She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 14

She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 14

One year later.

The letter from the prison arrived on a Tuesday in December, forwarded twice, addressed in handwriting I’d

hoped never to see again.

I almost didn’t open it. Then I decided that the woman I’d become could read anything.

Sloane-

They tell me Mom lost her appeal. Dale won’t visit either of us. I have a lot of time to think in here, and I keep

coming back to one thing.

In the first life, you loved me for three years and I let them kill you for it. In this life, you knew exactly what I was from the first morning, and you never raised a hand against me. Not once. You just told the truth and stepped back. Everything that buried us, we built ourselves. I’ve checked the math a thousand times. It always

comes out the same.

I don’t ask forgiveness. I ask one thing: be happy. Be so happy that when I dream of the farmhouse-and I dream of it every night-your face in the dream changes too.

Í read it once, standing by the window of the house Nathan and I bought in the fall-the one with too many windows and no hallway you can hear footsteps in, because I checked.

Then I fed it to the fireplace.

It caught fast. Paper always does. I thought of a black leather duffel, of contracts in a wood stove, of all the things fire had taken from me and for me across two lifetimes, and I watched the last words of Grant Whitlock curl into ash without feeling my pulse change at all.

That’s how I knew I was free.

“Burning evidence?” Nathan came in from the snow, cheeks red, carrying firewood and groceries and a

Christmas tree’s worth of pine smell.

“Burning the past,” I said. “It’s kindling. Someone taught me that.”

My parents arrived at four-my mother, who in this life never had to stand at her daughter’s memorial; my father, who in this life never had to be told what those men did; both of them alive in the way I once watched them die inside, and neither of them ever knowing what I saved them from. That secret stays mine. It’s the

lightest thing I carry.