I knew I was lying to myself, but if there was a chance I could get out of here alive, I had to try.

She scoffed. “Do you know how I met Ethan?”

I shook my head, and she let go of my hair. I heard heels tapping against cement floor as she walked back around the chair. I tried to look at my surroundings, but I didn’t recognize anything in the room.

“That’s where he left me: The High Tide Pub. Ethan was working that night; he’s the one who called the sheriff’s office. We were supposed to get married only two weeks later, and he left me.”

I’d never heard the story before. I knew Mallory hated men, but she never talked about any of the ones she’d been with. Never once had I heard her mention a fiancé. I always assumed she had bad luck with dating apps or some wild dates, but never this.

“I don’t understand,” I tried.

My throat was dry, a combination of whatever drug she used to get me here and the lack of water.

“They’re all the same. He left me for some other woman and moved across the country, leaving me here. For months, I was forced to sit there and watch every happy couple who came to the pub. It was our spot, and he left me there.”

She kept repeating it over and over.

“I’m sorry,” I said, part of me meaning it.

Mallory was my friend, and it still hurt me to know she experienced such pain.

“I had to watch all those couples come to the pub and pretend like they were happy. I had to watch them get drunk and celebrate like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine. Those men would have left them like he left me,” she said, her eyes distant.

I could barely tell if she knew where she was. “I don’t understand why Ethan would help you.”

“He understood,” she said. “I sat there for months at that bar. He cared. He knew what it was like to be left, to be overlooked. I saw the way that women at the pub stared at him and judged him. It wasn’t fair,” she said, shaking her head.

The perfect team. They found comfort in each other, a way to inflict pain on others who had something they never did.

“You used Ethan,” I guessed. “You lied about the code needing to be changed that day, and you used him to deliver the threat.”

She nodded. “I needed you to stop looking.”

“You used him to place that last call?”

“It was easy enough to time the call with when I knew he made his weekly run to the warehouse for Bobby,” she answered and shrugged.

“And the falsified police reports? That was you?” I asked, trying to buy myself time.