Chapter 29 Findings Inconclusive
FINDINGS INCONCLUSIVE
LILA
The suitcase won’t close.
Of course it won’t. Because nothing fucking fits anymore.
I shove a pair of jeans in. A bra gets jammed into the corner. A tangled charger. The shirt I was wearing the night we arrived.
I should be packing methodically. But my hands are trembling, my heart’s in my throat, and every item I touch feels like it belonged to a different person. A different life.
And maybe it did.
Because that version of me—the one who arrived here with answers to find and a heart half-stitched together—she didn’t know what it meant to watch justice corrode from the inside out.
She didn’t know that sometimes a body dies slowly, not from one fatal blow, but from a hundred microfractures.
I shove a book into my bag hard enough to bend the spine.
Victoria killed Henry. Let Peter take the fall. Manipulated the truth so thoroughly that the people who used to love her most had no choice but to weaponize their silence, their grief, their pain.
What the hell do you do with that?
And what does someone like me do with the knowledge that maybe she deserved what happened to her?
The weight of that last thought presses into the space behind my ribs. I don’t want to think it. I definitely don’t want to believe it. But it keeps coming back, weaving its way throughout my brain, trying to take root.
What does it say about me that I think I can understand? That I can look at everything she did and stand here, surrounded by fractured truths and broken people, and think: maybe there was no other ending.
The answers don’t live in the evidence bags. They don’t live in the bloodwork or the tox screens or the way the lariat marks curve around a bruised throat. This isn’t something you can reduce to science or a checklist of psychological symptoms. It’s messier. Heavier.
Something I was never trained to carry.
And maybe that’s what’s deconstructing now—me.
The girl who believed enough data could explain anything. The woman who once thought her grief was a solvable equation. She’s splintering beneath the weight of everything she couldn't predict. Because the worst part isn’t the horror of it all or the guilt or even the truth.
It’s realizing that none of it changes anything.
It’s the grey space where all of it lives together.
There is no justice waiting on the other side of this. No redemption either.
Cognitive patterns and behavioral sequences—I get those. They make sense because they make the world make sense. They offer logic and explanation.
But this?
It doesn’t matter how much evidence we’ve cataloged or how many timelines we’ve mapped—none of it accounted for the fact that Baryn would step in front of Emily the moment the ground gave way beneath her.
And love, when it’s that deep and that unwavering, doesn’t pause to weigh outcomes or justify itself. It just moves. It protects. It absorbs the blow before it ever reaches the other party.
Which changes my perception of Baryn entirely. The shield he’s built out of relentless assholery suddenly makes a lot more sense.
And then there’s the other thing. The one that’s been pressing at the back of my mind, nudging, relentless.
Another kind of love.
Yeah, that’s a whole mess of an idea. Especially when it involves me and Theo Grayson. Because nothing about him, or us, or this entire fucked-up situation fits into a tidy equation either.
And still, I don’t think I can stay mad at him for long, being that he’s only been gone for forty-five minutes and I already fucking miss his infuriating face.
I zip the suitcase violently, too fast, catching fabric in the teeth. It sticks halfway, resisting closure. Even my luggage thinks I’m not ready to leave.
And maybe I’m not.
Because underneath all of this there’s still Emily.
Emily, who once braided my hair every morning before class.
Who stayed up with me all night after Laurel died, just to make sure I didn’t feel alone.
Emily, who checked in with me relentlessly when I was a shell of a human and the worst kind of person to be around.
Who never gave up on me when I was at my lowest. Who knows all my gross habits and still calls me her favorite person.
Those memories aren’t theoretical. They’re not stories I tell myself to feel better about who she is now. They’re real. She’s been there for me when there was no one else. My constant. My one fixed point in a world that’s always felt a little off its axis.
I should see her differently now. As someone I don’t recognize. Someone who kept secrets. Someone who crossed a line that never should have been crossed.
And I do see all of that.
But I still see her, too. Beneath the damage and the decisions and the mess she made of everything. Scared. Grief-warped. Trying to survive something she never had the tools to face.
And no matter how hard I try to rewrite her in my head, the version of Emily I have always known and loved doesn’t fade in the slightest.
None of that excuses what she did. But it complicates it. And complications, for all their mess, demand you at least look them in the eye before walking away.
I don’t know how to look at her exactly the same yet. But I know I’m not ready to leave without trying. Because I love her. Because some part of me wants to believe we can forget this mess and move on with our lives.
Because I really do believe she didn’t mean for it to go so far. For it to end this way.
I press my palms into the suitcase lid and let out a breath.
The room feels too empty without Theo here.
And as much as I want to be mad at him—really, properly furious—I’m not. Because even through the shock and the hurt, I understand why he kept it to himself. He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was trying to spare me something I wasn’t ready to carry.
It still sucks. It still makes my insides ache every time I think about the look on his face in the kitchen, how he knew and I didn’t.
But deep down, I don’t feel betrayed. Just..
. tired. Confused. Stretched thin in every direction by a story that stopped making sense days ago and a house that refuses to give up all its secrets at once.
I don’t know what to do with any of it. With Emily. With Theo. With the version of myself that thought I could come here and leave with clean hands.
The door clicks softly, and I lift my head before I’m fully ready.
Theo steps inside, still carrying the weight of someone who just spent nearly an hour smoothing over a disaster I was too much of a coward to face.
He doesn’t look at me right away. Doesn’t ask why I didn’t stay with him.
He just closes the door behind him with a soft finality.
For a second, I’m sure he’s angry. Or disappointed. Or done.
The way I reacted to everything…
He doesn’t come toward me.
He goes to his bag instead.
He crouches beside it, unzips the front pocket, and pulls out his wallet. He takes a breath, one I can hear from where I’m sitting, and opens it. There’s something folded inside, edges softened from time. He removes it with careful fingers, smoothing it once over his knee, and then he stands.
He walks over to me, holds the paper out between us.
It’s a napkin covered in what started as idle pen marks and somehow turned into a very convincing blood spatter pattern. Directional lines, impact points, a tiny arrow labeled velocity???
It’s the one I doodled through our entire first conversation, forgot the second I left the gallery, and now recognize immediately.
"You kept this?" I ask, slightly confused. "Why?"
He doesn’t look away.
“I kept it because you were the only thing I could think about after that night,” he says.
“I told myself it didn’t matter. That we couldn’t happen.
That it was one strange, perfect chance encounter and I needed to let it go.
But I couldn’t. Every time I tried, I ended up unfolding this again, just to remind myself you weren’t something I imagined. ”
His hand twitches like he wants to reach out and touch me.
“You have no idea how brilliant you are, Lila. How much you have always meant to me,” he goes on. “And when you reached out about coming here, when you said you wanted to do this with me—there was never a universe where I was actually going to tell you no.”
My eyes are leaking now. He reaches up to swipe his thumb across my wet cheek, and keeps going.
“If anyone could figure this out, it was you. And yes, I wanted the truth. But I wanted you more. Being near you again… it was the first time I felt anything at all in months.” His voice drops.
“I came because I wanted to protect you. From this family. From this house. From what you were walking into. And maybe I took that too far. I wasn’t trying to prevent you from finding the truth.
I just—” He breathes out. “I wanted a few days where I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t in love with you.
A few days to be selfish and stay close to you, no matter what it cost.”
A laugh slips out of me. “So you’re a sentimental hoarder,” I say. “Good to know it’s not just me.”
His brows rise, a slow spread of disbelief and something warmer. “A sentimental hoarder,” he repeats, as if testing the words. “That’s what you’re going with after all that?”
“Yes,” I say, because it’s the only thing keeping my heart from combusting. “Someone has to keep you humble.”
His mouth curves. He steps in, his hands slide to my thighs, and suddenly I’m off the floor. A surprised squeak escapes my throat as he lifts me, my legs wrapping around his waist on instinct.
“Theo—”
He doesn’t let me finish.
His mouth finds mine, urgent and sure, kissing me with all the things he’s been trying not to say for a year. My fingers curl into his shoulders, holding on as his lips move over mine again, and again, and again, until my laugh dissolves into a groan.
I let my thoughts fall away and kiss him back with everything I have, suddenly certain that neither of us were ever faking a single second of it.