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Epilogue

Veronica

I’d been told I was nothing and that I didn’t matter for so long that now I can easily be anyone and anything.

Everyone is lying to you. Never forget it. But here’s the truth: Grayson Sommers would still be alive if it weren’t for me.

I knew Marsden was meeting Gray that night when he went to his barn, and I knew exactly why.

My brain works like a computer playing three-dimensional chess.

It’s such a shame I wasn’t allowed to keep going with school, but to be honest, who needs college these days?

You can learn everything you need to know about everything on YouTube, especially when you’re a teenage girl sitting at home alone, barely homeschooled by your exhausted and beaten-down mother.

I had so much time on my hands and the world at my fingertips.

Working outside the home was never going to be an option for me growing up.

Not only was it not an option, but it was strictly forbidden for the women in my family.

I was trained to serve the men around me and told that in order to be holy and to belong to God I had to follow the rules and not question anything.

If I disobeyed, I would burn in hell and be cast out of my family.

I believed it. Took it all to heart, let it settle into my bones as fact.

But once I became a teenager something didn’t sit right.

I wanted more. So much more, and all the lies I’d been told about how small and insignificant I was made me that much more desperate to break free.

But it’s harder than you think to just leave. I was a child with no money or power of my own. Despite the fact that my family owns one of the fanciest hotels in the state, despite the fact that they were rich as hell, I’d never been allowed on a plane. They kept my world as small as possible.

When my dad forced me to marry Marsden, I didn’t think it would get any better, but I knew my husband would be easier to manipulate than my father. My father was dying to give his hotel to Marsden one day because he couldn’t imagine having to give it to one of his daughters.

If I couldn’t work outside the home, I would make the best of it.

I’d be the best damn mother I could be. I became the CEO of our household and ran it like a business.

I did it because I loved the control and also because I didn’t want my boys to grow up like Marsden and Gray, as entitled little shits who believe they’re masters of the universe.

I wanted them to see who was boss even if it had to be in my house.

They saw me in charge of things and they respect the hell out of me.

I’ve been reading Marsden’s emails and texts for years because I knew exactly what kind of beast he was when my father forced me to marry him.

Spyware is a shockingly simple thing to work with.

Invasive apps masquerade as legitimate ones and then use a phone’s or computer’s permission settings to spy on its user. It’s almost too easy.

So I knew about Marsden’s affairs and his gambling debts.

I saw Rebecca’s message the night Marsden was heading to the barn with Grayson, the contract she’d drawn up asking him to give up all rights to her children.

It was horrific to read, but I can’t say I was surprised.

I’d had my own suspicions about Dr. Carmichael and listened to way too many of his lectures about the genetic dominance of the male sperm within our religious community.

Then Rebecca went a step too far. She forwarded Marsden all of Grayson’s disgusting emails to me. I had no idea why Rebecca had to involve me in her little scheme to get Marsden to give up the rights to her kids, and I didn’t like it one bit.

I barely had any time to react. I had just gotten home from being at the conference so I could get a decent night’s sleep in my own bed when Marsden came barreling into our bedroom and confronted me about the emails, drunk as a skunk.

I was able to talk him down and convince him that I never once responded to one of those filthy emails. He believed me.

“Please don’t go see him tonight,” I begged. But I knew he would do the exact opposite. I knew he would go in there guns blazing and that I needed to control the situation as best I could.

It was always like that between him and Gray, the intense love that quickly gave way to rage and jealousy.

It’s true what I told the detective when he interviewed me.

Marsden and Gray were always competing for things when we were growing up, including who could kiss a particular girl first, who could take whatever they wanted from her first. It was unfortunately me they both wanted, even though I was a child.

They grabbed me on the church playground one day when I was twelve and they were nearly eighteen.

They yanked me inside the shed where we kept the balls and playground equipment.

It had been Gray who clapped his left hand against my mouth and shoved the other down my pants, putting his fingers so deep inside me I began to bleed.

Then Mars lunged toward me. His lips were the first to ever touch mine.

Grayson was so pissed he punched Marsden in the gut.

They battled it out while I crawled out of the shed on bloodied knees.

I confided in my mother that night, hoping she’d help me get some retribution.

I told her about the kiss but was too ashamed to mention how Grayson violated me.

She immediately told my father, and he insisted that since Marsden was the first to defile me that he would be the man I married.

Daddy practically arranged it right then.

I hated that man until the moment he took his last breath beneath the pillow I pushed over his face.

So I drove Marsden’s blacked-out ass to Grayson Sommers’s barn and let him loose. I didn’t think he’d actually kill Grayson, but I wouldn’t stop him from giving him the beating he deserved.

I waited outside and listened to them brawl, enjoying Gray’s cries for help. Then a crack of bone hitting bone and a loud rupture of metal on metal. When I walked in Marsden was sobbing over Gray’s broken body, cradling him in his arms.

“We have to call an ambulance,” he said, nearly waking up from his catatonic furor.

“Absolutely not, Mars. Get yourself together,” I snapped. He blubbered like a bitch boy. “You need to finish what you started.”

“I can’t,” he wailed.

“Then I will.”

“There’s a camera up there. I think I broke it.”

“Then go get it down,” I ordered him as I examined Grayson’s limp body.

He was breathing, but barely. He needed to be put out of his misery and I had to pivot, just like Olivia always told me to do.

Grayson was lighter than I expected (he was two inches shorter than Rebecca, like most of the Internet had suspected), but I was also in excellent shape from years of CrossFit and weight lifting.

I could easily bench 180. I picked him up and before Marsden could scurry down from the hayloft with the camera I’d impaled Grayson on the blades of the harvester.

I’m not going to lie to you. Watching the life drain out of him sent a jolt of electricity through my body and then calmed me in a way that nothing else ever had.

The head of an ax gleamed in the corner; it called to me.

As Marsden stared at me in disbelief, I grabbed it and sliced clean through Grayson’s right wrist, severing the hand that defiled me all those years ago.

I left it inside the freezer next to the sourdough.

“Everyone will blame Rebecca,” I assured my husband as I got him into his truck. “No one will ever know we were here.”

Marsden was a disaster. He barely remembered anything when we got home.

“Did I do it?” he’d asked pathetically.

“You did,” I told him. “But I’ve taken care of it.”

For years Olivia had been counseling me about how to pivot, how to make the best of every new situation to maximize my audience and income.

When I had a skin cancer scare a couple of years back, we got sponsorship from three different sunscreens and gained a million followers for my #CancerJourney.

Never mind that the tumor was benign. We kept it going for a year until the engagement dwindled.

When I couldn’t get pregnant recently, I told Olivia I could just make myself seem pregnant with AI and then generate an AI baby. She thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

I planned to use my leverage with Marsden over what happened in that barn with Grayson to get him to give me everything willingly, to sign the hotel over to me.

To grant me an easy divorce. To just walk away.

Olivia agreed, but she told me to be patient, to tread carefully, to let her work behind the scenes.

I knew she was trying to decrease the damage and maximize the upside for both of us, for both Rebecca and me.

But I also knew her instincts were good, and I trusted her, at least as much as I trusted anyone.

But Marsden became obsessed with the idea of getting rid of Rebecca too. Couldn’t stop talking about it. I didn’t protest too much.

What did I care? Rebecca Sommers never did a damn thing to help me, just smiled and looked away when I showed up at her house as a child bride.

She could have befriended me, taken me under her wing, helped me, but she was too busy building her brand.

I’d deal with Marsden afterward. I planted the box of strange pictures of me in the Sommerses’ house, just to make sure the police knew what a weirdo stalker Gray really was.

I wanted them to think Rebecca did what she did because she was jealous and outraged.

I’ll admit I had fun taking them. While I was there, I did everything I could to access Rebecca’s Cloud storage, where I assumed she had kept the video of Marsden and Grayson fighting in the garage, but someone (I’d later learn it was Lizzie) was in the house and I didn’t have enough time.

I’d have to deal with it once Rebecca was dead.

I arranged the dinner in the desert, so I’d have a reason to take everyone’s phones.

I figured either Lizzie or Katie knew where to find Rebecca and had been in contact with her.

I used the same little spyware I had been using to watch my husband.

In fact, I loaded it onto everyone’s phones, all the influencers who came to the dinner.

It would serve me well in the future to know what deals everyone was brokering.

No one suspected that I’d even touched their devices.

They just handed them over like children following a teacher’s orders.

I had the location of Rebecca’s new phone within minutes.

Katie had been texting her nonstop about Alice’s ear.

I also threw the dinner so everyone would know exactly where I was when my husband kidnapped Rebecca Sommers in case something went wrong. I had thought of everything.

I knew Marsden would fuck up the plan to get rid of Rebecca. He always did. God gave him every physical advantage but forgot to give him any intelligence. He was denser than a big old oak tree.

But it was all to Rebecca’s credit that she fought back so hard. And Lizzie’s and Olivia’s that they went out to save her. Olivia called me afterward. She always did. “You’ll have to say the gun was Marsden’s. It’s unlicensed. They’ll never trace it,” she said.

“Of course,” I agreed. We moved forward from there.

Sometimes I feel like she lives in my brain. I trusted her to do what she thought was best.

“You’re getting exactly what you wanted and what you needed,” Olivia had said. “It’s your time to shine.”

Of course I agreed. She gave me the gift I’d been desperate for. She got rid of my husband. And then I gave her access to all the data I scraped from every major influencer in America. We are the perfect team.

Life is good. Finally. My sisters and I now have control of the hotel.

But if I ever want to run it myself…Well, I have a plan for that too.

I stare longingly at Alice. It would have been nice to make the girls mine.

They’re delicious. But I’m thinking about adopting.

Olivia tells me there’s a huge hole right now in the adoption influencing market, just waiting to be filled.

I still want to take down Dr. Carmichael for all the grotesque things he’s inflicted on the women here. I discussed it with Olivia and she agreed. Told me to plant the seed with Lizzie. She promised to help it grow.

I have everything I ever wanted. A big life. A big career. Peace and freedom. My fantasies have become my reality.

I saunter over to Lizzie and Rebecca as they chatter away to each other on the dance floor of the wedding.

Stacy walks up to the three of us with her wide lens DSLR camera.

“Exquisite shots. Get closer together.” Stacy tilts Lizzie’s head to get the perfect angle between Rebecca and me. She brushes a dead leaf off my shoulder.

“Now look at one another and laugh like you’re all in on some hilarious joke,” she directs us. “Yeah, that’s perfect, that’s the perfect shot.”

#Blessed.