20. Justin
JUSTIN
My hand hovers over the envelope.
I shouldn’t—but I do it anyway. I hook a finger under the flap and tip the contents out onto my desk. Papers slide free in a soft rush, photographs following, spreading into a disorderly sprawl that instantly feels invasive. Final.
For a long moment, I don’t touch anything.
I just sit there, hands still, staring at the mess I’ve made without actually engaging with it.
Like if I don’t pick anything up, I can still pretend I haven’t crossed the line Silas warned me about.
I don’t know what it is about Rowan Hale—whether it’s the discipline, the silence, the way she’s managed to erase herself so completely—but something about her pulls at me.
And the idea of combing through her past makes my chest thump dully, once, like a warning I’m choosing to ignore.
Eventually, I move.
It’s immediately obvious that Sheriff Morris was meticulous.
Painstakingly so. Every page is dated. Every note precise.
Timelines mapped. Names cross-referenced.
This isn’t the work of a man going through the motions—it’s the work of someone who knew the truth mattered, even if the world didn’t want it to.
I can’t help but wonder who else knew this existed. Or if they thought they were safe once he was dead. That whatever he’d uncovered would sink neatly to the bottom of that lake with him.
They were wrong.
I organize the mess into two piles. One stack of documents. One of photographs. I do it methodically, without looking too closely yet, like control might soften the blow.
Even without examining them properly, I can tell what the photos are. Crime scene shots. The kind you never forget once you’ve seen them.
I leave those face down.
There’s only so much my stomach can handle this early in the day.
I pick the first sheet up.
The paper is old, yellowed at the edges, warped in places where moisture once soaked in and dried again.
The surface is uneven—thick where the fibres have swelled, brittle where time has thinned them.
I can picture tears falling onto it, soaking deep enough to leave the page stiff with something heavier than water. Grief, maybe. Anger. Both.
The handwriting stops me cold.
It’s unsteady. Too tight in some places, sprawling in others. The kind of scrawl that belongs to someone young—barely past childhood, still figuring out how to make sense of the world while it’s coming apart around them. Not polished or careful.
Rowan.
I know it immediately. I don’t know how, but I do. There’s something unmistakable in the pressure of the pen, in the way certain letters dig into the page like they’re being carved rather than written. This isn’t a statement. It isn’t testimony.
It feels like a diary entry. Something never meant to be read.
And yet, for reasons I don’t fully understand, the sheriff had it. Kept it. Preserved it alongside evidence and reports, like he knew it mattered just as much as any photograph or forensic note.
I start reading.
One line. Then another.
Her sister’s name appears again and again, written like a claim, like repetition might keep her real. The memories spill across the page in broken fragments—hands, voices, laughter that turns sharp, fear that arrives too fast to outrun. The language is violent. Messy. Untreated.
Nothing in this has healed.
The words aren’t crafted for sympathy. They’re ugly in the way truth often is. There’s terror here, thick and suffocating. Rage that has nowhere to go. Guilt folded into every sentence, crushing and relentless.
I feel it settle into my chest, heavy and unmovable.
This isn’t a victim statement. It’s a wound, left open on paper. A child trying to survive something that should have destroyed her.
And suddenly, I understand something I wish I didn’t.
Rowan didn’t forget. She never moved on. She carried this with her—every word, every memory—until it hardened into something sharp enough to fight back.
Diary Entry 1:
I turned thirteen today.
No one remembered. Not Mom—still sprawled on the couch where she’s been since yesterday afternoon, empty bottles on the floor her only company. Not Dad, who hasn’t been home in three days and probably won’t notice even when he is. This house doesn’t remember things anymore. It just exists.
I told myself not to expect anything. I really did. But it still hurts. Everything hurts. It feels like my chest is packed too tight, like there’s no room left to breathe without something tearing.
It’s been six months since Missy died.
Six months, and I keep waiting to wake up. I keep thinking I’ll open my eyes and she’ll be there, yelling at me for stealing her sweater or laughing at something stupid I said. But she’s gone. And the space she left behind has swallowed everything. There’s nothing solid left to stand on.
The boys who killed her are still free.
I heard Mom crying when the police called again. I was halfway up the stairs, listening. They said they didn’t have enough evidence after all. After all. Like this was some kind of inconvenience. Like my sister wasn’t dead and buried.
How do they not have enough evidence?
I saw them. I told them who they were. I told them everything. I gave them names and faces and voices.
I can still hear Missy screaming when I close my eyes. It never stops. But apparently twelve-year-olds are unreliable. Confused. Emotional. They say that like it explains why no one believes me.
Yet I remember everything.
I remember their faces. I remember the way one of them laughed. I remember the car. The smell of the field. The way the air felt when I realized what was happening. I remember my panic, the blood, the silence that followed afterward.
None of that goes away just because I’m young.
I guess it doesn’t matter what you remember if you’re not important.
I guess it doesn’t matter what they did if they’re rich…
And as I stare at the words on the page, I feel them land in me one by one—each sentence a bruise, each memory a blade dragged slow. This isn’t a child asking to be saved. This is a child being taught, early and brutally, exactly how the world works.
I flip to the next page and stop. It looks like it’s been torn from a book—creased and crumpled, then smoothed out again. Like it was meant to be thrown away, discarded in a moment of impulse, and then retrieved later as an afterthought.
Four lines of text stare back at me, written again and again until the paper can barely hold them. The ink is pressed so hard it’s bitten through in places, letters overlapping, crowding each other, filling every inch of space. There’s no margin left untouched, no room to breathe.
This isn’t repetition born of carelessness. It’s deliberate. Obsessive. Like she was afraid that if she didn’t keep writing them, they might slip away. Or worse—be forgotten.
The strokes grow heavier as the page goes on. Angrier. The pen must have torn at the fibres, carving the names into the paper like a punishment that never quite satisfied. I can almost see her hand shaking, feel the force and anger behind each line.
This isn’t a list. It’s a fixation. A promise.
Names I won’t forget:
William Scott-Evans
Marcus Delaney
Unknown
Again.
William Scott-Evans
Marcus Delaney
Unknown
Again.
William Scott-Evans
Marcus Delaney
Unknown
Until the pen runs dry.
Diary Entry 2:
Dad is gone.
He didn’t leave a note when he left and he didn’t pack much.
He just walked out like the last two years finally crushed him and I was the reminder he couldn’t bear to look at anymore.
He couldn’t manage after Mom died.
They called it alcohol poisoning. Said it gently, like that made it less ugly. Like it wasn’t something I’d been watching happen in slow motion since the night Missy disappeared. She’s been dying for a long time. She just finally stopped pretending she wanted to live.
And now it’s just me.
The house feels wrong without them. Too quiet. Too empty. Every room echoes, like it’s waiting for something that isn’t coming back. I stand in the middle of it and feel small in a way that hurts, like the walls are leaning in, and they know I don’t belong here alone.
I’M ANGRY!
So angry it makes me nauseous. So angry it crawls up my throat and sits there, burning. How could they leave me like this? How could they sink into their own pain and forget that I was still here? That I lost her too. I lost my sister. I lost the person I loved most in the world.
I needed them.
They knew I needed them.
And they left anyway.
I’m fifteen. I’m supposed to figure out school and money and food and bills and how to keep breathing when my chest feels like it’s caving in. I’m supposed to do all of it alone, because they couldn’t carry the weight of their grief without dropping me in the process.
Sometimes I think about what Missy would say if she were here.
I know she’d be furious. At them. At the way they chose themselves. At the way they gave up instead of staying and protecting me. She’d tell me I deserved better. She’d tell me none of this was my fault.
She’d be right.
But knowing that doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t bring them back. It doesn’t make the house warmer or the nights shorter or the loneliness any less sharp.
It just makes it quieter.
And somehow, even lonelier.
Diary Entry 3:
I shouldn’t have looked at the autopsy report.
I knew better. I knew it would be a mistake. And I did it anyway.
No one was willing to hand it over without a fight. No one except Geena Morris.
She was my last option. My only one. Every other door I knocked on stayed firmly shut, bolted from the inside by fear, money, or loyalty to the wrong people. But Geena opened hers. Slowly. Carefully. Like she knew the time had come to finally let someone else carry the heavy burden with her.
She warned me first. Told me some truths aren’t meant to be uncovered, that once you see them you don’t get to put them back in their box. That answers come with a cost. I listened. And then I stayed.
I think she saw it in me—the refusal to back down, the way my defiance had calcified into something unmovable. She knew I wasn’t leaving without the truth, not after everything it had already taken from me.
So she gave me what she had. And in doing so, she became the only person ever, aside from her husband, who didn’t try to protect the lie.
I thought I was ready. I told myself that after six years, nothing could hurt more than the night she died. I was wrong.
I didn’t make it to the end.
I got halfway through the descriptions—the injuries, the bruising, the tearing, the way they catalogued her pain in neat, clinical language—and a chill slid through my gut.
I barely made it to the sink before I threw up.
I was choking, gagging, gasping like I was drowning. I couldn’t breathe then. I still can’t.
They hurt her. They violated her. Broke her down piece by piece.
Took what they wanted and left her ruined.
And when they were finished, when she wasn’t useful anymore, they threw her into the river like garbage.
Like the water would rinse her clean of what they did.
Like it would wash their fingerprints off her body and carry their guilt somewhere far away.
And the police let them. They protected them.
The report might as well have stamped their complicitness in bold letters across every page:
SHE DID NOT MATTER.
But she mattered to me.
She mattered so much that I still wake up hurting every day. Like my life stopped the night hers ended and everything since has just been echoes. I live in the shadow of what they did to her. I breathe it. I carry it. It’s stitched into my bones.
I want justice so badly that it terrifies me.
I want answers. I want to see their faces.
I want to look them in the eyes and know—really know—whether they regret any of it.
I want them to hurt the way she hurt. I want them to feel the fear, the helplessness, the moment when hope drains out of you and you realize no one is coming to save you.
The truth is, my sister didn’t just die that night. They killed something in me too. And whatever is left is sharp, and angry, and done waiting.
I slam the page down and drag in a breath through my teeth.
Rage sparks under my skin — hot and raw. Dark obsession. The kind that sinks in fast and deep and doesn’t politely ask permission.
I shove the pages back into the envelope where they belong.
There’s a whole stack of them, and I couldn’t get through four fucking pages. No wonder Rowan walks around like nothing scares her — she’s already lost everything. What is there left for her to lose?
The anger hits fast.
Not hers.
Mine.
Now I know what happened to her sister — at least enough to understand the damage done to Rowan. I have the names of the boys who walked free. The ones who were protected. The ones she identified who still managed to escape prosecution. And every thing starts to fall in place.
She was a kid.
And no one gave a damn.