Jack’s eyes were glassy and lifeless. “No!” I screamed and screamed, lay my head on his shoulder. “Please, please.”

“Remy, did you hear me?” she asked. “You weren’t here. You didn’t see anything, hear anything. You were in your car. Then you heard the gunshots and ran in. It was dark. I thought Jack was an intruder. It was all an accident.” She placed a hand on me, shook me violently, but I barely felt it. “Everything’s going to be okay, Remy. Everything’s going to be okay now.”

“No, please,” I said as I cried over Jack’s body. “Come back, come back to me.”

“You and me, we’re family,” she continued as if none of this was happening, as if she hadn’t just murdered the boy I loved. “It’s just the two of us now. It’ll always be just the two of us.” She’d said it a million times.

Those words, once a source of comfort, now sounded like a threat.

THURSDAY // AUGUST 31 // DAY 356

64.

Home was a person and for me, that person was Elise. Only now home has become a prison, and that prison is Elise.

“You killed him.” I feel faint, my collapse complete. “You murdered him.” As soon as I say it, I know it’s true. Maybe I’ve known all along and locked it away deep within me because I couldn’t face what she’d done.

“That’s not true,” she says, shaking her head firmly. “I don’t know how much you overheard, but he was threatening me. You weren’t there at the beginning. You didn’t hear the way he spoke.” Her voice begins to tremble. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. Chattanooga was an accident. But he was going to tell the police it was arson. He was going to tell the police I went there with the intention of killing my father. He was threatening me with decades in prison, Remy.”

The wind whipped around us faster, the Pink Caddy speeding up.

“My dad brutally beats me and he’s out of jail in less than a day, free to go until a hearing where he’ll get off with a slap on the wrist, and I have an accident playing an innocent prank and I’m the one who’s going to lose everything? It was all a ploy, Rem. Don’t you see that? He wanted to take you away from me. That’s what it was about. That’s what it’s always been about. You’re the only thing I have in the whole world and he was going to take you from me!”

“I’m not a—a thing. No one can take me, not him, not even you,” I blurt out. I have a choice to make now, not between Elise or Jack but between Elise and me. Between letting her take over my life or letting her go.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“That’s exactly what you’re saying. You’re acting like Jack was stealing me away from you, like I’m some kind of possession.” I feel trapped in the car with no way to escape.