Before I let go of my phone, I click into the Instagram app. I don’t know why I’m shocked when I see that I have over three hundred unread DMs. I barely ever post, so I guess it didn’t take long for the death threats to pile up under all of my photos from the past year. Apparently, a troll letting everyone know that my corpse deserves to be raped in every orifice isn’t alone. The comment has been liked by over a hundred people and planted under the last photo I posted with Nate. My stomach tightens at the thought of him getting this kind of hate too. How can this not be illegal? These people don’t know me. They don’t know what actually happened. They don’t know what their poisonous words could make me do. To myself. I almost click through to Nate’s profile to check, but stop myself at the last moment.

Instead, I torture myself more and click through to the profile of a user who has posted multiple comments on different photos in my feed. And another. And another. They’re all rabid Taylor Van Doren stans. Of course. After mapping a dozen trolls back to Taylor wannabes, I deactivate my profile and drop my phone next to my leg. Everything is shaking. The entire room is blurry no matter how many times I blink.

And then I realize I have to get out of here. I have to do something. There has to be some way to find a crack in Taylor’s story, some place to start chipping away at. She must have given the cops her own alibi, or else they would have suspected her too. And if she did actually have an alibi, then who laced his glasses with the poison? Jared? Mei? I think about the only other person who was there the night Simon was murdered. His fiancée. The report on TMZ said that she was the last to see him alive.

Maybe she has insight about what happened that night. Maybe she knows about the drama between Taylor and her dad. Maybe she overheard them arguing—Taylor made it seem like she hated him. Not just the normal way girls sometimes resent their parents. She actually hated him, in the darkest way possible. I could hear it in her voice that day I called her and accepted her poisonous bribe. If only I could get proof of how severe her hate for him was. She hated him enough to want him dead. Enough to kill him.

Maybe I’m getting way too ahead of myself, but another giant cockroach crawling down the wall next to my head reminds me that sitting here doing nothing won’t get me any closer to an answer.