Chapter 48
“Ruin” - Shawn Mendes
Two Months Later
Pierce
This fucker is going down, and I can’t wait to watch. The sun is just starting to peek over the horizon when the first cruiser pulls up outside the two-story Tudor with its stone facade and dark trim. It’s quickly followed by a second and third.
“Showtime,” I murmur, and take another sip of my coffee.
I’m parked across the street in an inconspicuous silver rental. My own car would have attracted too much attention in this neighborhood. While its residents are definitely upper middle class, not even professors with tenure drive Aston Martins. Much better to blend in with a BMW.
It takes several minutes for the officers to gather outside the arched wooden door, but once they’re all assembled, a burly one steps forward and pounds on it. I can hear his muffled “Police!” even through my car window.
I picture what’s going on inside the house. Likely the man inside has been woken by the banging and is currently scrambling to put on a robe and slippers. He’s probably wondering what’s going on, why his sleep is being interrupted on a quiet Wednesday morning in the middle of August.
He’s about to find out it’s much more than his sleep being interrupted.
It took me two days to narrow down the list of possible names by cross-referencing it with dates. Mr. Edward Carrow, primary school teacher at Langford Day Academy. He’s worked there for eighteen years, but he’ll never teach another class again.
The door opens, and it’s hard to see his features, but that’s okay, because I’ve spent the past few months memorizing them from pictures I found online.
At fifty-one, he hasn’t let himself go the way a lot of men his age do.
Still as rail thin as he was at twenty-five, the only signs of aging are his thinning hair and the deepening creases around his eyes.
Building a case against him was harder than I thought it would be. His reputation among parents is one a lot of teachers would kill for. They described him as soft-spoken, dedicated, and kind to a fault. The most common thing I heard was that he has a way of making children feel seen.
My gut turns sour at the thought, and I set my to-go mug back in the cup holder.
The police officer leads Carrow onto the front stoop—the fucker is wearing a terrycloth robe—then slaps a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. I expected to feel more satisfaction at seeing him led away, but a white-hot rage is burning through me so intensely that my hands are shaking.
I want to charge over there and pummel the man into the ground, to not stop until his face is a bloody mess, until he’s crying and begging for mercy, and not even then.
I want to drag his thin ass frame into the street and drive over it with my car.
I want him dead, his body cold and lifeless.
Scum like that doesn’t deserve to walk the earth.
He may be facing some form of justice, but it won’t be enough.
It’ll never be enough for what he did to my girl.
Blood drains from my knuckles as I clench the steering wheel.
Carrow is ushered into the back of a squad car, and I derive a tiny bit of pleasure from watching the officer shove him inside roughly enough that he hits his head on the frame.
It seems I’m not the only one who wants this bastard to pay for his crimes.
It took a while to track down his other victims. After asking Lux to break into the school’s records, we were able to access a list of Carrow’s students. But since they were all under the age of eleven when they came in contact with him, it wasn’t as easy as sending an email.
Using the list Lux produced, I cross-referenced the names against social media profiles, the society pages, and my own contacts.
Some of them I recognized, of course, and those are the ones I reached out to first, under the guise of being an investigative journalist who was given a tip about potential abuse at Langford Day.
I quickly discovered that Carrow’s tastes ran rather singular. All of the men I contacted had only good things to say about the teacher.
“He was a quirky old chap but really good at helping me with math.”
“Carrow? Nah, he wasn’t abusive. That had to have been Sherer. He was terrible.”
The responses from the women were a little different—not necessarily incriminating, but they contained undertones of something more sinister.
“Carrow never laid a hand on me, but my best friend said he could be inappropriate.”
“He always gave me the creeps.”
It took hours of phone calls and emails to finally track down five victims of Carrow’s who were willing to come forward with their testimony. When I asked why they had never spoken up before, they all said the same thing—they’d either been scared, or when they’d tried, no one had listened to them.
From there, I was able to put together a case file and submit it to the police, still using the story about being an investigative journalist as my cover. One of the detectives owed me a favor and kept me in the loop, which is where I got the tip about this morning’s arrest.
I watch the police cruiser pull away from the curb, Carrow in the back, and wonder if Maeve will see the news, if she’ll even care.
I wonder if she’ll remember our conversation at Belgrave Park, when she buried her face in my chest and told me her deepest, darkest secret, the one she’s carried alone all these years, because when she tried to tell the people who should have protected her, they let her down.
Pulling back onto the street, I make my way home.
There’s time for a workout before I need to be at the office, but even after an hour in the gym and a shower, I’ll probably still end up going in early.
Building a case against Carrow has been the only thing keeping me grounded these past two months, and now that it’s in the hands of the law, I’ll have time to pour myself back into Luminara Tech.
Without something to occupy my mind, it doesn’t take long for thoughts of Maeve to come surging back in, threatening to suck me down into the undertow.
We haven’t talked since she left that day.
It’s been two months and four days. I’ve become a bit of a recluse, simply because I know she attends nearly every event on the social calendar.
It’s not that I don’t want to see her—fuck, I want to see her more than anything. But I know what seeing her would do to me. Shoving a knife into my own chest would be less painful, especially if she’s with him.
She called me the night they broke the news to her at Heath and Walker’s. I was working late, trying to figure out which teacher at Langford Day had hurt her. When her name and picture popped up on my screen, it took every ounce of willpower I possessed to let it ring through.
It would have been so easy to answer, to listen to her voice, even if she was calling to yell at me—which, let’s be honest, she probably was.
Despite what I told the others, I’m well aware that Maeve likes to win on her own merits.
If she feels like you’ve given her a victory, it’s worse than if she’d lost.
The text came several minutes later, asking me to call her. I didn’t, of course, because I’m not a fool. She doesn’t want me? Fine. Then she’s not getting me.
She eventually stopped trying to contact me altogether, and as I glance at the dark screen of my phone on the seat beside me, I remind myself that it’s for the best. He’s what she wants.
I want her to be happy, and if it takes being with Ansley to make that happen, then I’m going to paste a smile on my face and pretend to be happy for her.
No one promised it would be easy.