Chapter 14
SYDNEY
“I-I’m sorry. What?” The car jerks a little as my words register.
I don’t blame him for asking me to repeat them. It sounds insane.
The story could be an episode of Dateline or a tell-all special. It’s not the kind of thing most people even fathom experiencing. It’s a nightmare, a worst fear. One that we all like to believe we won’t endure.
But nightmare or not, as bizarre as it sounds, it’s true.
“I killed her,” I repeat the words, struggling around the lump that weighs heavily on my vocal cords.
He’s silent. Of course he is. What could he possibly say to that? His brow is pinched in the light glowing from the dash, like he’s trying to process my admission.
“I…well, fuck. Was it a car accident or something? You said you were what, sixteen, when it happened?”
I shake my head.
If only it had been a car accident. If that were the case, how different would my life be?
“No,” I whisper.
The headlights wash over the shoulder as he pulls onto the side of the road and shifts into in park. I try to keep my attention focused on the lights that reach from here to the horizon. On the City of Angels.
Plenty of devils too.
The world is full of darkness. A darkness I fight every day.
The silence stretches, Cy sitting patiently in the driver’s seat. Like he’s waiting. For what?
Without my permission, my head turns his way. The compassion in his eyes is almost my undoing. Tears build along my lashes, a sob begging for an escape in my throat.
No. I can’t. I swallow hard, shoving it down.
“Why did you stop?” I force the words past paralyzed vocal cords.
His swallow is visible even in the darkness. “How did you kill her?”
Fuck.
He isn’t ready for the answer.
“Why do you want to know?” I ask, unpacking that old defensiveness I’ve carried for years and holding it tight, like a child clutching a security blanket.
I release his hand and clench mine into a fist again.
“It’s eating you up inside,” he says, his voice soft. “I’m not blind. I can see it consuming you even now. Talk to me. Maybe it will help.”
I blink rapidly, forcing the tears that want to spill over to dissipate.
No one has ever seen that piece—even Dad. The overwhelming guilt I still carry.
Most people don’t know about her. She’s my secret.
I’ve protected her memory from a world that doesn’t deserve her.
I inhale and release a sigh. One I’ve been holding for eleven years.
My shoulders drop, and I no longer have the strength to maintain that hard edge that keeps everyone at a safe distance.
I examine the lights. I don’t want to see the judgment set into his expression when he finds out what I did.
“Katie was my best friend from the time we were five. Our birthdays were almost a month apart. I was older.” Growing up, I teased her about it. “I turned sixteen first, and not long after my birthday, we went to—”
Shit, I can’t tell him about the concert. The words stick in my throat, choking me.
It takes several thick swallows to find my voice again. “Somewhere. She ruined something that I thought was really important at the time.”
Something that was stupid, when I look back. But fuck, it was so important when I was sixteen. I’d trade anything to go back and make a different choice.
“I told her she was nothing more than a people-pleasing rule-follower. That I was tired of hanging out with a baby like her and was going to find some real friends.” My voice wobbles over the last word.
I drop my head into my hands and force myself to breathe through the sharp pain that slices through my midsection. “I was so fucking stupid at that age.”
It’s a whispered confession, meant only for me.
But he hears me.
“We all did dumb shit as teenagers,” he says.
I straighten, surprised to see there isn’t even a hint of judgment on his face.
His eyes are soft, his mouth relaxed. He’s listening.
Nothing more. But also so much more. He’s trying to absolve me of a guilt I have no business being free from.
No amount of apologizing can bring Katie back.
I can’t go back and change the past. That’s why I’ll spend the rest of my life atoning for what I did.
“But we can’t take all of them back,” I tell him.
His eyes search mine and a shiver works its way through his body, touched by the shadows I have no doubt are visible when I think about Katie.
“What happened?” he asks.
“We’d argued before. Normally one of us would break after a couple of days.
We’d work it out. And she tried. But every time she tried to talk to me, I ignored her.
At school. When she showed up at my house.
I didn’t answer her phone calls or her texts.
I blocked her because every time her name flashed on my phone screen, I got angry.
“Her birthday came and went. Then when she didn’t show up to school for a few days, I was actually relieved. Because that meant she wasn’t trying to approach me in the cafeteria or at my locker. My best friend went missing, and I was fucking relieved.”
The words explode from me, tears overflowing my lashes, blurring Cy’s face and the lights outside the windshield.
He grasps my hand again, squeezing tightly as I struggle to breathe through the crushing pain. He stays like that, silent, patient. Like he has nowhere else to be.
The low music continues to play, one song switching to another as I swipe at the moisture on my face.
“It wasn’t until her parents showed up and sat in my living room, telling us that she had vanished on her birthday, that I knew what happened.
They were hoping I had an idea of where she’d gone.
I should have. We were best friends. I was so ashamed.
I had to tell them I didn’t know. That we had been in an argument.
Her parents both broke into tears when they realized I didn’t know. ”
Their shoulders shook with every sob. My dad tried to comfort the two of them, his own eyes glassy.
That moment was my undoing. Children believe their parents are invincible.
But their pain became another presence in the room with us.
I’ve never in my life been as terrified as I was that night. Or felt as powerless.
“K-Katie wasn’t like me. I’ve never cared about what people think of me, and I’m happy in my own company.
But she loved feeling like she was part of something.
She was an A student and involved in all kinds of clubs at school.
She was a people pleaser, always striving to ensure the people around her liked her.
But no one knew anything about where she’d gone.
” I force in another shuddering breath. “The police had no leads. Her cell phone was dead or broken. They wanted her laptop, but her parents brought it to me because I’d always been good with computers.
I could find things I wasn’t supposed to find. ”
It was a little rebellious addiction back then. Figuring out how to do things I wasn’t supposed to. And I was determined to use what I knew to find Katie.
Cy squeezes my hand, the touch startling me. For a moment I was sitting in my parents’ living room in Pasadena, not in a car in the Hollywood Hills.
“It wasn’t hard to break into her laptop, but it took me a couple of days to find her browser history.
That was a big red flag. Katie wasn’t good at that kind of stuff.
Someone must have walked her through how to hide it.
And she’d done a good job of it, but I found it.
She had been talking to a senior at another high school.
Logan Carter. That name still flashes in fucking neon in my brain.
” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and sniffle.
“Only Logan Carter didn’t exist. When the cops called the school, they confirmed that a boy by that name didn’t attend at all. ”
The urge to scream nearly overtook me when her parents told me that, I was so sure we’d find him and that he would tell us where Katie was.
Instead, we hit a dead end.
“I kept her laptop. Kept searching. Stayed home from school for a week because I refused to stop. It took several days, but eventually, I found it. A message. They had made plans to meet up on her birthday. Her sixteenth birthday. When I should have been with her, hanging out in her room watching movies or listening to music. But I was too busy being a self-centered bitch. Her parents gave the police the information while I kept looking through Katie’s chats and emails.
I studied the pictures he sent of himself, only to discover he’d stolen them from a teenage boy’s social media account. Some kid who lived in Pennsylvania.”
When I found out the images were stolen, I knew. This was bad. Really, really bad. I was obsessed with the laptop, convinced I would crack the case.
“What happened?” He says the words slowly, like he doesn’t want to know the answer.
He doesn’t.
“I missed another week of school, still digging, but I found nothing useful. Not on all the safe channels I’d been searching.
I’d heard about the dark web in some of the forums I was on, but I’d always been too afraid to go down that path.
When I ran into dead end after dead end, I finally realized that I couldn’t figure it out on my own.
So I went down that rabbit hole with what I had. Alice through the looking glass.”
The term “dark” is too tame to describe what I found. Resources I still use when I need to.
My stomach knots and my hand grows clammy in his. Does he feel it? If so, he doesn’t react.
“Did you find him?”
I nod and tears flood my vision again. “He wasn’t our age.
Not even close. Nathaniel Crowe was a middle-aged registered sex offender.
He had been convicted once before. Sexual assault by a person in a position of power.
He used to be a teacher.” I bat at the tears again, clearing my vision.
“But after he was convicted, he lost his license. Did odd jobs for money occasionally, but he had figured out how to catfish women and convince them to send him money. Logan Carter was seventeen, thirty, and forty-three. I found three profiles. He used the seventeen-year-old persona to lure Katie into meeting him at a convenience store close to his apartment. The police found the footage of her getting into his car.”
My stomach heaves and I gag. Shit. Quickly, I roll down the window to let the fresh air in.
“Did he lead you to Katie?”
I turn back to him, bottom lip quivering despite how hard I’m trying to hold it together. He swipes at the tears I can’t stop.
“The police questioned him for hours. She hadn’t been seen again after she got into his car.
They had access to all these chats and emails alluding to a romantic relationship between him and Katie.
” He kept his mouth shut. “Only when his attorney arrived and made sure that the death penalty was off the table, did he tell police where they could find her. An old access road close to the haunted forest—”
“Haunted forest?” He frowns.
It sounds ridiculous, but that is what the locals call it.
“It’s in Pasadena. A piece of land where a mansion used to sit. Though the house was torn down a long time ago.”
“Katie was there?”
I nod, my stomach cramping, causing me to double over.
“They found her body in a shallow grave next to the road. There were r-r-rope burns on her wrists and ankles. Like she’d tried to free herself or…” I can’t put the other possibility into words. That Crowe had used them against her.
“He didn’t even have the decency to cover her with more than a light layer of dirt. According to the coroner, she died a few days after she was seen on video. She’d been raped, sodomized. Tortured. Starved.”
My stomach lurches again. This time I open the car door, dry heaving.
Cy’s hand is warm on my back, running along my spine softly until the heaving subsides.
Eventually, I sit up and close the door.
He searches my face. He looks so angry in the overhead light “What the fuck? They shouldn’t have told you that. You—”
“They didn’t,” I tell him. “My best friend was gone, and my parents wouldn’t let me go to the trial.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t focus on anything but her.
School was pointless. I was close to failing out of my junior year when my dad allowed me to take the GED.
He and my mom sent me to a therapist, then a psychiatrist.” I drop my head back against the seat and close my eyes.
“But I couldn’t stand not knowing what had happened to my best friend.
Back then, I thought the not knowing was the worst part.
” Another wave of nausea rolls over me. This time, I keep it together.
“I eventually found the county’s network and broke through their firewall.
It wasn’t hard to find the files from there.
The coroner’s report was first. Then the transcripts from the court case where he explained what his findings meant.
There were also pictures from the crime scene and the autopsy.
I—” The pain in my chest intensifies, like a knife has been thrust into my heart.
“You shouldn’t have seen any of that,” Cy growls. “Fuck, I don’t know an adult who could handle that, let alone a sixteen-year-old.”
“But it was my fault. She died because of me. She should still be here. Not dead. I killed her. It’s my fault.” I hurl the words at him as pain overwhelms me.
Guilt. Grief. Rage at men like fucking Crowe. It all coalesces in a tidal wave crashing over me.