Wolfhunter River (Stillhouse Lake #3)(84)

“Get in,” Gwen says. “Let’s get out of here.”

“There’s no place to go,” I tell her. “And we need to talk. Now.”





14

GWEN

Sam doesn’t look right. He seems pale, and tired, and deeply unhappy, lines on his face I haven’t seen before. I don’t know what he sees when he leans down to look at me through the open door of the car, but he gets in and slams it shut. I immediately start driving.

“Where are you going?” he asks me. He even sounds exhausted. Hasn’t slept, I’m sure. Like me, he’s worn thin with it.

“Away from all this bullshit and this damn town. Mike called me. He said you were out on bail and where to pick you up. Where is he?” Sam doesn’t answer. “Never mind. Let’s go home.”

“Home isn’t a refuge,” he says. “Stop the car.”

I haven’t pulled out of the motel parking lot yet, just made the turnaround. I pull the rental into a space. “What?” I have the feeling I’m not going to like this. At all.

He hesitates for a long moment, and then he says, “I don’t want the kids to hear this.”

“I’m pretty sure we need to,” my daughter says. “Enough with the secrets! We’re not babies.”

But they always will be to me; tiny little bundles of sweet, new skin and kicking feet and waving hands that need protection from the world. I feel breathless, because Sam wouldn’t have said that if it wasn’t serious. If it wasn’t something that would change everything.

But he takes Lanny at her word. He leans up against the passenger side door to look at me, and at them too.

Then he tells us the truth.

“Miranda Tidewell and I used to be close,” he says. “I lived with her for a while. Before you assume anything, it was just . . . I needed a place to stay, and she provided a room in her house. A guest room.”

“For how long?” I ask him.

“From the time I got back from deployment until I moved to Stillhouse Lake,” he says. “I told you that I went there thinking I’d prove that you had something to do with Melvin’s crimes. That was true. I just didn’t tell you that I had funding.”

“Funding,” I repeat. “From Miranda.”

“And I guess she’s finally realized she’s not getting value for her investment.”

I feel something catch inside me, sharp as a fishhook. He’s only ever talked about it as his own decision, not that it was any kind of shared secret. Shared with her. “She knew you were coming to Stillhouse Lake. To hurt me. Put me in prison if you could do that.”

“Yes.”

Connor says, “The woman on TV? That one? You lived with her?”

“I did.” His voice breaks. He doesn’t want to admit this to Connor. “There’s more. I put together the Lost Angels group. It started with the two of us, then pulled in the families and friends of Melvin’s other victims. If we didn’t get everyone, we got close. It was meant to be a place to heal. But that’s not what it turned into.”

“Sam . . .” I know about the Lost Angels group. And I feel a crawling horror beneath my skin. “No. No.”

“I started it,” he says. “Miranda and I did that to you. God, Gwen . . .” I can see how long he’s carried this secret, and how much it hurts him. I can feel sorry for him even as he’s cutting my heart in two. “At first it was just talk, just internet bullshit to make ourselves feel better. Then . . . then I made the wanted posters. I found out where you were living after you changed your name.” He looks ill now. “We came back every day to put them up. For weeks. We tracked you.”

I want to throw up. I brace myself on the steering wheel. I remember how happy I was to get my kids back with me, how safe and warm our new refuge felt after my acquittal. We’d started over. I believed in the goodness and forgiveness of people then. I’d really thought we could move on without the stench of Melvin’s evil following us.

And then wanted posters with my picture went up around our neighborhood, accusing me of rape, torture, and murder. They were stuffed in our mailbox. They were nailed to our front door. To the doors of my kids’ school.

To hear that Sam did that . . . it burns something to ash inside me. He destroyed our safety. He pushed us to run for our lives, because after that first time it all went viral, beyond anyone’s control. Reddit went mad with speculation about how deep my involvement went in the murders and concluded that I was the mastermind. That Melvin was just my patsy.

We were relentlessly doxed from that point on. No safe spaces. The Lost Angels, and the army of rabid assholes who followed after them, began sending us more and more violent imagery and fantasies about our deaths.

I realize, with a horrible jolt, that Sam sent those too. He must have, in the beginning. It’s never stopped. Every day, the Sicko Patrol floods my in-box.

Sam is the real author of our misery.

I don’t even know how to process the depth of that betrayal, even if it was done before we ever really met.

There are tears in my eyes now, cold enough to freeze. It hurts. Everything hurts. How could you not tell me? How could you make me trust you? What kind of sick game are you playing now? I can barely feel my body. I’m sick enough to faint, but I don’t. I cling grimly to the world, this ugly, broken world, and I say, “You asked me to marry you. Did she tell you to do that? Marry me, then break me? Or maybe just kill . . .” I can’t continue; it hurts too much. My voice is shaking. I’m shaking. And I realize, Oh God, that I’ve not told the kids he proposed, that my children are witnesses and victims now, that I should have done as he asked and stepped out of the car to listen to this confession because this . . . this is going to destroy them. They trusted him.