Page 69

EPILOGUE

FOUR MONTHS LATER

BLAKE

My car is loaded up with everything I own.

Well, not everything. I couldn’t bring furniture, and a few boxes have already been shipped to my father’s house in Ohio. But I have filled every spot in the trunk and back seat of the used Kia that I purchased last week. It’s ready to go.

And so am I.

Amanda joins me in the living room as I take one last look around the brownstone, which gave me some of my happiest and worst memories of living in New York City. Now that the particularly snowy winter has come to a close, I’ve decided to start the process of trying to sell it, which was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make. If I never see this place again, it will be too soon.

Thankfully, it won’t be hard to sell. While recovering from being poisoned, I spent a little time fixing up the brownstone using all the home repair skills my father taught me when I was younger, because I was worried that nobody would be interested after…well, everything that happened here. But believe it or not, there are plenty of people eager to own the former home of a now notorious murderer. It looks like there’s going to be a bidding war.

“So this is it,” I say to Amanda.

She flashes me a sad smile. She’s been helping me pack and load up my car. And after I leave, she is going to facilitate the sale of the brownstone in exchange for living here rent-free for a little bit longer. I managed to make my mortgage payments after a few paid interviews about Krista, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. A publisher offered me an extremely lucrative book deal, and I turned them down outright.

“I’m going to miss you, Blake,” she says.

I’ll miss her too. After spending so long hating her, Amanda and I have bonded a lot over the last few months. I don’t know what I would’ve done without her to talk to about everything that happened.

“I bet you five bucks you’ll be bored to tears in six months and want to come back to New York,” she says.

“I’m never coming back,” I say, and I mean it. “You can always come visit me in Cleveland though. Open invitation.”

“I might take you up on that.” She grins. “I want to come visit your store.”

Yes, I am taking over my father’s hardware store. After it was discovered that Krista had been the one who got into my files and sold our marketing campaign, Wayne Vincent called me personally to offer me the VP job again. Apparently, Malcolm wasn’t able to keep up with the workload, and they were planning to let him go. Nobody could handle this job better than you, Blake. But after the way he threw me out on my ass after all those years without even giving me the benefit of the doubt…well, I couldn’t imagine ever going back there. I hadn’t realized how toxic Coble & Roy was, even when my predecessor tried to hurl himself out the window. (Truthfully, there’s a part of me that still wonders if Krista was somehow behind that, but now that she’s gone, I’ll never know.)

Anyway, my father is over the moon excited about me taking over the store, and it feels like the right thing to do. This city has nothing left to offer me, and it will be good to continue the family business. Plus, I miss my dad, and he won’t be around forever. I can’t wait to get home to Cleveland.

Now the only thing left to do is get on the road.

Amanda and I face each other, and for a moment, it’s a little awkward trying to figure out exactly how to say goodbye. A week ago, she and I hooked up—once. It wasn’t something either of us planned, but we’ve been spending so much time together and having such intimate conversations, it just…happened.

When it was over, I felt disgusted with myself. Krista was barely dead, and everything that happened was still fresh in my mind. But also, sleeping with a woman who saved your life did seem like a good antidote to your girlfriend trying to kill you.

Amanda and I end up giving each other a hug, which feels right. Amanda is so different from Krista—the sort of woman I’d always imagined ending up with. I only wish I had met her earlier, because Krista has screwed me up for a long time to come.

“Are you going to be okay?” I ask her.

She hesitates for a moment, then nods. “Yes.”

“Because if you need to borrow any money from me…”

“It’s okay. I’ve worked something out.”

One thing I was very concerned about was that with all the publicity around Krista, Amanda’s identity was outed. But she told me that with some of the money she has earned, she’s working out a payment plan. So it’s all going to be fine, or so she says. I’m still a little worried. You don’t want to mess with a pissed-off loan shark. I made her promise that if she is in any trouble, she’ll let me know. If this brownstone sells for what I think it will, I should have plenty of money to lend her.

“All right,” I say. “I guess this is it.”

Amanda walks me to my car, and we hug one last time. I’ve lived in this city for over a decade now. I’ll be sad to leave it behind, but I’m also happy for a fresh start. Everything happens for a reason, and it feels like this is my fate.

I can’t wait to start my new life.

AMANDA

I feel a bit sad as I watch Blake drive away in his new used car. It was nice spending time with him for the last few months, but he’ll be happier back in Ohio. He was making it work for a little while, but he’s too much of a Midwest boy. He was always going to end up back there, even if Krista hadn’t ruined his life.

I will miss him though. He’s a nice guy, very easy on the eyes, and a great kisser. I can see why Krista was so possessive of him.

I also love how he believed every word I told him.

He’s worried about me. I could see it all over his face. He’s worried that the loan sharks will come after me. If he knew the truth, he wouldn’t be worried. He also wouldn’t let me stay in his house or offer me money. And he definitely would not have gone to bed with me last week. But what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

It all happened one month before Krista was killed. I was working the late shift at the diner, dreading going home to the brownstone, and I noticed a gruff-looking man at one of the tables who was making me very nervous. As the rest of the customers emptied out, he stayed behind, nursing the same cup of coffee. It wasn’t until the place was practically empty that he grabbed my arm while I was walking by his table.

“Take a break, Amanda,” he told me. “I want to talk to you out back.”

He called me by my real name. I thought about running for it, but I knew that was suicide.

I met him next to the dumpster behind the diner. He introduced himself as Frank Gallo. He told me that he knew I owed one of his colleagues a lot of money, and he wanted to help me clear my debt.

I was sure whatever he was going to ask me to do was going to be something terrible, but I was so tired of running. I was tired of living in shitty apartments with asshole landlords who accused me of eating too much cereal and using the wrong kind of laundry detergent. I was willing to do just about anything to put an end to all this. “What do you want?” I asked.

“You’re living with a woman named Krista Marshall,” Frank Gallo said. “She killed my nephew, Jordan, and got away with it. Like you, she thought she could hide, but she couldn’t. We always catch up sooner or later. Ironically, it was you who helped me locate her.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but his words were enough to make me shiver in the back alley. “What do you want me to do?”

“You kill Krista Marshall,” he said, “and we’ll forget about all your gambling debts.”

Yes, of course they were gambling debts. Does anyone really borrow money from a loan shark to pay for their mother’s chemotherapy ? Give me a break. I’m not Pollyanna. Anyway, my mother is an alcoholic who barely looked at me through my entire childhood, and if she got cancer, I would happily watch it eat away at her until she died.

I’ve done a lot of rotten things in my life—call it bad upbringing. But I’d never killed anyone before. Still, I wanted my life back. And it didn’t feel like I had much of a choice.

“Fine,” I told him. “I’ll do it.”

Ironically, the night Krista stabbed me, I had planned to kill her. Like Krista, I was thinking that Blake would go down for it. I didn’t like him much back then, and anyone could see that he was falling apart. I had already pegged him as the one who killed Mr. Zimmerly next door. None of it happened the way I expected, but in the end, I was the one who killed Krista. I did exactly what Frank Gallo asked me to do, and he has assured me that my debt has been paid.

So you see, when I stabbed Krista that night, I wasn’t saving Blake’s life.

I was saving my own.

I bet you five bucks Krista never saw that coming.

THE END