26. Keira
KEIRA
I can feel his eyes on me, burning into my back like he’s trying to read the truth right out of my spine.
He thinks I was trying to run. That I packed a bag to vanish, to disappear before he could stop me.
And maybe I can’t blame him for thinking that.
But he’s wrong. I wasn’t planning some grand escape. I wasn’t going to bolt.
I just needed… a place to be. A space that wasn’t his estate, wasn’t that suffocating bedroom where every breath feels borrowed, uncertain. Somewhere I could exist for a few hours without feeling watched, or owned, or kept on a leash I didn’t ask for.
I came here to pass the time. That’s all. Three o’clock would come, Lionel would return, and I’d be back in the car, back in the cage.
But the house…This house isn’t just a monument to the past. It’s a tomb. And someday soon, someone’s going to have to empty it out, box by box, memory by memory. So I figured I’d get a head start.
I came to pack the rest of my things—what little I have left here that still belongs to me.
A few books. A sweater. Old photos I’m not even sure I want.
It wasn’t about fleeing. It was about closure .
Because deep down, I know I can’t come back.
I don’t ever want to come back here if I can avoid it.
Not after everything that’s happened here. Even if—by some miracle—Jayson decides I’m free. Even if he rips up the marriage decree and tells me I’m no longer bound to him by this sick, twisted arrangement…I still won’t come back. Because this place has nothing left for me but ghosts.
And the echo of a girl who realized too late to stop the monster that raised her.
I fold the last sweater and zip the bag halfway, my fingers moving on autopilot. Everything in here feels like it belongs to someone else now—someone I used to be.
The drawer beneath my nightstand sticks when I try to open it, swollen from time and neglect.
I almost don’t bother. But something tells me to tug.
It gives suddenly, jerking open with a small puff of dust and a clatter.
I glance down and see the edge of a notebook peeking out beneath some old receipts, a faded friendship bracelet looped around its spine like a tether to the past.
My heart skips.
I pull it out slowly, like it might burn me.
The cover is battered—cheap cardboard, edges frayed from being shoved in backpacks and passed between hands under desks. The front has doodles scrawled across it in pen. I’d know that handwriting anywhere.
Riley.
Her name is still there, carved into the top corner with my stupid glitter pen.
There’s a heart next to it. My initials beside hers.
I feel the world tilt just slightly.
I’d forgotten about this. I must’ve stashed it here years ago. Before she… vanished. Before the nightmares started. Before the guilt turned me inside out.
I sit down on the edge of the bed, the bag forgotten at my feet.
My fingers tremble as I flip it open.
There are pages of nonsense—bad poems, notes we passed in class, stupid little sketches of our classmates we used to laugh about. But then I turn the page and find something that punches the breath out of my lungs.
“I wish I knew what it felt like to be someone’s safe place.”
Written in her handwriting. No context. No date. Just scrawled across the top of a page in angry, jagged ink. My blood goes cold.
I don’t remember ever reading this. Or maybe I did and chose to forget.
Something deep in my chest coils tight, panic blooming like a bruise across my ribs. The air feels thinner now. Like the room is shrinking.
It’s as though she tried to tell me. Not out loud, but in her own words, now buried in a notebook we thought was just for jokes and secrets and songs we wrote about boys we’d never meet.
But this? This wasn’t some silly secret scrawled in a notebook. It was a warning. A quiet scream written in ink. A premonition dressed up as teenage fear. Because Riley never had a safe place. She never stood a chance.
I stare at the sentence, reading it over and over until the words stop making sense. My hands won’t stop shaking. I press the book to my chest, eyes burning, heart screaming. I want to scream with it. But there’s no one to scream to. No one to hear me.
The notebook feels heavy, as though it’s soaked with ghosts. Its pages hold Riley’s words. And I never heard them .
I stare down at it, at another place where Riley’s writing ends mid-thought, like she was interrupted—like someone reached into her life and just cut it off. No warning. No goodbye.
Tears slip down my cheeks before I realize I’m crying. Quiet and steady, they fall onto the page, smearing old ink. I press my palm against them, trying to stop the damage, but it’s too late. Just like with her.
You were trying to say something, weren’t you, Ri?
And I never heard you.
I was right there, and I never fucking saw it.
My shoulders tremble, my breath hitching in the silence of the room. And then I feel it. The air shifts. A floorboard creaks behind me—soft, intentional.
I don’t turn. There’s only one other person in the house, and it could only be him.
He doesn’t say a word at first. I can feel him standing there, his presence like a storm creeping in through a cracked window—heavy, watchful, restrained.
I can only imagine what I must look like to him.
Curled forward, gripping a stupid notebook like it’s the only thing holding me together.
Tears streaking my face. Breath shuddering.
Weak. Exposed. Raw.
But I don’t care right now. Not when everything inside me feels like it’s breaking.
His footsteps approach, slow and deliberate. And when he reaches me, he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t try to fix it. He just stands beside me—close enough that his body heat brushes mine.
And like a magnet drawn to safety, I lean into him like I have no control over my own goddamn body. I just fall into him.
His arm comes around me a moment later. Strong. Steady. Certain. He doesn’t flinch when I press my face into his side, the sob catching low in my throat. He doesn’t pull away when I cling to his shirt like I might drown without him.
For a man I should fear, he’s strangely quiet in the face of grief.
“Keira,” he murmurs, voice low, rough. “What is it? What’s in the book?”
I don’t answer at first. I’m not sure I can. The words feel too sharp in my mouth, like they’ll cut me open if I try to say them out loud.
But Jayson waits. Patient. Unmoving. The monster who tore my world apart is now the only person keeping me upright.
I lift the notebook, my fingers trembling, and open it to that page. I don’t speak. I just show him. His gaze drops to the words.
“I wish I knew what it felt like to be someone’s safe place.”
I feel the moment he absorbs it. The way his breath catches. The way his muscles tense. His hand on my back stills.
“Whose journal is it?”
“We all used to write in it,” I tell him. “There were five of us.”
I don’t tell him that there were five then four, and now I’m only one. After everything that happened with my father, even my friends started dropping off. Everything sort of just made sense after that.
“Riley wrote this. She went missing when we were fourteen.”
Jayson exhales through his nose, like he’s trying to rein something in. Rage, maybe. Or understanding.
“I—I don’t remember ever reading it. But it was here, all this time.”
I pull back slightly, just enough to look up at him. His expression is unreadable, but his jaw is tight, his eyes sharp—focused on that one sentence like it’s a loaded weapon.
“Somehow, I missed it. I was too caught up being a stupid teenager to see it. ”
Jayson looks at me for a long moment, then reaches out and closes the notebook gently in my hands.
“You were a kid,” he says. “Don’t put her fear on your shoulders. If she were afraid… that’s on whoever gave her a reason to be.”
My throat tightens.
“I wish I’d paid more attention to this?—”
“Keira,” he cuts in softly, firmly, “you can’t blame yourself.”
I don’t know what to say. So I say nothing.
Instead, I sink against him again, gripping the notebook like a lifeline.
And for the first time since Riley disappeared, I let myself grieve her—not as the mystery, not as the rumor, not as the cautionary tale.
But as the girl who sat beside me in math class, drawing hearts in the margins.
The girl who was scared. The girl who never got the chance to tell her story.
But maybe… just maybe… I’ll tell it for her.