Page 52 of Savior
“What has that done for me?” I hiss fiercely. “I did what I was supposed to do. I wrote the statements. I testified in court. I relived the worst day of my life for public consumption, and they still released him on a technicality.”
Logan takes my hand and helps me down the hall to a secluded interview room. “If you want someone else—someone objective—to interview you, I’ll find someone, whoever you want. I’m not doing this to attack you. I’m not doing this to hurt you.” He pauses by the table to look down into my eyes. “I’m doing this because I’m, at the bottom of it all, your friend and I care about you. I want to help you.”
“That’s interesting considering you were basically biting my head off when I walked in.” I whirl away, anger clipping my voice and causing my hands to tremble. I tuck them under my arms so he can’t see. “What? Did you think I owed it to you to bare all my wounds?”
I hear his steps come closer and my spine stiffens. “Of course not,” he says. He doesn’t touch me, but I can sense his presence behind me. I have to snap straight to keep from leaning into his heat. “Of course not,” he repeats.
Scoffing, I spin around. “Really? So the intimidating conversations about my past were...what? Occupational hazard?”
He rolls his shoulders, his resolve finally cracking. “At first it was that; I guess you could call it. You were a new woman working with my family. Then, it became something more. I started to care about you.” My eyes immediately fall to the floor to avoid this line of the conversation, but he tips it back up. “I could tell something was haunting you, and all I wanted was to take that away. Then you got hurt, and I realized how much it’d fucking bother me if something happened to you.”
“I don’t want you to care about me,” I say vehemently. “Don’t you see that?”
His hand drops from my chin and his lips firm. “I wondered why that was. Even after I found out about your ex, I wondered why you’d guard yourself so much. Why you kept running from what happened to you.”
I turn again, eyes roving from corner to corner looking for an escape, but I find nothing but walls. “What? Having a murdering psychopath for an ex wasn’t enough?”
“I’m sure that was nothing compared to the fact that he murdered your twin sister.” His words are muted, but they may as well be a gunshot.
There’s a stunned silence as his voice trails off, and I’m catapulted back to the moments when I realized it was Paige lying dead on the floor. I don’t realize I’m crying soft, silent tears until he gathers me up into his arms and sits in one of the chairs by the table with me in his lap.
His arms around me are the only things keeping me grounded. I pour out all of my fear and despair and loneliness into his chest until there’s nothing left but a hollow ache in my chest.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asks, when there aren’t any tears remaining for me to cry.
A long sigh shudders through me. “I thought it was nothing, at the time. I mean, not that missing people are nothing, just it didn’t seem like it would touch me in my little bubble. Everyone on campus just assumed they were isolated events...” I trail off for a second and then clear my throat. “Our roommate was the second person to go missing. She was the sweetest person. It’s funny. I can’t even remember the sound of her laugh anymore. I used to be able to remember her laugh, but one day, it was just gone. He took that from me. He took away Carly.
“It wasn’t until Carly’s murder that the police started noticing the pattern, but we still didn’t pay it much attention. We were young and stupid, especially me, and I thought we were invincible.”
Logan draws soothing patterns on my back, lulling me into a stupor and allowing the memories and words to roll out like they happened to someone else.
“After that, I walked in on my fiancé, Gavin, kissing another woman. I was upset and I went out drinking. He found me there and tried to patch things up but Paige, P-Paige came and talked to me for a while.
“It’s funny, the whole time we were dealing with Carly’s death, Paige was the one who couldn’t get out of bed, but the moment I needed her, she was there for me. She was the best part of both of us.”
“You were identical twins?” Logan asks when my words bubble up and clog my throat.
I nod against his chest. “Y-yes, but our styles couldn’t have been more different. She was very much the girly girl. They used to make fun of me in high school, saying that she got all the female genes, but it didn’t both me because no matter what they said, I still had my best friend as a sister, and not many people get to say that.”
“What was she like?”
“I used to say she could have been a pop princess if she’d been a tween in the 90s. She was bright and bubbly. The kind of person who puts a smile on your face by just talking to her.”
I pause and realize I’m smiling, which only makes the tears well up again. I haven’t remembered Paige and smiled in so long, and I know how wrong that is. Memories of her should bring me happiness, but all I feel when I think of her is the profound loss.
Logan wipes away my tears, his big hands reassuringly gentle, and I lean into him like a cat seeking affection. “You sound like you were very close.”
“The closest. We were the kind of twins who finished each other’s last sentences, had the sixth sense type of connection.”
“Did you notice something off the night she was killed?”
Unable to look him in the face, I study his shirt instead as a miserable sucking blackness inside of me clouds out everything else. “That’s the thing, I didn’t. I didn’t, and I should have known. The one time it should have mattered for me to pay attention, I didn’t. I was so upset about stupid things that I didn’t even know when my own sister was a target.”
“She came to the bar to cheer me up, like I said, but she had a date with her boyfriend, and I didn’t want to ruin it.” I choke back another sob. “I didn’t even think about having someone go with her to make sure she got home safe, even after what happened to Carly.”
“You said your ex was with you at the bar. Did you see him leave after you two spoke? Did he follow her out?”
“The cops asked me all these questions, Logan,” I say wearily.