Robin stood up to hug me good-bye. “I’ll miss you too.” She pulled away, fixing those intense brown eyes on mine. “At least it was you. I know it’s a weird thing to say, but I’m glad he ran into the arms of someone who loved us both. Had it been anyone else, she would have tried to take him away from me. At least you’re giving him back.”

“Robin, he was never mine to give back. He has always been yours, and he always will be.”

Chapter 38

Owen

2001, BEAVER FALLS, PENNSYLVANIA

Owen Fischer had grown up around guns. By the age of five, he was already spending weekends target practicing with his dad at the local sportsman’s club, and he was a decent shot too. By seven he could hit a beer can at twenty-five yards. When he was thirteen, his dad bought him his first pistol, a 9mm. And by eighteen he was a marksman, frequently competing in and winning competitive shooting tournaments, and a proud card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association. Owen’s dad made sure he knew the foundation of responsible gun ownership: how to properly clean, handle, carry, and store his weapons. How to treat a gun was instilled deep; how to treat others, not so much.

“If you can handle the responsibility of a weapon, you can handle anything,” his dad had taught him.

Except when Owen got angry. When Owen got angry, he couldn’t handle himself, let alone a deadly weapon. His father’s rules flew out the window, and recklessness flew in. And right now, Owen was angry. “Righteously angry,” he called it when Mackenzie begged him to calm down.

It started with a fight. And it ended with a murder.

Owen didn’t personally know Geoffrey Faust. As far as he was concerned, he would have never crossed paths with the degenerate if it wasn’t for Mackenzie Kirkland’s soft heart. Everyone on campus had noticed and gossiped about Robin Goldman’s growing belly. She was a flirt, which automatically made her a whore, according to most of the students at their small college. Yet when Robin refused to drop out and instead have the baby, that was more shocking than her pregnancy.

Like every other classmate, Owen had assumed a one-night stand had caught up to Robin. That’s when Mackenzie set him straight. After she’d told him what Geoffrey had done—a secret Mackenzie had vowed to keep for Robin, then slipped up and shared with him after one too many vodka Jell-O shots one night—Owen’s moral indignation was triggered and his vigilante impulse kicked in.