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‘Probably,’ she said easily.

‘Did you think I killed Mitchell?’ I said, almost tripping over my words as they rushed out of me. ‘Because the cop in Atlanta, she said you didn’t – you don’t – think I killed him.’

‘I don’t think you killed Mitchell Covier,’ she replied. Her eyes didn’t leave mine. She wasn’t lying.

‘What about before, though?’ I pressed, aware that I was in dangerous territory now. The police wanted to interrogate me, not the other way around.

‘You were a person of interest, Jessie, but so were a lot of people,’ Officer Gale said, leaning forward a little. ‘Your mom was a person of interest. So were her ex-boyfriends. Mitchell’s colleagues were, too. Do you understand?’

I nodded. Then forced myself to unclench my jaw.

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ she said. ‘When did you and Brooke first plan to run away together?’

I frowned at her. ‘We didn’t plan it,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘I left the house with my stuff, and then when I was on my way to the bus station, she pulled over and asked me if I wanted a ride.’

Get to the bus station. Get on a bus. Go.

That felt like years ago now, not just a couple of weeks. It had been a good plan. I was so pleased I hadn’t followed it.

‘So it was a total coincidence that Brooke was also leaving the city at the same time?’ Officer Gale prompted.

‘Yes.’

She looked down at her paperwork, and I knew she didn’t believe me.

‘Jessie, could Brooke have killed Mitchell Covier?’

‘What?’ I said, startled, and almost tempted to laugh. ‘No.’

‘You know that for sure?’

‘Yes,’ I said emphatically. ‘The timelines don’t add up, and I barely knew her back then. It doesn’t make sense.’ I shook my head. It was absurd. ‘Brooke didn’t know anything about the Cr– I mean, Mitchell.’

Office Gale pounced. ‘What do you call him?’

I sighed. ‘The Creep. I don’t think that needs much unpacking, do you?’

She gave me a long, easy look. ‘Since his death, there have been some allegations of inappropriate behavior leveled against Mitchell Covier. Do you have any thoughts on that, Jessie?’

My heart sank. ‘I don’t know if he was hurting anyone else. That’s God’s honest truth.’

I knew they would want me to go into it at some point – how it had started, what exactly had happened to me, where and when. They were going to want to know why I hadn’t gone to my mom, or one of my teachers, or the police, and I didn’t know how I was going to explain any of that.

It was hard for me to look back at the girl I’d been when I found the Creep’s body and decided to run. That was classic fight-or-flight instinct kicking in, and I’d never had it in me to fight anyone.

Not then, anyway. Now, I knew what I was capable of.

I wondered if Officer Gale knew about Chris.

About what I’d done. About what I’d been forced to do to get Brooke back – the knife through Chris’s hand.

I was almost tempted to tell her. To brag.

She knew what had happened with the Creep – or she thought she did – and that gave her an impression of me.

One that was wrong. Telling her about Chris would get me in trouble, though, and, more than that, I’d have to explain what had happened to Brooke.

She hadn’t wanted to go to the police before, and I wasn’t going to make that decision for her now.

‘He was hurting you, though?’ Officer Gale said.

‘Yes.’

I had an overwhelming desire to strip off and force her to look at all my scars, the same way I’d showed them to Brooke. I wanted her to face them, face the reality of what the Creep had done to me.

‘Do you want to see?’ I asked.

I’d gotten a lot worse at controlling my impulses recently.

‘We’ll get it documented,’ Lena said, stepping in. ‘Through the proper channels.’

‘I can do it now.’ I was already getting up and stripping off my shirt.

This was my body, and they were my scars that he’d given me. The man whose death Officer Gale was investigating. She deserved to know what type of man he was.

‘This,’ I said, yanking my T-shirt aside, ‘is where he used to grab my arm and put out his cigarettes on my skin. I learned not to scream when he did it because that just made him laugh.’

I stepped up onto the low coffee table, so I was looming over her, and thrust my hand toward her face.

‘This is from when he swung a beer bottle at my head, and I put my hand up to stop him and the bottle broke my finger.’

I shoved my shorts down to my knees, exposing the ugly red scar at the top of my thigh. ‘This is from when I didn’t make him a coffee one morning, so he took mine and threw it at me.’

Lena got up and gathered me in her arms, a brief, tight hug, then gently set my clothes straight again like I was a little kid.

‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said to Officer Gale while Lena buttoned my shirt, carefully, since her nails were still drying. ‘He was a sadistic psychopath, though, and I don’t blame whoever did.’

‘Did you tell anyone about what he was doing to you?’ Officer Gale asked, and I flinched hard. I’d known this would come back to haunt me.

‘I spoke to my youth pastor,’ I replied. ‘I said I wished he was dead. So she knew about it, but I don’t know if she told anyone else.’

Officer Gale nodded, and I realized she already knew that. She was testing me, to see if I’d tell the truth.

‘How about anyone else?’ she pressed. ‘Your mom?’

‘No,’ I said, feeling exhausted all of a sudden.

I sat back down on the couch. Lena pulled a bottle of water out of her purse and handed it to me. It was a silent message to calm down, though I got the impression it came from a good place – she wasn’t scolding me.

Officer Gale caught my eye again, looking deadly serious this time.

‘Jessie, who’s Norma Jeane?’

I cracked.

It was so ridiculous – this mix of what the police knew and what they didn’t. Of all the things they could ask me about, of all the things they should have figured out by now, the one point they were most curious about was that ?

I howled with laughter.

Lena and Officer Gale exchanged a look.

‘Norma Jeane was Marilyn Monroe’s real name,’ I said.

‘Is it some kind of … code?’ she pressed.

‘No,’ I said, slumping back in my chair. She was just like Brooke: a girl who everyone misunderstood. ‘She was just a girl. Just a girl …’

Time moved quickly over the next week. I decided that I wouldn’t go back to regular high school – not for the rest of this semester, at least. Lena home-schooled me, and she seemed pretty confident that she could catch me up on the work I’d missed. After all, I’d only been gone for two weeks.

I had to keep reminding myself of that. It felt like I’d been gone for years. Long enough to completely transform who I was.

I still had to decide where I was going to spend my senior year, and Lena was letting me find excuses to delay making the choice.

She probably knew that I wanted to know where Brooke was going before I agreed to anything, but she didn’t call me out on it.

I’d been putting off asking what had happened to Brooke, scared that I wouldn’t like the answer.

At first, being stuck in limbo was a relief, because I didn’t have to face the truth, and then it turned into painful, silent torture.

‘Can I see Brooke?’ I asked one night over dinner when my resolve finally cracked.

‘I don’t know,’ Lena said. She didn’t bullshit me, and I liked that about her. ‘I’ll find out, if you want?’

‘Yes. Please.’

We’d talked about Brooke a few times. She obviously featured in some of my notes – the ones that Lena had read – and I’d been fairly honest about who Brooke was to me without specifically using the word ‘girlfriend’.

It didn’t feel right to call Brooke my girlfriend when we hadn’t even had the chance to talk about it yet, but Lena was astute. She knew what I wasn’t saying.

I had to go back to the police station to have more interviews with Officer Gale, but the tone of them had changed.

She wanted to know more about the Creep now, what he’d done to me, what I knew about his relationships with other people.

His relationship with my mom. Whether or not my mom had known about how he was hurting me.

I told them she hadn’t known. I asked if the Creep had been hurting my mom. Officer Gale said she didn’t know.

Lena took me to other interviews, too, with the foster care people, which was awkward.

We had to go all the way back to the ugly office building in Bitter Lake, which meant driving through my old neighborhood.

Lena always made a point of taking a route that didn’t go past my mom’s house, so I didn’t have to look at it. I was grateful to her for that.

We stopped at Starbucks on our way home, and Lena handed me her credit card to pay for our orders while she found a booth.

I got an iced oat milk caramel latte, because the taste took me back to a place and a person I ached with missing, and Lena wanted some green matcha thing that I was definitely not adventurous enough to try.

When I sat down, she had pulled her iPad out of her purse and her expression had changed.

‘Thanks,’ she murmured as I handed her the mug.

‘Did you hear from Brooke?’ I asked.

Lena shook her head and locked the screen. ‘I’m working on it, Jessie, I promise.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘I have got an update for you, though.’

I guessed it was something big.

‘Oh.’ I sipped my iced coffee. ‘Do they know who killed the Creep?’

Lena looked me dead in the eye. ‘Yes. They do. A man called Thomas Dederich has been charged with second-degree murder.’

‘I know him,’ I said. I pushed my drink away, not sure I could stomach it anymore. ‘He goes to our church.’

Lena looked at me, waiting in an increasingly tense silence to make sure I was okay. I nodded for her to keep going.

‘Mitchell was physically abusing Dederich’s son, and potentially a few other children in the youth program he was responsible for. I can’t tell you much more than that, because there’s a court case pending, but that’s the information that’s going to be publicly released.’