Page 27 of The Truth You Told

Although, to be fair, when Raisa tried to imagine seeking that kind of relief during an investigation, she couldn’t get past the idea that she’d probably pass out from exhaustion when her body hit the mattress. So maybe she was a little stunned by that aspect.

Still, there were more important things to focus on.

“Isn’t that a wild coincidence that you met Shay while you were working the case for Conrad’s first victim?” she asked.

“First victim we knew about at the time,” Kilkenny corrected, a not-very-skillful dodge of her question. “He’d killed three times before that.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Semantics won’t distract me.”

“The bar was in a different county. She didn’t know I was an FBI agent,” Kilkenny said, like he’d rationalized this to himself a million times. He probably had. “I watched for any untoward interest. She didn’t care about the Alphabet Man.”

“Ohh,untoward. Are we Victorian dandies now?” Raisa teased.

“My first day in town, everyone at the bar was talking about the case,” he said. “Shay was working, and even then she barely paid attention to any of it.”

“You remember the specific night well?” She’d had a million nights like that, all at different bars or hotels or in cars or airports. It was rare she could pinpoint exactly where she’d been when, let alone remember what those around her had been talking about.

“I met my wife that night,” Kilkenny said with simple surety.

A lot of times she wondered how Shay could possibly live up to the reputation she’d gained as a tragic figure in Kilkenny’s life—no fights or flaws, no personality or mistakes, just a ghost to be remembered as perfect. But right in that moment, a tiny part of her admired the stalwart devotion.

“In hindsight, though ...,” Raisa prompted, because Kilkenny was too good of an FBI agent not to look at this coincidence and call it suspicious.

Still, he shook his head. “It’s not some conspiracy. I met Shay in the area and then dragged her into the crosshairs of a serial killer. It’s me that’s the connection.”

Raisa wasn’t sure he was right, but she knew he believed he was. Eventually she was going to have to stop treading carefully. Kilkenny could handle it. “What if she wasn’t collateral damage, though? You met her the first day you were in town. You have to think that’s strange, looking back on it.”

“She was a bartender with a tight-knit family and only a handful of close friends. Moving with me to Washington was the first time she’d left Houston in her life,” Kilkenny said. “She didn’t have enemies. She was killed because of me, not because of something she was involved in.”

Sometimes there were stories that people told themselves so many times they became a cornerstone to who they were as a person.

They couldn’t see that the stories weren’t always true.

And at the heart of Kilkenny’s story that he told himself was guilt. That was a far easier thing to live with than pure grief. If Kilkenny didn’t have guilt to sustain him, what would he have? An empty house and pictures instead of the woman he’d loved.

Raisa understood that, she did. She had her own story she had been telling herself all her life, and it started and ended with two people she’d believed to be her parents. Two people she’d thought had died because of a silly mistake she’d made.

Raisa understood the simplicity of guilt, and how addicting it could become. Guilt at least implied some degree of control over your life. You became the driving force of terrible things, and so terrible things would never happen to you again if you were just a better version of yourself.

The universe was random, though. Bad things happened to good people, and all you could do was acknowledge that there was always a chance something devastating could happen again. And you might not have any control over it.

That was a pretty terrifying thing to sit with.

But if they were going to figure out what had really happened to Shay, they had to stop telling stories.

“Or maybe,” Raisa said softly, so softly she wasn’t sure Kilkenny actually heard, “you had nothing to do with it at all.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Shay

November 2009

Four years before the kidnapping

A strange man stood in Shay’s kitchen.

Shay didn’t stop to think or consider. She just reached for the wooden baseball bat she kept tucked into the corner near the couch.

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