Page 58 of You Belong Here

I followed the shadow across the street, desperately trying to call Delilah while I ran. It was so late; she wasn’t picking up.

Stay inside, I thought. Lock the doors. Call for help.

I hoped Trevor was on his way.

I veered onto the footpath of the main gate behind them, heading to lower campus. The academic quad was deserted in the middle of the night. There were only the dim lights lining the path, and the emergency blue-light system, spaced out in steady intervals.

I tried to keep up as the shadow wove behind buildings, avoiding cameras. I worried that Bryce was heading back to upper campus—to the dorms.

I didn’t wait, couldn’t risk it. I stopped briefly at the nearest blue-light emergency phone and pressed the button. I remembered from orientation—the promise that help would be here soon. But then I kept going, scared of losing him.

The shadow slipped around the back of Beckett Hall, near the woods.

I trailed behind at a careful distance. Once behind the building, I couldn’t see where he went next. The woods were dark except for a dim blue light between the trees, on the path to upper campus.

I started heading that way, then stopped at the sound of a door creaking on its hinges behind me.

I spun, but the night was empty. Behind me, the back entrance of Beckett Hall stood open.

There was no camera on this end. No card-swipe system. Only the key for a lock—a set of security keys that Bryce had in his possession—something that had given him access to Delilah’s dorm room. Something that let him slip through every unseen part of campus.

He’s a kid. He’s just a kid, I kept repeating to myself. I knew this place better than he did. Every in and out. Every secret. He’s just a kid. Nineteen and very angry. Acting out in desperation.

Cliff must’ve believed me when I’d told him it was Bryce who had the keys.

He must’ve called Bryce in, confronted him.

He must’ve assumed that Bryce had set the fire next door, where Cliff had started to move in.

He had backed me up to the police twenty years earlier.

He’d said he even had to leave town because of it.

He must’ve been hated almost as much as I was.

Bryce had the access, and he had a motive.

Maybe it had started as a taunt, a lit match, a glowing ember. But it wasn’t anymore. The game always grew beyond the players’ control.

I pushed the door open, calling Bryce’s name. I listened to the word echo back, resounding through both ends of the building.

I stood under the red glow of an exit sign and took out my phone to use as a flashlight. I had to keep him here, in this building, until help arrived. I had to keep him from going to the dorms.

I dropped the phone to my side, finger over the side button, in case I needed to call emergency services.

And suddenly I understood why I’d received a call in the middle of the night from Delilah’s phone.

I was her emergency contact. The number accessible without opening the phone. Adalyn must’ve been calling for help. My stomach sank: I’d heard the gasp of her last breath before the phone fell from her grip.

I sent a text back to the FordGroup number: I’m right here.

I heard a ping, and it sounded like it was right beside me. I shone my light around the space, but there was no one here.

The other atrium. That eerie echo, a feature of Beckett Hall.

He was in here, at the other end of the hall, so close.

I thought better of waiting and decided to place a call right now. I pressed the new contact for Fred Mayhew, then turned the phone to silent, stuffed it inside my purse. I’d called so they would hear the truth. I’d called to clear my daughter’s name.

I knew it was late. I hoped, above all, that Fred picked up.

“Bryce!” I called again, walking deeper into the building.

There was a light at the other end, the red glow of another exit sign, but I didn’t see him anywhere.

“Bryce, come and talk to me,” I said. “I know who you are. I know you’ve been following Delilah.

I know you sent her a text during the howling, luring her to the quarry. ”

I saw the door to the tunnels, open and waiting.

I walked toward the entrance, peering down. Cliff had told me the tunnels didn’t connect across campus anymore. I didn’t think Bryce had gone that way to escape. He was luring me down—the same way he’d tried to lure Delilah.

“I’m not coming down there,” I called, just as I felt two hands collide with my back. And then I was falling—tripping down the short flight of steps, hands bracing for impact at the bottom.

I landed on my shoulder and felt something pop. My purse had been crushed between the cement and my body, and I could feel the phone inside digging into my rib cage. I had no idea if anyone was on the other end of the line, listening. I had no idea if anyone was on the way to help.

I scrambled back as a shadow appeared in the red glow of the exit lighting behind them. The person was shorter than I’d first thought.

“Well, this is fitting.” A woman’s voice.

She descended the steps, wearing all black, with a hat pulled over her shoulder-length blond hair.

“Violet?” I called, a throb working its way down my arm. “What are you doing? Why were you just in Cliff’s house?”

She reached the base of the tunnels and stopped. “I went over there to have a simple chat. He called me today, said we needed to talk. Figured we could sit down like old friends, hash it out.”

I saw it then: after I left his office, Cliff calling Violet instead of Bryce. We have a little problem with your son—

“Now, you tell me why you’re looking for my son,” she said, leaning over me.

I pushed myself to standing so I was facing her, one arm held awkwardly in front of me. “I know what happened at the quarry.”

“No, you don’t.” She stepped closer, so I had to back up, spine pressing into the pipe running along the wall. “But I know what happened down here with you and Adalyn. I saw you.”

“You’re the witness,” I said. Now I understood. The first text had arrived right after I’d shown up at orientation. Right after she’d seen me here. The emails started after she’d done a little bit of digging on me, figured out what I did for a living. “You drove the truck that night?”

She stepped back, looked over her shoulder, making sure we were truly alone.

“I told them I saw you, but no one believed me. You were both in masks. They said any identification couldn’t be trusted.

That it was too far to see in the dark. But I saw you in the headlights.

” She raised her arm, like I had done back then, to block the glare.

“And you know what I saw?” she said, one finger on her wrist. “The mountains.”

The ridge, like my own heartbeat. Proof that it was me.

“I wasn’t the type of person people listened to back then.

Except for Fred, who knew me. But everyone else, they believed you and Cliff.

I had no proof. I knew it was you, though.

I always knew it. I saw both of you that night from the truck.

Don’t you think I’d remember something like that? It was the last time I saw Charlie.”

My stomach dropped. There were people who died that night and other people left behind. They remembered. Of course they remembered.

“I didn’t know you were together,” I said, trying to pivot away, closer to the exit.

“Why would you have known?” she said, turning with me.

“You had nothing to do with the town anymore. But I heard about you . I heard about you and your friend down at the Low Bar. I was pregnant, so I wasn’t really in the scene at that time, as you can imagine.

” She took a step to the side, blocking my view of the exit again.

“I’ve done well for myself, don’t you think?

” she continued. “Charlie’s family made sure the settlement went to me and Bryce.

They’re really good people. So was Charlie. ”

“You have,” I said. “You’ve built a good life.” I placed my hand on the side of the tunnel, trying to orient myself. Looking for a chance.

“I have, ” she said, voice rising. “But I’ve had to carry this for the both of us for years. Decades, Beckett. I’ve learned to be patient. I’ve learned that justice sometimes takes time.”

As if that’s what we were doing down in the tunnels where two men had lost their lives. “This isn’t justice, ” I began. But what did I really know of that, either?

“Bryce was so excited to start here, and the school was happy to welcome him. His roots are strong. He never wants to leave this place.”

She took another step closer, so that I had to keep moving away. We were backing slowly away from the exit, the red glow of the sign fading to dark.

“I couldn’t believe you were back, Beckett. I really couldn’t. The nerve of you after all this time.”

“Bryce has been harassing Delilah, even though she had nothing to do with anything that happened then,” I said, trying to get back on topic.

To get her to tell the truth about what really happened in the woods.

To prove Delilah’s innocence. “He’d been stealing her things, following her.

He broke into my parents’ house and left her threatening messages.

He was luring her to Cryer’s Quarry that night, I have proof—”

“You have no such thing,” she cut in. “So here’s what I want to know. Tell me how you did it, Beckett. Tell me how you got away with killing them.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I swear I didn’t know what she was doing.”

“That’s the lie I kept hearing. But I saw you both. You had a plan.”

She was right. I was guilty by association. Haunted by the choices of someone else.

Maybe this was all it took to break everything free. Reach back to the past and bring it into the room with us.

Maybe we were all reaching for something here. Something we couldn’t give up. Cliff and Violet and me, all saying in our own way, Please, I can’t go back.

It made you the most dangerous type of person, with nothing left to lose.