Chapter 8: Twelve Videos

Kellan's POV

I sat outside the operating room until the windows turned grey.

Nobody spoke to me. Duncan Rook sat at the far end of the bench, with his glasses in his hand and his eyes shut.

My mother had gone home. She told me she could not look at me.

They took Odette away at four in the morning, in the back of a patrol car.

She stopped in front of me on the way out.

"You still think this was me," she said. Her voice was soft, and I realized I had never heard it do anything else.

She pushed a slip of paper into my hand. It had a website on it, and a password.

"Look at it all," she said. "Then tell me whose plan it was."

The officer pulled her on.

I stood there with the paper for a long time.

Then I sat down on the bench, opened my phone, and typed it in.

It was a cloud drive. There were eleven video files, each with a date, and a folder holding hundreds of chat logs.

I opened the first one.

It was our kitchen, last winter. I had hidden Willa's heat packs to see if she'd come looking for me.

On the screen she came through the door with her lips blue-black and her hands curled stiff.

I remembered laughing. I remembered folding my arms around her.

"See?" I had said. "You know how much I mean to you now, don't you?"

She had smiled up at me, grey and shaking, and said yes.

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