She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 11

She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 11

The visiting room at the state penitentiary smelled like bleach and despair.

Grant shuffled to the table in his chains, and I barely recognized him. Hollow-eyed. Unwashed. The charming, lint-flicking, mirror-checking man I’d loved for three years had been scraped out, and what was left looked at me through the scratched plexiglass with something that wasn’t quite hatred and wasn’t quite hope.

“You came,” he rasped.

“You advertised well.” I sat down, spine straight. “Say what you have to say.”

For a moment he just stared at me, eyes crawling over my face like he was checking it against a memory.

“It started in the holding cell,” he said. “The first night. I dreamed I was at the farmhouse, and there was a funeral. Your funeral. And I was standing next to Brynn telling your mother-” His voice cracked clean in half. “Telling your mother that you’d-that you’d asked those men-”

“I was there,” I said coldly. “Skip ahead.”

“It’s not a dream, is it.” His shackled hands flattened against the table. “It happened. All of it happened. You died in that house, and then I woke up and it was December again and you were alive, and you knew. You knew the whole time.” His breathing went ragged. “The peanuts. The duffel. The job, the poker game, the phone call about the bus station. It was you. All of it was you. You destroyed everything I had. My money, my family, my life-are you satisfied now? ARE YOU SATISFIED?”

The guard by the door shifted. Grant lowered his voice to a shaking whisper.

“Was it revenge, Sloane? For the other life?”

I leaned forward and held his gaze, and I gave him the only sentence I’d traveled two hours to deliver.

“Grant. You and Brynn owed me a life. Consider the debt collected.”

He sagged like a cut puppet. And then he laughed-an awful, broken sound.

“You think you won,” he whispered. “You think you saw the whole board. You didn’t. That’s why I called you here. Not to apologize-what’s the point-but because you need to know what I found.” He leaned so close his breath fogged the plexiglass. “After the arrest, my mom boxed up Brynn’s things from the motel. There was a

journal. Mom mailed it to me thinking it would help my case. Sloane-Brynn remembered too.”

The fluorescent lights hummed. My heart stopped humming entirely.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “She fell for the allergy switch. If she remembered, she’d have known-”

“Read it yourself.” His eyes were fever-bright. “It’s in my property box-I signed it over to you. She didn’t remember everything, not like us. Fragments. Dreams since last fall. But Sloane-the first life? The

farmhouse? The journal goes back years before that.” His voice dropped to almost nothing. The shrimp. in your chowder was never a misunderstanding in ANY life. The men in your room weren’t improvised, She

planned your death for eleven months. There are pages on it. There are pages on what she was going to do to you in THIS life, after the wedding-and a name. Someone who helped her the first time. Someone who’s still

out there, Sloane. Someone you know.”

The room tilted.

“Who?” My voice came out as a stranger’s.

Grant shook his head slowly, and for one flickering second, I saw something almost like the old grief in his

ruined face.

“I protected her for twenty years and she was this underneath. I can’t-I’m not saying it out loud in a monitored room. It’s in the journal. Last ten pages.” He stood as the guard approached, chains rattling, and

looked down at me one final time.

“For what it’s worth-and it’s worth nothing-I’m sorry. In both lives.” His mouth twisted. “Read the pages, Sloane. And then check who poured your wine.”

They led him away.

I sat frozen in the visiting room, two lifetimes rearranging themselves in my head like furniture in the dark.

Check who poured your wine.

But Brynn poured the wine that night. I remembered it. I’d swear it on my own grave-

I went still.

Brynn had brought the wine.

Someone else had opened it in the kitchen.