Page 58 of Kiss Me Like I Didn't Kill You

Ophelia

Weeks have passed since I received that note.

Time moves, but the confusion inside me only thickens with each passing day.

It’s now mid-November, and my days have narrowed to the same steady pattern—study, Bellamy, classes, repeat.

Exams are getting closer, so I keep my head down, burying myself in revision as if focus might quiet the chaos in my mind.

It doesn’t.

Because sometimes, when the world goes still, I see the wordMURDERERburned behind my eyelids.

I assure myself it was a cruel prank. A mistake. A fragment of my imagination.

I wish it were all some kind of madness, that I could be diagnosed and medicated and done with it.

But then there’s the note. And my sister’s words.

And suddenly the fragments don’t feel like nightmares at all.

They feel like memories—mymemories—the ones my mind tried to bury, only for them to claw their way back.

And the question that circles through my head, endlessly, day and night, is that someone knows.

Someone knows what happened to me that night.

Everything seems to point back at me, as though I did something.

Did I truly kill…?

I can’t even finish the thought. I don’t want to believe it.

And if I did… if it’s true, then whoever sent that note certainly knows.

So what is it they want from me?

If it’s meant as a threat, it’s working. I’m unravelling, one thought, one heartbeat, one sleepless night at a time.

I press my palms against my eyes and exhale. I can’t afford to lose myself here.

The library is hushed, rows of students bent over their books, the soft shuffle of pages the only sound.

I’m surrounded, but alone.

I force my attention back to the text in front of me, pretending the words are making sense.

They aren’t.

The heavy oak doors open at the far end of the room, their hinges groaning softly, but I don’t look up. Not until I hear the scrape of a chair across from me.

Someone sits down.

I lift my gaze, and freeze.

Arlo.

We haven’t spoken properly in weeks. I’ve avoided him, and he’s seemed more than content to return the favour.