A kaleidoscope of contradicting feelings spun in her heart, the colored glass of it shattering and revealing a new emotion with every turn. Rye was a wet petal, still grief-stricken and tender; Rye had betrayed her trust and gotten himself involved with Joel out of pettiness. Rye’s story was true, and she had pages and pages of news articles and YouTube videos to prove it; Rye had stayed with her in her home and lied about who he was. Rye was gentle and sweet to her at all times, especially when they’d been in her bed together; when they were in her bed together, it was twinned loneliness and she was worried about her brother, dizzied and desperate for a sexual connection and release to numb her.
Rye had saved Lionel.
She felt sorry for Rye; how could she not?
He may have lied about who he was without her picking up on it, but the core of her instincts had been right. She didn’t believe he’d killed his wife and daughter, and some would call her a fool, but she didn’t doubt her ability to read people’s energies just because she didn’t pick up Joel’s cheating husband energy as quickly as she could’ve. She’d been wrong about Joel, but she’d never been wrong about pure evil.
Rye was a lot of things, a lot of things she couldn’t know yet, but he wasn’t a sociopath or a murderer. She’d read about Christine’s autopsy, the drugs she’d had in her system, her history of mental illness. She’d watched a ten-minute video of an episode of a crime show he’d pulled up on YouTube, a team of attorneys explaining how he couldn’t have done it. The video had half a million views.
Diagnoses: Acute grief from the deaths of his wife and young daughter three years ago. Survivor’s guilt. PTSD from being accused and convicted of their deaths and subsequently falsely imprisoned.
*
“This is all so gut-wrenching, and I’m sorry…I’m just so sorry you’ve had to deal with this,” Tallie said. “Did you tell the cop who pulled us over who you really were?”
“Yes. And he recognized my name immediately. Googled me as I sat in his patrol car, and he got the same pitiful sorrow in his eyes everyone gets when they hear the story.”
Tallie changed the expression on her face, careful to not have those pitiful-sorrow eyes when she asked him, “Weren’t you worried someone would recognize you when we were at the party? The unicorn…my friend who thought you looked familiar? Did anyone say anything?”
Rye shook his head. “No one said anything, but there were a couple of times this weekend when people looked at me too long. In the pub…and an older woman stopped me in the grocery store. It’s usually older people. Old people love the news. Li said something about me looking familiar, though. And I thought your mom definitely recognized me when she came over. I thought your neighbor did, too. She looked at me weird.”
“Well…just so you know, my neighbor looks at everyone weird,” Tallie said.
“Noted,” Rye said.
After a moment he launched into why the letters were so important to him. He told her he got rid of everything else that belonged to Christine and Brenna except the wedding ring and those butterfly wings. And that the letters, although simple and, in Brenna’s case, unfinished, were his first attempts at sharing the part of his heart that had gone mute. He hated that he couldn’t even bring himself to finish Brenna’s letter, and the letter he’d written to Christine embarrassed him because it didn’t say enough. How could it? No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get it right. Like he’d failed her all over again.
“I know they didn’t seem important, but I’d never even tried to write Brenna a letter before. And I’d started letters to Christine in the past, but that was the first one I’d been able to finish…if it’s even finished…I don’t know.” He paused and looked up before continuing. “The letters aren’t the same thing at all, but just in general…I’m tired of people going behind my back and reading shit about me and knowing everything or thinking they know everything. I didn’t even get to tell you their names myself. You saw them first,” he said.
“I’m sorry I read them,” she said, attempting to fully understand his frustration as well as she knew her own.
“Well…I overreacted.”
“Tell the truth: Did you really send your parents that suicide letter?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m being honest with you about everything now.”
He kept talking. Told her where the money had come from. Told her he took antidepressants for about a month years ago and hated them. Told her he didn’t even smoke weed anymore. He was prescribed the beta-blockers after everything because he thought his adrenaline would never let off turbo-boost.