Jade
The indictment hasn't come yet but Phoenix's lawyers say it's coming.
They give him a timeline—weeks, not months—and Phoenix relays this to me over dinner on a Tuesday with the same voice he uses to tell me about traffic and grocery lists, and I nod and pass the bread and we eat the rest of the meal talking about other things.
I've been writing. I opened my laptop three days after the study conversation expecting to stare at a blank page and found instead forty pages I didn't entirely remember producing.
My half-elf scribe had made a decision I hadn't consciously planned for her.
She'd stopped protecting the man she loved and started protecting the truth about him instead.
I read it twice, changed six words, and saved it.
What I came away with from the conversation with Nicholas isn't what I expected.
I expected the murder. The premeditation. The specific shape of a man who planned to kill someone and did it and built thirty years of careful living on top of it. I expected to sit with that and figure out what I thought and come to some conclusion I could hold and examine.
Instead, I keep coming back to the question I asked and the answer Nicholas gave.
Did any of it actually help her, or was it for you?
He looked at his hands. He stayed with the question long enough to mean it. And then he said both and that the balance wasn't what he'd told himself for years, and that building the empire let him look at himself in the mirror without seeing only what he'd done in that kitchen.
He’d built a monument, not a memory.
I've been thinking about Ashley Price ever since.
Not the version of her that exists in Nicholas's guilt or in Olive's childhood friendship or in the email that arrived too late.
The actual girl. Seventeen years old, in a library in Mississippi, writing a letter she didn't know would define everything that came after.
What she was like in the forty-eight hours before she died. I wondered if anyone was kind to her.
I started researching, as you research things you're not sure you have the right to know. Public records first—an obituary in a small Mississippi paper, three lines. Ashley Price, seventeen, survived by her mother. No mention of the cousins. No mention of how she died.
Then survivor forums.
There are communities online for people who have lost someone to suicide, and communities for people who were there and have never been able to leave it behind.
I read through several of them for two nights running, sitting on the couch after Phoenix was asleep, the house quiet around me, the screen the only light.
On the third night I found a thread in a forum for long-term grief.
Someone describing a girl they'd known briefly.
Seventeen. Mississippi. The summer. Being kind because it seemed like no one else was going to be.
I read it three times.
Then I made an account.
I didn't say who I was or why I was asking. I described what I knew in careful general terms—the timeline, the cousins' house, the library where she spent her days—and asked if anyone remembered her.
Then I closed the laptop and went to bed and lay next to Phoenix in the dark and stared at the ceiling.
Phoenix reached for my hand in his sleep. His palm warm and his grip is loose.
I held it and waited.
The response to my post came six days later.
I was at the kitchen table with coffee going cold beside me when my phone buzzed with a notification from the forum. I looked at it for a full minute before I opened it.
Her name was Donna. She'd been seventeen that summer too, the daughter of the family next door to the cousins' house.
She'd been the only person who said hello to Ashley in those forty-eight hours.
She'd brought her a glass of water on the first afternoon, through the fence, and Ashley had looked at her like she wasn't sure kindness was something that still happened to her.
She wrote three paragraphs. Her words were plain and heavy.
Ashley had been quiet. Polite. She'd asked Donna if she liked to read, and when Donna said she did, Ashley had said, me too, I mostly read about places I haven't been yet.
She'd drawn things in a notebook, something like maps, Donna thought.
She hadn't seemed like someone planning to die.
She'd seemed like someone tired of fighting to stay.
The second evening Donna had knocked on the fence to say goodnight and Ashley had been there already, as if she'd been waiting. She'd said thank you for talking to me. That was the last thing Donna remembered her saying.
She'd found out what happened the following morning.
She'd been holding onto it for thirty years, she wrote, because she'd always wondered whether she'd known and missed it, or whether she hadn't known because Ashley hadn't wanted her to.
She hoped it was the second thing. She preferred to believe Ashley got to choose what her last two days looked like, at least a little.
I read it twice. Then I sat at the kitchen table with my cold coffee and the blank page and the morning light coming through the windows, and I thought about a girl drawing maps of places she hadn't been yet, and a glass of water passed through a fence by a stranger, and thank you for talking to me as the last words a kind person heard from her.
The monument Nicholas built is thirty years old and worth billions of dollars.
None of it brought Ashley a glass of water.
I closed the forum tab. Then I opened it again and typed a reply.
I thanked her. I told her what her message had meant.
I mentioned, carefully, that Ashley had people who loved her and had wondered about those last days for a long time.
I didn't say who I was or how I was connected.
I just said the wondering had been real and her message had helped.
Then I closed the laptop and called Olive.
She picked up on the second ring and I could hear the garden in the background — birds and the faint sound of shears from somewhere near the south wall.
"I found someone," I said. "Someone who knew her. At the end."
Olive was quiet. "Tell me."
I told her about the forum and Donna. I told her all of it in order, as you tell someone something when you know they've been waiting years to hear any version of it.
When I finished Olive was quiet long enough that I checked the call was still connected. Then she exhaled, slow and not quite steady.
"She drew maps," Olive said.
"Yes."
"She used to do that as a little girl. She'd fill whole notebooks. Countries she invented, cities with names she made up." Her voice stayed even, careful. "I didn't know she was still doing it at the end."
I let her have the silence.
"She was still herself," Olive said finally. "At the end. I've spent thirty years wondering if she was still herself or whether she was already gone before she died." She stopped. "I needed her to still be herself."
"She asked someone if they liked to read," I said. "She said she mostly read about places she hadn't been yet."
Olive didn't answer. I could hear the garden. The shears had stopped.
"Thank you," she said.
"I'll send you Donna's contact information," I said. "If you want it. When you're ready."
A pause. "Yes. Send it."
I hung up and sat at the table for a while. The coffee still cold. The cursor blinking. Outside the windows the afternoon was bright, and warm, and indifferent.
I opened the manuscript and wrote for three hours without stopping. The scene I'd been avoiding wrote itself in forty-five minutes. The scene after that came just as fast.
I didn't think about what I was writing. I just followed the character through what she'd decided, and she was moving now, past the place where the truth had stopped her, and I let her go.