions, too stunned to see her.
“You weren’t at your house. I checked your location and didn’t recognize it. I just—”
The cop who tried to stop her outside surges forward to intervene, but the officer nearest us puts a hand on his arm; there’s no threat to anyone here.
“—wanted to make sure you were okay. I saw your car in the driveway, saw that woman in the window with the gun, and I called 911, but they said I’d make things worse if I intervened, that she could— She could—”
Nina breaks off, dissolves into tears, and I slump against her chest as she gathers me in her arms. I focus on her warmth, her softness and solidity, unable to articulate my surprise. I hoped for someone to spot us through the window, call the cops just in time, but I hadn’t considered it would be Nina. Maybe I should have. This is not the first time I’ve been crumpled on the floor in her arms.
“They told me to wait outside until they got here,” she says. “But I swear if they’d taken even a second longer, I would have knocked that woman to the ground.”
A laugh sputters out of me. “I’ve never seen you knock so much as a fly to the ground.”
“I would if it was pointing a gun at you.”
“Like a fly-sized gun? Or a regular gun? Because that would be a strong fly.”
“Stop.” Nina sniffles as she laughs, and I burrow closer to her. I’m dizzy with it all—Blair’s confessions; Blair’s finger on the trigger; the cops who crowd the room—but Nina keeps me from spinning.
“Do you hate me?” she asks.
I pull back to look at her. “Hate you? You saved my life!”
“But the things I said at the hospital. I shouldn’t have talked to you like that. And that ten percent thing? I’m so sorry, Rosie. I didn’t really think you could kill Morgan. You just want love so badly that it blinds you sometimes.” She pauses, biting her lip. “Okay, that sounds like I’m justifying it again, but— I don’t know how to put it.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “You’re right. It does blind me sometimes.”
Or, at the very least, it compromises my vision, my Rosie-colored glasses making everything pink, love-tinged, so they camouflage red flags. Can I blame Nina, then, for doubting me a little? My grasp on reality isn’t always reliable. And maybe what really matters is that she knows my flaws and still chooses me as her friend. That even with that ten percent, she tracked me down tonight, believing I was worth protecting.
“It’s okay,” I repeat, sinking against her, tightening our embrace.
Nina’s heart drums against my ear, and it’s a beat that never wavers. I tune out the cops, close my eyes against the flashing lights, and as my own heart thumps, I press myself closer to her, listening to all that love for me.