20. Someone Else’s Skin
Someone Else’s Skin
Summer
The tears don't stop after he's gone.
At some point I give up trying to wipe them away and just let them come, soaking into the pillow beneath my cheek until the cotton turns cold and damp against my skin.
My face aches. My eyes burn down to the lids.
I can't make myself move. So I lie where he left me, on a bed that isn't mine, in a room that isn't mine, and let the walls blur.
Every part of me that he touched feels like it belongs to someone else—like I set my body down somewhere in the middle of it and haven't found the way back into it yet. His voice is in my ear. That name hangs in the dark where he left it.
Annalise.
I don't follow the thought any further than that.
I can't. If I let it lead me back into my own skin I'll have to feel all of it, and I'm not ready. So I lie very still and think about nothing—which is worse, because nothing is where the grief is waiting. Mama and Papa are dead, yet now I can’t even mourn my father cleanly, not now that I know what he was.
The man I want to cry for and the man in that footage won't hold still long enough to be the same person, and I'm left grieving a lie I was handed every day of my life.
Somehow that's heavier than a body would ever have been.
The lock clicks.
The sound cuts through the quiet like a gunshot, and every muscle in my body pulls tight on instinct. I don't look up. I've learned by now that looking doesn't change who's on the other side of the door, and there's a small, cowardly mercy in the half-second before I have to know.
The handle turns. Footsteps cross the threshold—slow, measured, unhurried, the walk of a man who has never once in his life had to rush.
I know who it is before I lift my head. Jackson’s back.
For several seconds neither of us says a word.
I keep waiting for him to close the distance.
To say something about what he did to me in this room an hour ago—the fact that he raped me in that bed and then walked out like he'd done nothing at all.
To flood the space with that suffocating presence he carries into every room like weather.
He doesn't. He stays over by the dresser.
And when I finally make myself look at him properly, I see that he's holding something.
A box. Small. Black. Old enough that the corners have gone soft with handling, the way things wear when they've been picked up ten thousand times. The sight of it sends a chill straight down my spine before I even understand why.
He closes the door quietly behind him and crosses the room, and there's something careful in the way he moves—deliberate, like a man carrying something that might shatter if he breathes on it wrong.
He lowers himself into the chair across from the bed, settles the box on his lap, and then he simply looks at it.
The silence stretches until it has a texture.
I watch him despite every instinct screaming at me not to draw his eye, because something is different tonight, and different is the most dangerous thing there is in this house.
The anger that always sits just beneath his skin isn't there.
Neither is the cold amusement, or the cruelty that usually shows up somewhere behind his eyes like a second man looking out.
For the first time since he took me, Jackson Moore just looks tired.
Not the physical kind. Something far deeper than that—the soul-deep exhaustion of a man who stopped knowing how to let go a long time ago.
Slowly, he lifts the lid.
I wish immediately that he hadn't.
Everything inside is arranged with unbearable care.
Photographs. A little jewelry. A bundle of letters tied off with a ribbon that's long since lost its color.
A bottle of perfume. My breath snags—not because of what any of it is, but because of the way he looks at it.
I've watched people hold heirlooms. I've watched my own mother press her face into clothes that still carried someone's smell. I know what grief looks like.
This is something past grief. Something that never got the chance to become it.
His fingers hover over the contents before they settle on a photograph, and he lifts it the way you'd lift something holy—like it might come apart in his hands.
Its edges have worn pale, the colors faded almost to sepia, but I can make out a woman's face and dark hair spilling loose down her back.
A crease runs straight down the middle, the paper split where it's been folded and unfolded so many times the fibers finally give.
A small smile touches his mouth despite the damage, and it changes his entire face.
For one disorienting second, I catch a glimpse of the man he might have been, before whatever happened to him happened—and it frightens me more than his anger ever has.
Because I understand his anger. I know what it wants. I can't read him at all.
Monsters make sense. It's the broken ones you can't predict.
"She hated this picture."
His voice is so quiet I almost don't catch it. I don't answer. I'm not sure the words were meant for me at all.
"Spent twenty minutes complaining about it." A soft laugh escapes him, and the sound doesn't belong in this room, doesn't belong anywhere near the man I've come to know. "She said it made her nose look crooked."
His thumb moves across the image. Once. Twice. The smile lingers.
Then he looks up, and everything shifts.
His gaze goes from the photograph to me.
Back to the photograph. Then back to me again.
The smile fades—not into anger this time, but into something worse.
Concentration. He's comparing. Measuring me against her, hunting for the places we line up, searching for pieces of a dead woman hidden somewhere beneath my skin.
Under the weight of it I feel like a specimen laid out on glass, and I have to fight the urge to fold my arms across myself.
"You're thinner."
The words catch me completely off guard. "What?"
"Than she was." His tone stays thoughtful. Mild. As though it's the most natural thing in the world to lay a stranger down beside a ghost and find her lacking. His eyes travel over me again, assessing, tallying. "You'll have to eat more."
My mouth goes dry.
He turns back to the photograph, and just like that the conversation is over—if it was ever a conversation, and not just me sitting in the path of one he's having with someone who isn't here. Because that's the thing I'm starting to understand. He isn't talking to me.
He's talking to a memory.
I just happen to be in the room while he does it.
The thought slides through me, cold and clarifying, and I can't yet tell whether it's the most dangerous thing I've realized since I got here or the first thing that might keep me alive.
He reaches into the box again and draws out the perfume bottle, and the second his fingers close around it, something in his whole face softens.
Not for me.
For her.
The difference matters. It's a terrible, vital thing to understand, and I hold onto it like a handrail.
"She loved this." A sad smile. "Used to complain about how expensive it was." His fingers tighten a fraction around the glass. "But she'd always buy another bottle."
He lifts it and sprays once into the air, then leans back into the falling mist and breathes it in—and I watch him leave.
Watch him step out of this room and into another one, into a whole other life.
Whatever came after her—the prison, the blood, all the ruin he's built and left behind him—none of it seems to exist inside that single breath.
For as long as the scent hangs in the air, he's back with her, and the years between might as well never have happened at all.
And all at once I understand the shape of him.
Jackson loved someone once, and she was taken from him, and he never healed from it. Never accepted it. Never let it settle into the past where it belonged. Part of him is still standing in the exact moment he lost her—frozen there, unable to walk out of the room.
When his eyes find mine again, the intensity in them makes me want to look away. I don't. I can't. Because I can see the cracks now—the places where the grief kept twisting until it became something else entirely. Something darker. Something that doesn't want to mourn her anymore.
It wants her back.
"You look more like her now." He says it with a quiet satisfaction that turns my stomach—the voice of a man who's finished a piece of careful work, who's mended something that was broken.
And the pieces drop into place all at once. The dark hair. The photographs. The perfume. The clothes he had laid out for me. The way he keeps looking—not at me, at her—
Oh God.
This was never about revenge. Not really. Not entirely. It was never about selling me, or trading me, or even hurting me—because any of those would almost make more sense than the truth.
Jackson doesn't want Summer Miller.
He wants her.
And somewhere along the way, he's decided the two of us can be made into one and the same.
The understanding settles into my chest, cold and heavy and absolute.
And beneath the horror of it, so quiet that I'm ashamed of it, something else stirs.
Because if Jackson can be this—this soft, this open, this unbearably human over an old bottle of perfume—then there's a crack in him.
A way in. A way, maybe, to reach him. To reason with him. To survive him.
If he believes I'm becoming her—if some ruined part of him genuinely thinks he can bring her back through me—then that belief is a thing I can use. I can lean into it. I can pretend.
Even trapped inside a dead man's delusion, I can pretend.
Jackson rises from the chair and crosses to me, slow, his gaze never once leaving my face, the perfume bottle still in his hand like a relic he can't bear to set down.
A bridge, I realize. Between the woman he lost and the one sitting in front of him now.
He stops beside the bed and studies me for a long moment.
Then he smiles.
Because in his mind, he's already won. He's killed Papa.
He has me here, in his house, in his hands.
He's taken my body in this room, only hours after making me look at what was left of my father—and maybe, in whatever logic runs beneath all of this, that was how he thought it was supposed to begin.
A door he had to walk me through to get to the other side.
The look in his eyes turns my blood to ice.
Because it isn't cruel. It's hopeful.
And hope is so much worse. Hope means he believes there's a chance this works. Hope means he isn't performing any of it. Hope means he's already stepped over the line between memory and fantasy and pulled the fantasy shut behind him.
Then, between one breath and the next, he snaps back. The softness drains out of his face and leaves it sour, and when he speaks again the tenderness is gone as though it were never there.
"You will wear her perfume. You will wear her clothes. You will do everything I ask of you until you no longer remember the name Summer Miller."
My throat closes around a swallow that won't come. Because he means every word. Because he genuinely believes this is a thing he can do to me.
And staring into those hopeful, terrible eyes, I understand the most horrifying thing of all.
If I want to survive this, I have to pretend to be someone else.