The Memory Auction That Destroyed Us All Chapter 05

The Memory Auction That Destroyed Us All Chapter 05

Two nearly identical cars.

One was Sophie’s. One was the car Sophie had given me as a gift.

They were so close to the same that Sophie had stuck a small decal on her rearview mirror just so we could tell them apart.

Ethan stared at the decal on the screen.

The memory pulled him back.

“Are you two deliberately leaving me out? You put a sticker on yours and now my car’s the odd one out.”

He flicked my forehead, laughing.

Sophie grabbed my arm and held on.

“Claire and I are obviously closer. You’re at the back of the line. Deal with it.”

The two of them started fighting over me right there on the side of the highway. All three of us laughing, somewhere we thought we’d always be able to come back to.

We were young enough then to believe the road ahead had no end.

The high beams flashed again in the memory. The decal on the rearview mirror caught the light, small and unmistakable.

Ethan’s whole body was shaking. He crawled across the floor to the screen.

He reached up and touched the glowing point where the sticker had been.

“The driver of that car was…”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He couldn’t say her name. The name he’d said ten thousand times in the last decade and couldn’t say once now.

He wrenched his hand back like the screen had burned him and scrambled back to the examination table.

“No. No, that’s not possible. Sophie didn’t kill herself. She didn’t kill all those people. No.”

He kept saying it.

But four probes were still inside my skull and the footage wasn’t stopping and there was nothing left to argue with.

The room went completely still.

“The victim was the driver. Sophie caused the crash.”

“What have we been doing. Whose justice were we here for.”

The families stood with their hands over their mouths.

“She’s been dead the whole time. We’ve been here avenging a murderer.”

Every head turned toward Sophie’s sister.

Sophie’s sister looked at the crowd closing in and ripped the diary in half.

“It wasn’t us. We didn’t know. We didn’t do anything.”

Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold the pieces.