Thank God, the truck stops, and the night doesn’t end with me being hit and killed by a pickup truck. I hazard a look behind me, but there’s nobody there. I’m not sure Shane was ever following me in the first place, but if he was, he’s gone now.

I run up to the side of the vehicle. The driver is a big guy with a full beard. He’s bigger than Shane. He looks tough, but his eyes go wide and all the color drains from his face when he looks at me, standing there dripping wet, blood all over my shirt.

“Please help me,” I say.

And then I collapse.

It’s over.

Chapter 41

PRESENT DAY

When the police arrived at the Nelson farmhouse, they found five bodies. Brandon Jensen on the porch—dead. Kayla Olivera in an upstairs bedroom—dead. Chelsea Cho in Shane’s bedroom—stabbed to death between the time I ran out of the room and the arrival of the police. Tim on the floor of the living room—bleeding and unconscious, but still alive. Shane on the floor of the living room—knocked out cold. Three dead, three survivors.

I was the one who told the police that Shane had tried to strangle me with my necklace. When Tim regained consciousness, he confirmed Shane had come at him with a knife and taken him down. But Tim forced himself to get off the floor and had hit Shane on the head with a baseball bat and knocked him out to keep him from following me out of the door—just before collapsing himself. Shane’s fingerprints were found all over the knife.

Shane was the only one who told a different story. He claimed that he never stabbed Tim—and it was his knife, so of course, his fingerprints were on it. He claimed Tim had knocked him out, and he couldn’t remember anything that happened afterward. He alleged that Tim must have stabbed himself to make it look like he was the innocent party. But of course, I was the tiebreaker who backed up Tim’s story. When I told the police about what Shane had done to me, he was the one arrested.

Even though I never saw his face through the whole thing.

And now Shane is spending his life in prison. Tim, on the other hand, is my boyfriend. Someone who I’m beginning to think I might have a future with, for the first time since I became a single mother at eighteen years old. He’s a great guy. The best, really.

Shane was the one who tried to strangle me that night. He had to have been.