“So when you told me about the night he was arrested—how he didn’t fight, didn’t try to run,” Daniel had said, leaning closer, his eyebrows raised. Hoping that I would understand, finally. That I would get it, finally. That he wouldn’t have to say it himself. That perhaps the killing could be self-inflicted; the trigger would go off in my mind instead of on his tongue. “How instead, he just whispered those two words.”
My father, in handcuffs, straining for one final moment. The way he had looked at me, then Cooper. His eyes zeroed in almost directly on my brother, as if he were the only one in the room. And that’s when it hit me, a sucker punch to the stomach. He was talking to him, not me. He was talking to Cooper.
He was telling him, asking him, pleading with him.
Be good.
“You killed those girls in Breaux Bridge,” I say now, my eyes on my brother. The words that I had been turning over and over on my tongue, trying to make sense of their taste. “You killed Lena.”
Cooper is quiet, his eyes starting to glass over. He looks down at the wine, the splash still left at the bottom of the glass, and lifts it to his lips, downing the rest.
“Daniel figured it out,” I say, forcing myself to continue. “It makes sense now. The animosity between you two. Because he knew that Dad didn’t kill those girls. You did. He knew it, he just couldn’t prove it.”
I think back to our engagement party, to the way Daniel had wound his arm around my waist, pulling me closer to him, away from Cooper. I had been so wrong about him. He wasn’t trying to control me; he was trying to protect me, from my brother and from the truth. I can’t imagine the balancing act he had been trying to achieve, keeping Cooper at an arm’s length without revealing too much.
“And you knew, too,” I continue. “You knew Daniel was onto you. And that’s why you’ve been trying to turn me against him.”
Cooper, on my porch, reciting those words that had been chewing at my brain like cancer ever since. You don’t know him, Chloe. That necklace, buried deep in the back of our closet. Cooper had put it there, the night of the party. He was there first, letting himself in with his key. Slipping it silently into the very place he knew it would hit the hardest before making his way outside, hiding in the shadows. After all, I had done this before. With Ethan, in college, suspecting the worst. Cooper knew that with the right memories dug up and replanted in just the right way, they would start to grow in my mind, uncontrolled like a weed. They would take over everything.
I think about Tyler Price, taking Aubrey and Lacey and Riley, recreating Cooper’s crimes in just the right way because he had told him how. I think about how broken you must have to be to let another person convince you to kill. It’s no different from the way damaged women write to criminals with marriage proposals, I suppose, or how seemingly ordinary girls find themselves in the clutches of threatening men. It’s all the same: lonely souls in search of some company, any company. I’m nobody, he had said, his eyes like empty water glasses, fragile and wet. The same way I had found myself, time and time again, tangled between the sheets with a stranger, afraid for my life, but at the same time, willing to take the risk. You’re not crazy, Tyler had told me, his hands in my hair. Because that’s the thing about danger—it heightens everything. Your heartbeat, your senses, your touch. It’s a desire to feel alive, because it’s impossible to feel anything but alive when you find yourself in its presence, the world becoming cloaked in a shadowy haze, its very existence all the proof you need—that you’re here, you’re breathing.
And in an instant, it could all be gone.
I can see it now, so clearly. My brother pulling Tyler under his spell again—this lost, lonely person—the way he always has. He made me do it. There was always something about him, after all. Something about Cooper. An aura that captured people, an attraction that was almost impossible to shake. Like magnets trying to fight iron, that gentle, natural pull. You could try, for a while, shaking under the mounting pressure. But eventually, you just gave in, the same way my anger would always melt as he pulled me into that familiar hug. The same way that swarm of people was always around him in high school, scattering with that wrist-flick of dismissal when he no longer wanted them, needed them, as if they weren’t actually people, but pests. Disposable. Existing for his own pleasure and nothing more.
“You tried to frame Daniel,” I say finally, the words settling over the room like soot after a fire, coating everything in ash. “Because he saw through you. He knows what you are. So you had to get rid of him.”