40. Rowan
ROWAN
Justin closes the door to his office behind us, but he doesn’t lean into it or claim the space. He leaves it untouched, stays a careful distance away, his hands loose at his sides. Like he’s offering me room to move while making it clear there’s nowhere safe to step.
“Whatever you tell me,” he whispers quietly, “won’t change anything between us.”
I study his face, waiting for the crack—for the flicker of doubt or judgement that always comes sooner or later. It doesn’t. Whatever he and Silas discussed was serious enough to pull me in here, serious enough to sharpen his focus, but not enough to alter the way he looks at me.
That almost makes it worse.
“I need to know,” he continues. “All of it. I need to know what we’re walking into.”
My chest tightens. I’ve been carrying this for so long my body has learned to live around it, learned to exist with the pressure instead of imagining relief.
“Even with all your assurances, Justin,” I say carefully, “I don’t know that you’ll be able to handle what happened that day.”
He doesn’t flinch.
“I need to know,” he repeats.
Whatever’s coming, he’s already decided to meet it head-on.
There’s no space left to retreat. No way to soften the edges enough to make this survivable for either of us. And I realise, with a slow, sinking certainty, that once I start, there will be no putting it back.
“You’re asking for something I don’t have neatly packaged,” I say quietly. My throat tightens around the words. “There are parts of that day that are still… missing. Not forgotten. Missing.”
My hands curl in my lap, nails biting into skin. I barely register the pain.
“There are holes in me where memories should be,” I say. “And around those holes is everything I am now. The caution. The anger. The parts of me that never came back.”
My voice wavers despite my effort to keep it steady.
“And if I open this,” I say, barely above a whisper, “I don’t get to choose what comes out. I don’t get to protect Missy. Or myself. And once you know… you don’t get to unknow it.”
I swallow hard. Silence settles between us, thick and unforgiving.
“I don’t want to make this any harder on you, Rowan. But this is now about so much more than what happened to you and your sister that day. And it could be the only way you get your justice.”
“There are parts,” I say slowly, “I can’t do this alone.”
He nods immediately. No hesitation. “How can I make this easier for you?”
“Bethany. Lily. I need their support.”
Another nod. “Titan?”
I think about that for a moment. About the way he watches without blinking. About the grief he carries like an old injury that never quite healed. Titan is sturdy, and he’s just as much Goliath as Justin is.
“Yes, him too.”
Justin exhales, relieved I didn’t say no.
“I’ll get them. Take your time.”
When the room fills again, it does so quietly.
Bethany sits beside me first, close enough that our knees touch.
She takes one of my hands in hers, and sets it down on her own knee, telling me she’s present and she’s listening.
Lily takes the chair opposite, her posture open, attentive, her eyes soft but steady.
Titan leans back against the far wall, arms folded, his expression unreadable—but I can see it in the tight line of his jaw.
The way it ticks once, twice, like something old has been disturbed.
I think he’s seen so much, he probably already knows what’s coming.
And he’s ready to burn a building down with the rage settling inside him.
Justin takes a seat across from me.
“Whenever you’re ready, Rowan.”
I swallow.
For years, I told myself that if I didn’t give the memory language, it couldn’t keep reshaping itself. That if I left it unspoken, it might eventually soften at the edges, bit it never did.
So this is me finally telling my truth. All of it. Before it kills me.
Missy and I did nothing wrong.
I need to say that first, because the world has a way of twisting stories like this until the girls are always the mistake. We were walking. Laughing. Talking about nothing and everything the way sisters do when they’re young and carefree and think they have all the time in the world.
We were walking back home after Tessa Calloway’s sixteenth birthday party.
There was a weeklong festival in town, which we hadn’t yet attended, and distant music carried on the air.
There were cars passing every now and then.
Nothing about that day could have prepared me or forewarned me that it would be the last normal moment of my life.
A car slowed behind us. It started rolling towards us, and there was noise. Voices. Catcalls. We knew they were visitors, because the local boys were always so respectful and never behaved that way. Missy squeezed my hand and told me to ignore them and keep walking. Which we did.
Then the car came to a stop beside us, and one of them opened the back door.
Then the passenger side door opened, and two boys climbed out.
There were three men in the car that day - those two and the driver.
I never saw the driver’s face, but I saw the two boys.
They were older, and I noticed a varsity jacket hooked to the back of the passenger seat.
I remember thinking they were college boys.
The jacket bore patches from St Augustine’s.
The boys were laughing as they approached us. Missy told me to run, but I refused.
I said her name. I told her no. I told her I wasn’t leaving her.
She shoved me.
Hard.
“Rowan, run,” she said again. “Please.”
There are moments in life where you make a choice that rewrites you completely. That was mine.
I ran.
I didn’t look back. I didn’t scream. I didn’t think. My body just… moved. Survival kicked in, brutal and blind.
Someone followed me into the cornfields.
I could hear his breath as he ran and his laughter.
Then he started talking to me, trying to get me to come out.
But I ignored him and cut across the field, the grass slicing my legs, my lungs burning.
I didn’t see the fence until it tore into me.
It was barbed wire, old and rusted, hidden by weeds.
It caught my leg and ripped.
I remember the pain—white, immediate—but I didn’t stop. I dragged myself through it, skin tearing, blood soaking my leg. I didn’t feel human anymore. I felt like an animal, all instinct and terror.
I fell. I crawled. I got up, then fell again.
I don’t know how long I was in that field. Time didn’t exist. There was only forward motion, and trying to get away from the danger following me.
I remember collapsing onto a porch. Wood splinters digging into my palms. I remember knocking—once, twice—before the world went black.
When I woke up, everything was wrong.
It hit me before I even opened my eyes. I knew immediately that something was gone.
Missy.
I didn’t remember running at first. Or the fence. Or the field. I just knew she wasn’t there. I knew it in my bones. In the empty space beside the bed. In the silence that shouldn’t have existed.
I asked for her. But no one answered. So I asked again.
That’s when my mother started crying.
She told me they found her by the creek.
She was dead, damaged. Even if she’d survived such a brutal attack, the damage to her body, her mind, would have been catastrophic.
I stopped being a sister that day. I became a survivor instead. And survivors don’t get comfort—they get questions. Suspicion. Silence.
It’s funny how quickly a person can go from being a victim to being viewed with suspicion. They called me unreliable, dismissed every piece of evidence I gave them until the system failed us.
The police investigation stalled. Evidence disappeared. Names were never spoken out loud. Lawyers descended before the grief even settled.
We were served with a gag order.
Do you know what it feels like to be told you’re not allowed to say the name of the men who murdered your sister?
That if you speak it, you could be sued. Ruined. Imprisoned, even?
Silence was enforced. And along with it, justice was stolen.
My family didn’t survive it.
My mother drank until she forgot she had two daughters and not just one ghost. She drank herself into an early grave, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because my father left after that, and I was alone in the world.
I carried my trauma through school. Through adulthood. Through every relationship that failed because there was no room for anyone else inside me.
I was lonely in a way that never eased. A loneliness that calcified into anger. Into resentment. Into something sharp and deliberate.
Eventually, the grief stopped being the loudest thing, replaced by rage.
And when that happened, I understood something else, too: I had nothing left to lose.
They took my sister. They took my family, and my future.
All that remained was the question of what I would do with what was left of me.
And the answer, whether the world liked it or not, was this: I chose not to let her disappear quietly. I chose to remember. I chose to name them. I chose to make sure they paid.
This is my truth. And I am done carrying it alone.
Bethany sobs softly. Lily’s eyes shine with tears she refuses to let fall. Titan stares at the floor now, jaw rigid, unmoving.
“I went to the morgue,” I continue. “I don’t know why. I think I needed to see her. Needed to prove that she had been a real, living thing. Not someone I had dreamed up. That she hadn’t just… vanished.”
My voice trembles then, finally.
“I saw the autopsy photos. I saw everything they did to her.”
I stop breathing for a moment.
“They didn’t just kill her. They took her apart. What sort of depraved animals do that to a person?”
Justin’s hands curl slowly into fists. Silence echoes through the room.
“I lost everything that day,” I sob. “And the anger had nowhere to go.”
Titan shifts then, pushing off the wall just enough to resettle his weight. His eyes are dark, distant. I know he’s not here anymore—not fully. I know he’s seeing Lily, younger. Broken. Bleeding.
“I studied them,” I continue. “Scott-Evans. Delaney. I learned how men like that move. How institutions protect them. I knew that Missy would never get her justice for what they did to her.”
Bethany squeezes my hand.
“And the resentment,” my voice is hollow now, “it didn’t fade. It just fermented.” I look at Justin. “Until all I could think about was making them pay.”