Chapter Fifty-Nine
Fifty-Nine
Jake Calloway, aka Cody Abbington, aka Wesley, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder and four counts of attempted murder.
He pleaded guilty. Detective Ellison told me he had spewed a long, rambling confession as soon as they sat him down in the interrogation room.
He explained how I was the one who’d attacked him, not my father—justification for his righteous revenge.
Cody Abbington hadn’t died. I hadn’t killed him.
Aggravated assault by a nine-year-old didn’t have the same ring to it, and in the midst of so many actual murders, my greatest secret disintegrated into irrelevance.
A fact that I had shaped my entire life around—gone.
Knowing everything could have been different for me, I wasn’t sure what that made me now. I was completely lost.
Jake spoke at his arraignment, another speech, this time aimed at the cameras.
He wanted to be infamous, like Abel, admired for the lives he had taken, how he had reclaimed the narrative after his tragedy.
He wanted it framed like a master plan he’d concocted that had been executed flawlessly, the pinnacle of tragic manipulation.
He very much refused to acknowledge that he had been foiled in the end by a kissy face and a woman with a hard skull.
Fourteen days after Jake Calloway was processed into Edgar Valley, he was found dead in his cell—strangled.
It would have been easy to wrap a sheet around his neck, hang him from a bed, and disguise it as a suicide, but his assailant hadn’t gone to the trouble.
Jake had been strangled by someone’s bare hands.
I knew who did it and so did the rest of the world, but two corrections officers insisted they were with Abel during the entire time window. I had seen my father control one of those officers with a look and I knew his alibi meant nothing.
I couldn’t stop fixating on Cody, wondering if maybe that was what he’d wanted all along, to end up in that prison, to get to Abel, to die at his hands like the rest of his family.
His lawyer could have asked for a different prison.
It would have been a reasonable request. I thought there must have been a reason he hadn’t.
Then I would hate myself for how much the idea of him maybe getting what he wanted bothered me.
Then the more I spiraled, the more it felt like he had gotten what he wanted.
I had come a long way on paper. I wasn’t a murderer after all.
I was nothing like my father, and even more than knowing it, I had accepted it.
I grieved for Natalie and my mother—even for James Calhoun.
I had people in my life I cared about. I should have felt better, but those were just bullet points.
Realizing that I could be my own person, that I didn’t need to hide, and that I didn’t need to hurt people—that was nice, I guess.
But that’s not how I had spent my thirty-year existence up to that point, and a few storybook epiphanies weren’t going to reset the way I processed the world and the people in it.
The frosting was pretty, but I worried the cake was still rotten.
The guys were faring better than I was. Dominic was getting his book deal—a book that didn’t yet exist, but Elyse and I had both agreed to exclusive interviews and the publisher couldn’t resist.
Porter got a lot of attention, mostly because he was the only one receptive to it, and he very quickly leveraged that into something more.
He gained an awful lot of Instagram followers and started posting ads.
I didn’t know what qualified a person whose only claim to fame was almost being murdered to suggest teeth-whitening products and protein powders, but I was happy for him and his platform.
He would shoot me a few texts once in a while, but I wasn’t sure he needed me anymore.
I wasn’t sure what he thought about me, about Gwen. Or what he thought about Marin.
I sat on my couch. I’d thought everything would be so different for me now, but I was still alone and I was still battling thoughts I had hoped would dissipate.
I debated calling Elyse, but there was no way to be casual with her now.
Over the past months we’d had brief conversations, never alone, always surrounded by cops or lawyers.
I didn’t know if she had forgiveness in her.
She had hated the real me for almost twenty years.
She’d gotten her brother back and now he was gone again because of me.
I could have called Dominic. He always picked up, but I didn’t want to talk to him. These days, the conversations felt more like interviews.
Three dead ends.
I grabbed my phone, opened the internet browser, and stared at the search bar. Then I started typing.
Natalie Shea
She’d had no social media. Only that one video that was taken down but had lived on like all things do on the internet.
There were other links though. She was one of Cody’s victims after all.
I read the first fifteen search results.
They all listed her in the context of the bigger picture.
A few described her as a mentally unstable accomplice, which I was sure they’d gotten from Cody.
There was never a mention of any journals, and I had to assume Cody had taken them after he killed her.
If only people knew the truth, but I had the last journal, and I’d kept it a secret too. I told myself it was because it raised too many questions about Porter’s involvement, but it was really just something I didn’t want to share with the world. It was the only thing I had left of her.
I wondered what had happened to Natalie in all those years since they’d pulled her away kicking and screaming. I used to promise her that everything would be okay. Talk about broken promises.
I suddenly felt the urge to search another name.