Page 109 of Death and Do-Overs

Energy surged from her, straight into me, like a tidal wave. I had no choice but to submit to its power.

MARNIE

Mar had thought since she’d been the older copy, that she’d absorb Greta.

Greta hadn’t given a thought or care to which form became host to the whole.

But it was Greta who saw the purple bubble.

A flood of new memories washed over my brain, two sets converging into one experience. All of the memories were mine.

I wasn’t Greta anymore, or Mar. I was Marnie, as complete as I could be without the final pieces of Nie. Through my rejoining, I knew two consequential truths.

One—I’d done way more than kiss Levi, because even if I didn’t want to admit it, I was falling quite hard for him.

Two—Otis undoubtedly murdered Nie.

I’d been so certain I knew exactly the kind of man Levi was, that I could truly trust him.

And now….

How could he be best friends with a murderer?

Worse, Otis had murdered me.

A sinking feeling settled in my gut, heavy and foreboding. What if I’d been wrong to trust him? He’d been in Piccadilly at the same time Nie’s head had shown up on Barnacles’s door step.

The fox had dragged Nie’s head away, which checked out with Levi’s account of following a fox to the train station. But he’d said the fox was pulling a trash bag. A fox couldn’t have put Nie’s head in a bag, gotten it onto a train, traded the bag for a box, and delivered that box across town.

At the very least, Nie would have been covered in scrapes and bruises when I’d found her.

And when I searched her memories, I found only one piece of information that lent evidence to any of this—red. The fox was red. It was flimsy at best.

What if the fox had help? What if everything that had happened between me and Levi was a lie? What if Otis had never been missing, and Levi had been helping him this entire time with some twisted plot?

My breath rushed from my lungs. I staggered back as I tried to process the hurt that flooded my senses. The pain was physical, crushing, suffocating.

“You did it!” Imogen threw her arms around me and squeezed. “You’re one Marnie again. And you did it on purpose. That’s amazing.”

I could hardly feel the pressure she added.

I could hardly feel anything beyond the questions and thoughts swirling through my head.

Imogen kept her grip on me, but turned her head like she was waiting for me to say something.

I said, “Thanks.”

“I know this whole Otis thing is throwing you. How could it not?”

I wriggled to free myself from her grasp.

She released me. The concerned look on her face hurt my heart. I couldn’t handle any more hurt. I looked everywhere but at her.

“I have to talk to Levi,” I said.

“He’s getting dinner, remember?” Imogen tilted her head, the concern lines on her face only deepening.

“Right,” I said.

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