She’d spent years in therapy developing coping strategies but, as the sole survivor, the guilt still ate her up every day. She should have guessed what Richie had planned to do. She should have stopped him. He’d told her to stay home from school that day. She still wasn’t sure if that was so he could kill her more easily when he murdered their parents, or so he didn’t accidentally shoot her at school.

His girlfriend had dumped him a week before. He’d let alcohol and his idiot friends fuel his rage and then he’d taken their father’s assault rifle and killed their parents when they tried to stop him.

For years Yael had tormented herself, wondering if he’d gone upstairs to her room to kill her too. She didn’t know. She’d never know.

But his eyes had flashed wide with surprise when he’d spotted her in the school corridor that day. Then he’d shot the boy she’d had a crush on, killed him right in front of her—told her he was doing her a favor—before he’d strode away, shooting kids indiscriminately. And she’d run. She’d run and run and run until she’d gotten home and she’d come to a screaming halt when she’d found a police officer already there. She’d seen the white sheets covering her parents’ bodies in the garage and she’d spent the next fifteen years mourning the family she’d lost—even, secretly, the young man who’d morphed from beloved brother into evil incarnate.

She squeezed her hands into fists and forced herself to leave the photo out. Richie didn’t deserve to be loved or mourned and she wished she could still hate him the way she had for so many years. That would have been so much easier. But her parents had been good people. She touched her mom’s smile and remembered her dad’s need to outcompete the neighbors’ Christmas light display every year.

But not after that day.

After that day, Yasmine Abbott’s world as she’d known it had ceased to exist.

Yael didn’t want to disappear again. She’d paid a heavy price for a crime in which she’d been as much a victim as anyone else.

The grieving parents had wanted someone to pay though and she’d been the only one left alive.

Now Yael stared around her nice living room and felt the walls pressing in on her. Was this all she had to look forward to? Was she a prisoner of her own making? She wanted to take a chance at a new start. She wanted to live.

She ran upstairs.