My phone starts to vibrate and I answer even before it starts to ring. “Meredith?” I say.

There’s a long pause.

This isn’t good.

I shake my head and say her name again.

“It’s a match!” she yells. “He did it! Owen killed both of them!”

I start to jump up and down, beaming and smiling from ear to ear.

I keep asking her if she’s sure and not believing her when she says she is. She’s still at work and won’t be able to come over until the evening.

I run back home, excited to tell Sydney but she’s not there either.

It takes me almost half an hour to calm down and as soon as Josephine answers the phone, my excitement explodes out of me.

“Oh my God,” she says. “I can’t believe he killed both of them. You are so lucky.”

I pause. She’s right. I hadn’t thought about it like this before but Josephine is absolutely correct about Owen.

He killed Nina and David and he tried to rape me. If he had succeeded, he probably would’ve tried to kill me, too.

Goose bumps run up and down my arms and I rub them trying to make them go away.

We talk for a while and celebrate but then Josephine has to go and wanting to have someone else to talk to, I call Meredith back and ask about the next step in the process.

“The thing is that now we have to tell the district attorney,” Meredith says.

“Do you think it’s going to be hard?” I ask.

“It’s not going to be easy,” she says with a sigh. “The thing is that I can’t tell him that we already did the test because then my lab tech and I will definitely get fired and possibly face criminal charges for tampering with evidence.”

Wow, I had no idea that what we did was that illegal.

“So, what do we do?”

“We have to somehow convince them to run the DNA without telling them what we know,” Meredith says.

My mouth drops open.

I was certain that if we got the DNA match, we could share it with the world.

And now? Now, we have to keep it secret?

“That’s not what you told me before,” I say quietly.

She doesn’t respond.

“I know, I’m really sorry. But we tampered with evidence. We can’t let anyone know, otherwise they’re going to press charges. The only way to do it is to just try to convince the DA that Owen is the right guy.”

She keeps repeating herself over and over again as if that’s somehow going to change her story.

I let out a long sigh and watch my breath as it collides with the cold air and makes a large pouf as if it were made of smoke.