Epilogue
Blair
Months Later
It’s been nine months.
Three fucking months since I left the motel behind. Since I got back home. Since I sat in a beige university office, nodded along to some guidance counselor telling me how strong I was for “overcoming adversity,” and re-enrolled in school like none of it ever happened.
Like I didn’t lose my goddamn mind. Didn’t invent a whole fucking world.
I graduated last week. With honors, apparently. Not that it matters. None of it feels real—not the degree, not the praise, not the life I’m supposed to want now.
Because a few days ago, they found her.
My sister.
What was left of her.
Buried in the woods, wrapped in black plastic like she was trash someone needed to forget. Dental records and a customer silver earring our grandmother gave her on our sixteenth birthday confirmed it.
Brynn was never missing. She was dead.
On some level, I always knew that, but it still guts me.
The funeral was yesterday. Closed casket, obviously. My mom cried into tissues she kept folding and unfolding like maybe she could smooth out the grief. My dad didn’t show.
Now it’s just me. On the beach.
Same place. Same hour as that night with Dagger.
The air smells like salt and gasoline. Like wet pavement and something rotting. Fitting, honestly. Waves crash soft and lazy, the sky smeared with early dusk, and I sit cross-legged in the sand, staring at what used to be the warehouse.
Now?
It’s a goddamn fish market.
Fresh paint. Neon sign. Bougie little food stalls out front selling overpriced oysters and seaweed chips to influencers in linen pants. The roll-up doors are gone, replaced by wide glass panels. There’s even a chalkboard out front that says, TODAY’S SPECIAL: LOBSTER ROLL + KOMBUCHA.
Kill me.
I glance down at my boots, then back up at the place where everything started—where I danced, where I got high, where I kissed them both like it was the last breath in my lungs. Right on the beach where Dagger gave me his jacket and looked at me like I was the center of his universe.
Where he kissed me like I was his.
Held me like a promise.
God, I was so fucking gone for him.
I remember Noir, too. That desperate, haunted look in his eyes. The way he always pulled me into shadows like I belonged there. Like I was his tether to something real. Like he cared.
I remember the pills.
The music.
The way the bass made my bones vibrate like maybe I was alive for the first time in years.
But it wasn’t real.
That’s the part that eats at me most. None of it was.
I keep telling myself that.
Over and over.
I kept looking for them. Even after I swore I wouldn’t.
Dagger and Noir. My dark little delusions.
But there was nothing. No records. No texts. No hoodie tucked in a drawer smelling like smoke and sin. No proof that either of them had ever existed outside whatever cyanide-laced fever dream I’d cooked up in that motel.
Everyone I asked gave me the same look—somewhere between concern and is-this-bitch-for-real ? Like I’d just asked if they’d seen my imaginary boyfriends who may or may not have also been criminals with god-tier bone structure.
And maybe I was crazy.
Because how the hell do you miss people who were never real in the first place?
Back home, I paint skulls.
Neon pink, mostly. Sometimes I add glitter, like blood caught in strobe light. Occasionally, I give them faces—one with eyes like chaos and ruin, the other with a smirk that could short-circuit your morals.
I know.
Totally sane behavior.
But what else was I supposed to do? After a psychotic break so vivid it gave me a personality reboot, I went back to college and enrolled in art. Because apparently my trauma response was becoming a tortured creative genius. Who knew Cyanide could unlock talent ?
Now my professors think I’m edgy and mysterious.
All I do is paint the same goddamn thing. Over and over.
Pink skulls. Pink skulls. Pink skulls.
Sometimes, late at night, I swear I hear it—that beat.
That low, pounding bassline that drags your ribs open and makes you feel alive even when you’d rather be dead.
Other times, I think I hear a motorcycle.
Just once. Just faint. Just enough to make my heart trip over itself.
But no one ever shows up.
But no one ever comes.
I check my phone.
4:56 p.m.
Train soon.
Dinner with Mom. New leaf, fresh start. All that bullshit.
I kick off my shoes and wander toward the water, just to feel something. The tide’s low, lazy, licking at the sand like it’s bored. I step in, let it soak the hem of my jeans, cold enough to jolt me back into my body.
Then—
Something taps my ankle.
Soft. Light.
I glance down.
A wave retreats, and in its wake lies a small, clear holographic bag. Sealed.
I bend, fingers wet and trembling as I pick it up.
Inside?
One pink skull pill.
Glittering like it’s been waiting for me. Like some twisted little love letter from the past I wasn’t supposed to survive.
My breath catches. My chest tightens.
I flip the bag over.
There it is—scrawled in smudged black ink like a goddamn omen. A phone number.
My heart stutters.
No way.
No fucking way.
All this time—I thought I cracked. Thought I’d invented them. Dagger, Noir. The raves. The lights. The overdose. I almost checked myself in somewhere just to make the delusion stop looping in my head like a bad remix.
But this?
This stupid little bag?
It means it was all real.
Holy shit. It was real.
I laugh. Actually laugh—sharp, unhinged, straight out of a psych ward.
I dial the number, hands shaking.
Because Jesus Christ, Blair… you weren’t just crazy.
You were right.
The line crackles once before a voice answers—low, disinterested, with that telltale rasp that makes my stomach drop.
“Pick your poison.”
My lips part, and I swear my heart forgets how to beat.
They’re still out there.
I smirk, slow and vicious. Oh. Okay. So this is the game now?
They wanna play ghost?
Hide in the shadows like none of it ever happened?
Erase themselves like I’m the glitch?
Cute.
I glance down at the pill again—neon, glittering, lethal.
A flare dressed like fucking candy.
“Cyanide,” I say, sweet and sharp.
Then I smirk.
Let’s see what happens when I take another hit.
After all…
I am their favorite little relapse.