Chapter 30
The book had been a stroke of genius. I was a year away from graduating Dartmouth and still reeling from Will’s first failed appeal.
I’d always been a good writer and Dartmouth’s BFA had made me an even better one.
I wanted to get Will out of jail, and in order to do that, I knew I’d need to drum up interest in his case.
I realized that a novel was the way to go.
I could craft something that would make people pay attention.
A tell-all would have been great, but if it was nonfiction, I would have had to tread lightly.
If I wrote a fictionalized version of our story, however, I could say whatever I wanted.
You can’t sue someone for fiction—or at least not easily.
I knew Gary would never let his family take it to court.
He’d never risk me telling the world what he was doing the night that his daughter died.
I pored over the details of the case. Every time I sat down in front of my computer, the words spilled out of me, the blank page becoming my safe space.
The only problem with the book came at its climax.
I knew Will hadn’t killed Alex, but I didn’t know who had.
None of my research had led to any outstanding suspects.
I couldn’t write the novel without naming a killer. That’s the reason people bought mysteries, for the big reveal. And what good is saying someone was innocent if you don’t know who else to blame? No one likes an unsolved case, so I made an executive decision.
Gary would kill his daughter. The more years that passed, the more the assault began to eat me from the inside out.
I had refused to tell anyone about it, but it had completely changed the way I perceived men and sex.
Everything that followed—my slutty high school years, Bradley—was his fault.
And he deserved to be punished for it. In print.
Whether readers believed me or not, it would make Gary a villain.
A suspect. After all, his alibi was no better than Will’s—he was asleep, a fact corroborated by Mrs. Hopely alone.
And it was just like the police said: Families lie.
I knew he would understand. The moment he found out how he was characterized, he would know why I’d done it. He had molested me, and this was my revenge.
The night the news broke, I was back at my loft after fucking some guy in Alphabet City, a little drunk and very unsatisfied.
I was standing in the kitchen balancing on my uncomfortable heels and hate scrolling through Facebook when I saw the headline from the Palm Beach Post: “Gary Hopely, father of murder victim Alexandria Hopely, dead by suicide at age 57.”
Even before the hateful messages started rolling in from the Hopely sisters, even before Mrs. Hopely was interviewed by ABC about the impact of my book, I knew I was the reason.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and my pen had killed Gary Hopely.
I opened the champagne my editor gave me when I made the New York Times bestseller list, and drank the entire bottle in one go.
It was the first time I felt real joy since before Will was arrested.
Justice had been served, at least in this instance.
I waited for the guilt to hit me, but it never did.