Page 128 of The Moment You Know

She exhaled a partial laugh.

“So, how did it happen?” David asked, as a few appealing scenarios ran through his head:

Carter, sans seatbelt, crashing into a telephone pole and almost decapitating himself as he went head-first through the windshield, then bleeding out on the hood of his car.

Carter, unable to open any doors or windows in his burning house and being cremated alive.

Carter having a massive stroke while swimming in his pool, drowning after several hours of trying unsuccessfully to get out of the water.

Carter falling down the stairs to his basement where he kept his ping pong table and paddles, and lying there with multiple compound fractures, unable to move and starving to death.

Carter getting diagnosed with a prolonged, but terminal form of cancer (it didn’t matter which kind), combined with the contraction of a flesh eating bacteria, so that parts of his body (like his dick and balls) would literally get eaten away while the cancer was internally killing him.

David actually liked the last scenario best, because if anyone deserved to die in such a manner, it was that motherfucking pedophile.

“He committed suicide,” Paige told him. “He put a .9 millimeter Sig Sauer in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

David frowned, actually disappointed at what was a quick and possibly painless end, but then shrugged it off. Dead was dead. “Well, as far as decisions go, that was a pretty good one to make.”

“I think I helped him make it, actually.”

“How?”

“I wrote a book about what he did to me and mailed it to him.” She paused and then added, “It was my ‘Fuck You’ letter.”

“What’s a ‘Fuck You’ letter?”

“It’s basically exactly what it sounds like. At the end of therapy, a sense of closure can be achieved either with a personal confrontation, or a ‘Fuck You’ letter. Most people go the ‘Fuck You’ letter route because confrontations can be very unpredictable, possibly even dangerous.

“However, that didn’t keep me from wishing I could confront Carter and get vengeance like a scene out of a movie but I knew that was never going to happen, not after a panic attack in the post office was brought on just because some guy smelled like him. I had no idea what would happen if I actually saw Carter again and that was enough of an unknown to make it clear that the last time I saw him, which was years ago, would be the last time I saw him.”

She then explained how Lauren had come up with the idea of converting Paige’s journals into a book and having that be her ‘Fuck You’ letter.

“That’s genius,” David murmured.

“I wrote a message to him on the inside cover, telling him what I might have said to him in person, along with some other stuff, then sent it certified mail. I’m not going to lie … it gave me a lot of pleasure picturing him signing for something from me, but not knowing what it was until he opened it.

“I knew he likely wouldn’t read the book, but that didn’t matter. It only mattered that he got it and knew I’d written and published it for the world to read. Well, maybe not the world, but there’s a lot of people out there who now know what he did and that feels pretty fucking good.”

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