“You saved Robin,” he whispered. “I don’t even know how to thank you.”
“Actually, Robin saved me,” Abby corrected him. “She’s a total badass. When I was her age, I wouldn’t have been brave enough to clobber him like that. She has the Harrison guts, clearly.”
He smiled. “She wants to be an FBI agent.”
Abby tilted her head, taking that in. “She’d be great,” she said. “But Georgia’s going to have a fit.”
Paul laughed, brushing a kiss against her temple. “Please rest,” he said. “For me.”
She closed her eyes, telling herself she was just doing it to appease him. But he was so warm, and she felt so safe.
Abby fell asleep cradled in his arms, finally succumbing to the exhaustion, knowing he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
Chapter 37
Two weeks later
“Are you ready?”
Abby nodded.
Stan, the prison guard, opened the door leading to Wells’s section of solitary. She nodded as he pointed to the panic button like before.
“Thank you, Stan. I’ll just be a few minutes,” she said.
She waited until he had left, until it was just Wells and her, and only then did she turn to him.
There was still a fading bruise spreading across her temple. She had thought about trying to cover it with makeup, but she had a feeling that sort of effort would just delight Wells.
“You’ve come to see me again,” Wells said.
“For the last time,” Abby said.
He clucked. “You didn’t bring Agent Harrison with you.”
“He doesn’t need to see you,” Abby said. She admired that about Paul. That he didn’t need this validation. That he didn’t need to stand there and face him.
But Abby did.
“I had no idea I was so important to you.”
“I found him,” Abby said.
“I figured.” Wells gestured to the mess of purple and green on her face. “Is that his handiwork?”
“You should see him,” Abby said, a mean smile playing across her face.
Robin’s blow to Patten’s head had fractured his skull. It had taken a week for him to regain consciousness because of brain swelling. By then, the FBI had dismantled his entire home, finding trophies and items from not just the seven missing girls that Zooey had identified, but five other girls in Oregon whose remains were still unknown. Cadaver-sniffing dogs had gone through as much of Patten’s property as they could, but who knew where they were buried. Who knew how many more stone Xs were hidden in the forest?
Cass hadn’t been his first, but she’d been his most important—the kill that he kept trying to emulate over and over again. Abby had watched as he had waxed poetical about Cass, downplaying her athleticism and competitive spirit, going on and on about her femininity, how proud he’d been when she’d stopped playing softball. A girl shouldn’t try to be like the boys, he’d told Agent Grace Sinclair, who had flown in specially to interview him before taking him to prison. Cass came to understand that. I taught her that.
The profiler’s lip had curled, unable to hide her disgust as she concluded the interview.
“I hope you didn’t hurt him too badly,” Wells said. “Wouldn’t that make you just like us?”
Abby snorted. That smile was back on her face. “I’m nothing like you two,” she said. “I’m smarter.”
Wells chuckled. “Quite the claim.”
“I figured it out,” Abby said. “Why you finally let me see you. Why you set this all in motion.”
“It was time someone put him in his place,” Wells said.
“It wasn’t that at all,” Abby said. She leaned forward. “You missed him,” she said. “Your son. You wanted to see him. In order to do that, you had to expose him.”
A smile curled across his face. “That would require quite a lot of sentiment on my part. Do you think I’m capable of such things, Abigail?”
“I think that for people like him, people like you? Exerting power over others is the closest thing you can get to love. You and him? You show each other you care by hurting each other. By taunting each other. By killing for each other. But now . . .” She trailed off.
Something flickered in Wells’s eyes. “What did you do?” he asked.
“I won,” Abby said. “I got justice for Cass. And I’ll get justice for all his victims. But this?” She gestured to the empty room, to the loneliness that was awaiting him. “This is a favor to the other girls. The ones that you killed. The girls that you carved Xs into and stole their breath and their lives like you were entitled to them. For those girls, I give this gift: You will never, ever get what you most want. Your son will rot in prison on the other side of the state, and you will never see him again. Never talk to him again. We figured out how you were communicating. Those little letters of yours won’t reach him again.”
Wells was white as a sheet, staring transfixed at her.
“You vicious little thing,” he said.
“I warned you before,” Abby said. “Predators who mess with farm girls? We’ll get you. Every time. You should have listened.”
She walked out of the room without even looking back, feeling like a part of her was finally free. As she made her way out of the prison and to the parking lot, it felt as if a weight was finally lifted from her shoulders.
She loved Cass. She would always love her. Growing up as a girl was hard enough without a best friend, and she was glad Cass had been hers. Cass had been a good friend and a bad friend, and Abby had been the same in turn. They had made mistakes and they had made good choices and bad ones, because they were human and they had just been getting started.
Bert Patten had taken Cass away before she was able to soar. Abby would always hate him. It would always be a wound in her heart that Cass never got to grow up, to become who she was supposed to become. Now that wound was as healed as it ever was.
Abby had to let go. Finally lay Cass to rest. Leave behind the bad, cherish the good, and get past all the pain.
Abby walked into the prison parking lot. Paul was leaning against her truck, waiting.
She walked over to him, a soft smile on her face.
“You okay?” he asked, looping an arm around her waist and pulling her close.
She shook her head. “But I will be,” she said.
He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, tracing the line of freckles that lined the edge of her jaw. She looked at him, feeling settled in a way she never had experienced before.
“I love you, you know,” he said.
She tilted her head up and they kissed, a slow, sweet kiss that she felt to the tips of her toes. The kind of kiss that started a forever.
They broke apart, just barely, her forehead still pressed to his, their chests brushing, her fingers winding in his hair and his in hers.
“I love you too,” she whispered.
He smiled. “So . . . what are we going to do about that?”
She beamed. For a moment, she couldn’t quite believe the boy next door and the girl across the meadow were finally standing in the same place, at the same time, their hearts finally free to truly love each other. But it was real and their time was here. Their future was forever.
Cass would have wanted them to seize it.
And so they would.