She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 12

She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 12

The property clerk slid a battered cardboard box across the counter. Inside: a dead woman’s hairbrush, a phone with a shattered screen, a courthouse-wedding photo-and a pink journal with a broken lock, fat with eleven years of cramped handwriting.

I read it in my parked car for four hours, in a prison lot, with the heater running and my whole body cold

anyway.

The early years were what you’d expect, and worse. Brynn at fifteen, cataloguing every gift the Whitlocks gave her against every gift they gave Grant. Brynn at nineteen, slashing the tires of a girl Grant took to a fair. Bronn at twenty-three, the first entry about me: “He brought a woman home. City. Rich. Watches him like she invented

him. We’ll see.”

Then, last October, the entries changed.

“The dreams again. The farmhouse, the funeral, her face all swollen. I wake up HAPPY. Is that sick? They don’t feel like dreams. They feel like instructions.”

My hands shook so badly I had to set the journal on the dashboard.

She’d remembered in fragments-enough to feel the shape of the first life, not enough to map it. She’d dreamed my death and read it as prophecy. Permission. When I said “peanuts” instead of “shellfish,” she’d written: “She’s lying about the allergy, the dream said shellfish. Doesn’t matter. If peanuts is the story she’s telling, peanuts is what she gets. Either she swells up like the dream, or she’s caught lying to the whole family.

I win twice.”

She’d never imagined the allergy was Grant’s. Her fragments had holes, and I had lived inside one of them. That was the entire distance between her grave and mine.

Then the last ten pages.

The plan for this life, dated two days before Christmas: get through the wedding, become family, then-a

wine bottle, a dosage she’d researched, men she could reach through her cousin’s circle, and afterward the

same poisoned sentence she’d used at my memorial in another universe: she said she got lonely sleeping

alone.

And the name.

The person who, in the first life, had opened the wine in the kitchen. Who had measured the dose when Brynn’s hands shook. Who had stood in the hallway that night making sure no one came when I screamed. Who had wept at my memorial in a coat I bought her.

“P. helped before, in the dream. P. will help again. P. hates her more than I do. P. says no city girl is taking her son and her son’s money out of this family.”

Patty.

Patty Whitlock.

I sat in that parking lot and remembered, with a clarity that nearly bent me in half: Patty’s footsteps in the hallway that final night. I’d heard them through the drugged fog and felt relief-help is coming-and the footsteps had stopped outside my door, waited, and walked away.

She heard everything. She stood guard.

I called Nathan. I don’t remember what I said; I remember he was already driving before I finished the first

sentence.

What I did next, I did coldly, correctly, and through lawyers.

The journal went to the district attorney-not for a death in a life that no longer existed, which no court could touch, but for what the final pages proved about this life: a documented conspiracy, dated and detailed, naming Patricia Whitlock as a willing participant in a plan to drug and assault me after the wedding. Combined with the phone records my investigator pulled-calls between Patty and Brynn’s cousin’s circle in the weeks before Christmas, payments Patty couldn’t explain-it was enough.

I’ll never forget the photo in the local paper: Patty Whitlock on her own porch in handcuffs, the down coat I bought her zipped to her chin, screaming at the deputies that she was a good Christian woman and that all of this-all of it-was the fault of that Calloway girl.

Conspiracy charges. A trial date. A son in one prison and a mother awaiting her own.

Earl sold the farmhouse to pay her lawyers. Dale bought it cheap, and the truck sat in its driveway.

The night the indictment came through, Nathan found me on my balcony, staring at the city.

“It’s done,” he said. “All of them. Every single one.”

“Not quite,” I said.

He went very still. “Sloane-who’s left?”

I turned to face him.

“Me,” I said. “The version of me who keeps waking up at 4 a.m. listening for footsteps in the hall.” I exhaled,

long and slow. “She’s the last one I have to set free.”