Chapter 3
THREE
HIM
I should have fucking waited.
That’s the first thought that hits once the sirens are a memory and the town is a smear of light in the rearview.
I should have given it another week. Let them get complacent. Let the sheriff forget what it feels like to be helpless. Let her start sleeping without the light on.
Instead, I went to her tonight and knocked on Tallulah Gentry’s door like a salesman.
It was…satisfying, for a moment.
The little jump in her voice. The way it shook when she threatened to call the police, like she already knew that wouldn’t matter. The flash of her face in the glass when she finally saw me at the window—eyes wide and dark, mouth parted, that pretty brain of hers throwing sparks.
It was almost worth it.
Now I’m parked on a back road just outside town, engine off, heater ticking, the smell of cold air and stale coffee in the cab. The woods press in on both sides, branches black against the thin winter moon. Sirens wail somewhere far away, then fade. A dog barks.
I flex my hands on the steering wheel, one finger at a time.
The coolness lingers on my palm where it pressed against her window. Her apartment is third floor, accessible with a rattly fire escape, cheap storm windowpanes, old locks, even if she does have an extra deadbolt. Saw that through the window.
It’s an insult, really. After everything, after all she did, she hides in a place with plywood doors and thin walls like any other girl.
Like she’s ordinary.
She isn’t.
She’s the reason my brother’s in prison.
The first time I became aware of her, she was just Twiggy Gentry. Skinny little kid who should’ve been in high school but had this big, incredible brain. The name didn’t fit the brain, if you asked me.
Her real name—her given name—was Tallulah. That name fit—polished, heavy, something her father could use in sentences that started with “my daughter” and ended with “Harvard” and “consulting” and “legacy.” She was part of his décor, an ornament on his carefully curated life.
I liked her that way.
Useful. Contained. Controlled.
But she was too fucking clever.
People always talk about “the one that got away” like it’s romantic. Nostalgic. For me, it isn’t the girl who ran or the girl who fought. It’s the girl who sat behind a screen and dug until she found seams in the story she was never meant to see.
Lucy Falls wasn’t random.
It was ours long before anyone in this state started whispering the name Henry Thurston like a campfire story.
Jason and I were brought here as kids, folded into Beatrice Thurston’s neat little house on the hill like we were charity cases instead of warning signs.
Her town. Her family name on half the mailboxes. Old money. Old sins. Old secrets.
We grew up learning where all the cracks were.
Later, when we came back as men, we didn’t “choose” Lucy Falls off a map.
We were reclaiming a stage that should’ve belonged to us from the beginning.
Jason wanted the hands-on work—the chase, the tears, the mind games.
I wanted the structure, the staging, the way the town held its breath when it realized there was something in the dark.
And I wanted the kill.
It was supposed to be ours.
Now Jason’s in a cage with a DOC number instead of a life, and everyone pretends that means the story’s over.
All because a girl behind a screen decided to get clever.
I tap the steering wheel, counting the beats.
It’s not grief that burns in my chest when I think about him getting caught. We weren’t that kind of brothers.
It’s irritation.
He was useful. He liked the parts that took him right up to that point of no return, that line that, when it was crossed, there was no pretending you were a good guy.
We weren't good guys. I was always okay with that. He liked to pretend.
Now everything…all of the parts…are my responsibility. Lure. Logistics. Execution. Cleanup. Every step an extra weight because some girl behind a laptop “figured it out.”
I had to leave after that.
Not because I was afraid, but because the stage was ruined. Too many eyes. Too many uniforms. Too many people wandering around in shock, flinching at shadows.
I went quiet. They thought that meant I’d stopped.
I hadn’t. I was just…traveling.
There was a girl off a highway in Tennessee who thought nobody noticed when she left work alone at night.
Another in a motel three states over who liked to prop her door with the ice bucket while she smoked.
A woman jogging through a suburban park in a town that barely made the news, where the local police were so convinced it was her ex-husband they never thought to look at anyone else.
I had to practice on all the parts Jason had taken care of before. The finer points of stalking and abducting, for example. Those girls were experiments.
They were fine. Functional. Neat.
Forgettable.
None of them had history. None of them had stood in front of me at a window with my brother on their conscience. None of them had changed my story halfway through.
I would lie awake in cheap rooms and think about her sometimes.
About the way her name looked in print. About the way she moved in the footage I had seen of her—fast, clipped, never quite at rest, like her brain was always three steps ahead of her body.
Tallulah Gentry.
I watch her window in my mind again, the way it looked tonight.
The sad little pretend tree, more wire than branches. The cheap white lights. A single ornament that looked like it mattered swinging near the floor—tiny hummingbird, glass wings catching the light. She held it like something fragile and sacred when she took it out of the box.
I watched her hang it.
She took something from me. Not my brother—I could have done that myself, someday, when he stopped being useful. She took the luxury of anonymity. She took the joy of being the only one in on the joke. She turned my story into a cautionary tale for law enforcement seminars.
Now they whisper my name like it’s a password.
Henry Thurston.
It’s not the name that bothers me. It’s the way they say it. Like they discovered something. Like they earned it.
She did, I suppose. I’ll give her that. She earned the right to be on my list.
She’s a loose end. An unfinished thread. A bright, annoying bookmark sticking out of the middle of a book, reminding you where you stopped.
I try to imagine just…leaving her.
I could let her sit in that apartment, wrap herself in those old memories, build a new life out of small-town routines and cheap coffee and cops who think they can keep her safe. Let her age. Fade. Become a story other people tell at dinner parties.
Remember that girl? The one who helped catch that killer? Whatever happened to her?
My hands tighten on the wheel until the tendons stand out.
I can’t do it. Coming back to Lucy Falls was inevitable.
This town is mine in a way those other places never were. I know its angles. Its blind spots. Its habits. Where the snow piles, where the sirens echo, how long it takes for a cruiser to get from the edge of town to the apartment complex on the south side when the sheriff’s already on the road.
Three minutes.
I timed it tonight.
Three minutes between her whisper—he’s here—and the first wash of red and blue across her ceiling.
Three minutes where it was just her and me and a pane of cheap, breakable glass.
She thinks she won because I stepped back when the lights hit.
She doesn’t understand it was a test. I wanted to see how fast they’d come.
How loud they’d be. How many.
She forgets that leaving is a choice.
She forgets that I know where she sleeps now. How she moves when she’s afraid. How her voice sounds when she’s trying not to cry.
My brother would have rushed it.
He would have broken the glass just to see her bleed. Would have made a mess for the thrill of it.
I’m not him. I can be patient.
I’ve worked alone for more than a year now. I know how to plan. How to adjust. How to disappear between acts. I’ve had time to think about what went wrong the first time and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
I won’t give her the same story twice.
When I come back to that window, it won’t be with my hand on the glass and my voice through the frame.
It will be quieter.
Closer.
I let go of the wheel, flex my fingers again, and start the engine.
Headlights carve a tunnel through the trees. The town…Tallulah…is behind me for now. It won’t stay that way.