Epilogue
Sasha
Six weeks later
It’s finally sunny. I sit in the courtyard of Raffy’s rehab center at a stone-carved table, eating a cheese sandwich in the
bright sunshine. Tucson had the best dual-diagnosis facility, and so we came here. I’ve always wanted this warm, happy climate
but would never have believed the road I’d take to get here.
Chloe adores her school, and of course it’s difficult, but she’s adjusting to this new life.
Drew has taken up photography and seems a little lighter—sometimes I even see a glimmer of something resembling a regular teenager who’s excited about stuff, playing pickup basketball and talking about colleges.
We don’t turn on the news or follow the updates on Al Blanc’s trial or all the coverage on Tom’s heinous crimes over the years.
We go to the state park and botanical gardens, we watch British baking shows, we grow lemon trees in pots on the patio, and we watch fireflies blink in the backyard of our tiny rented house.
And I visit Raff every afternoon when the kids are at school.
I’ll likely have to testify, but I don’t let myself think about that now. I won’t be a good witness anyway because I never
suspected a thing—not one of the horrors going on right under my nose. I just want to put it all behind me.
It wasn’t hard to walk away from the very comfortable life I was used to. It was the easiest thing I ever did, because it
never felt quite right no matter how much I convinced myself it did. I suppose I wouldn’t have lied and spent so much time
at Raffy’s if I’d felt . . . safe.
Everything was in Tom’s name, so it will be seized by the state, and even that can’t possibly be enough to pay his lawyers
and debts to the families he’s destroyed—victims that seem to surface one by one with each passing day.
The state can have it. I don’t want it anyway. I never really did. The little house on the cliff that Raffy and I bought was
modest and had wooden shutters and flower boxes and a vegetable garden in back, and that was home. I wonder if I should have
fought harder to keep that all together—if I helped him enough or gave up too easily.
I won’t give up on him this time. We’re selling the cliff house and the money will get us by while I look for a job. We’ve
been left with next to nothing, but I couldn’t be happier. The man who ruined Raff’s life and held him emotionally captive
all these years is gone, and he finally can be free now. Maybe letting go of that will finally allow him the space to recover.
I sit across from him, the sun on his face, light in his eyes for the first time in many, many years.
I push a bottle of lemonade Chloe made for him across the table.
He smiles. We eat our sandwiches and watch a goldfinch hop from branch to branch of the desert willows above the courtyard, and I pray to myself, silently .
. . a quiet plea that Raff stays with me.
That I don’t lose him again. That he doesn’t lose himself.
I stay until dusk, hanging out in the rec room and pushing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together and talking with him about his
plans—the business he could rebuild, the fruit trees we could grow, the years we still have. Then, when it’s time for him
to go, I walk inside with him. I hold his face between my hands and kiss him goodbye before he walks down the long hall leading
to the group therapy room, and I turn to go back out to the lobby and leave. It’s dark outside and I’m excited to pick Chloe
up from her ballet class and bring dinner home for Drew. I feel something I haven’t felt in a very long time—something like
happiness, I think.
When I pass through the lobby to the front door, I stop when I hear my name. It’s the news playing on the TV above the waiting
area chairs near the front desk. They are talking about the events that happened—the tragedy, and the arrest of two seasoned
killers. I moved far away from Connecticut, but I know the story has made some national news outlets. But this time what I
hear is different, urgent, horrifying.
I look up at the screen and see the face of a young reporter with a microphone saying words I cannot believe I’m hearing.
“Breaking news: Thomas Blanc has been reported missing from Mercy General.” I instantly become so dizzy the rest of the report blurs before my eyes and only some of the words reach me—a buzz in the air like electricity. Escaped, manhunt, armed and dangerous.
I have to rest my hands on my knees as I lose my breath. A desk clerk rushes out to steady me and tries to help me to sit
down, but the world is spinning all around me as sparks of light detonate across my vision.
I have tried to avoid hearing that name. I have gone out of my way not to loop all the horror in my mind and let it erode my psyche and sink into my bones. But now it’s in front of me. They say
he escaped yesterday. He could be anywhere. My phone rings; it’s Regan. A text buzzes. Andi. Everyone is trying to warn me,
but it’s too late.
“He’s free,” I whisper to myself as the desk clerk fans me and a woman who was sitting in the waiting room gets me a paper
cup of water.
“Are you okay, ma’am? Should I call a medic?” the woman asks.
Suddenly, there is a pop, the hiss of electronics shutting down, the shock of the power halting suddenly, and then the building
is dark. There are gasps and murmurs around her. Footsteps, shouts, a couple staff trying to find a flashlight. Shouts of
“What happened?” and “Oh, my God” whirl around me, and I know. I fall to my knees, I try to breathe, but I know what’s happening.
He’s here.
There’s no panic right away because nobody else knows what is really happening.
They still live in a safe world where a benign power outage can happen anytime.
It’s true that brownouts aren’t uncommon, but I know what’s coming.
First, I start to run for the front door, because I don’t want to be trapped inside.
But then I immediately think, Raffy. Tom’s not here to kill me.
He wants Raff. I push through the double doors and start to run down the corridor leading to
the staircase up to Raff’s room.
I hear mumbles about the generator not kicking in. Of course it hasn’t. Tom’s a master criminal. He would have thought about
disabling the generator. It’s not the first time he’s skillfully planned a murder in a short amount of time. How could he
have even found out which hospital Raff was at? He’s so seasoned at this, I imagine there are ways—as complex as hacking a
system or as easy as calling and asking to talk to Rafael Carro and having some college student working the front desk give
out too much info. Somehow, he’s done it. All these thoughts spin in my head as I run—my mind’s attempt at making sense of
how this could be.
I imagine him flying here under one of his fake names, researching the hospital, looking at the layout on Google Earth, accessing
the blueprints, which are public record—all the things he could have done to get his ultimate revenge, he would do. He would
sink to any level and he has the expertise.
Then something stops me cold. I hear a pop. A gunshot. A scream. That’s when the chaos starts. Residents who were hovering
in their door frames, looking to see what was happening with the power, are now panicked, rushing for the stairs, falling
over each other with fear. Active shooter. Common, everyday words in this country. I’m sure they can imagine themselves on
the news tonight. Another mass shooting we will forget about in a couple weeks. No power, no generator. Gunshots.
The shouting is deafening. When I reach the second floor, I’m almost trampled by the crowd of residents rushing me.
Nurses are screaming evacuation instructions, but nobody is listening.
It’s sheer desperation to get out, to run.
There is one security guard who seems to have been swallowed up in the confusion.
Could it have been him? Did he shoot an intruder?
No. Thomas Blanc is a man with nothing to lose. He knows he’s going to prison for the rest of his life no matter what, and
he will take as many people down with him as he can.
It happens so fast that I can’t be sure what occurred in which order, but a staff member was shouting for people to stay in
their rooms and lock their doors and get on the floor, and when I finally reached the top of the staircase, I see Tom, right
there—just his profile—and I can see he’s pointing a gun and standing perfectly still. Raff is just outside the open door
to his room. He has his hands up and fear in his eyes, but there is something stopping Tom from killing him. The security
guard is there—on the opposite side of the hall in front of a nurse’s office. He’s a scrawny, sandy-haired man—a kid, really,
scared to death. His hands visibly shaking, but he holds his gun with both hands and shouts orders at Tom.
There’s a woman on the ground. The one I heard shouting orders. She must have gotten in Tom’s way. Was that the shot I heard?
Is she the only victim so far? She’s groaning in pain, but she’s alive. The three men stand in a triangle—a standoff. But
the second I saw Tom is the exact moment he registered me, and it all somehow feels like slow motion and like a flash all
at the same time. In one swift movement, he grabs me by the hair—before I can even absorb what I’ve just encountered and turn
to run. He pulls me into him, and before I can scream, he has me in a chokehold with the gun pointed at my head.
“I never wanted to hurt you, Sasha,” he says, and all of it hits at once—the hopelessness of what is happening. My legs go weak and the adrenaline surges through me, making my whole body tremble. I could never get out of his grip twice. I beg him. Reason with him.
“You can run. You’re free. Why are you doing this when you could still escape? You could be in Mexico by now!” I say, because