Page 139 of The Road to Ruined

I'm going to need my port for this one.

"All right," he says, sinking into an oversized armchair. He pats the space beside him. "Come here, Teag."

I sit beside him and begin eating my breakfast. The girls and Luca all sit on the sofa; Hazel sets a plate and a drink for Declan on the table beside him as she passes.

And then I hear my name on the television. My heart drops into my stomach.

"And now, onDateline Investigates…Bloodlust: The Teagan Townsend Story."

I don't think I'm going to be able to eat. I set my food aside and cover my mouth with my hands.

An old photo of me with River and Hazel flashes across the screen.

"Oh my god!" River says. "It's us! That's from my Instagram. We look cute."

"We do look cute," Hazel agrees.

"They could have been a little more creative with the name," I say.

It opens with an interviewer sitting across from my parents, Blakely, and Austin.

In Blakely's lap is a chubby baby girl, old enough to sit up, but it doesn't look like she has any teeth yet. She's wearing denim overalls and a pink shirt with lace around the sleeves and has maybe an inch of dirty blonde hair in ringlets.

"She has a baby," I say softly. "She's a mom."

"You're an auntie, Teag," River says.

I offer her a smile. But I'm not an auntie—not really. I'm dead.

Declan wraps his arms around me and kisses the side of my head. "If you need to pause it or take a break, let me know."

"I'm okay," I tell him.

"This is an extraordinary story,"the interviewer says,"of how a quiet girl from the California suburbs went from a true crime obsession to becoming entangled in one of the most disturbing cults of our time and, eventually, met her untimely demise."

"Really? Most disturbing?" Declan says. "I can think of a thousand things more disturbing than our family."

"Shh," Hazel says as more photos flash across the screen. "You're ruining my program. Ah! It's us again!"

"Tell me a little bit about Teagan. What was she like as a child?"

My mom is the one who answers."She was a good kid. I mean, she wasn't like Blakely. She wasn't involved with sports or extracurricular activities. She was quiet, kept to herself. She spent most of her time in her room, reading books or writing stories. Her grades were good, but she didn't care about school. She didn't have a lot of friends after elementary school, but for the most part, the other kids ignored her or left her alone."

"Until they didn't,"Blakely says.

"Were the two of you close growing up?"she asks Blakely.

"No,"Blakely says."We were four years apart and didn't have much in common. After her accident, I tried to be there for her, though. We became close; she moved in with me when she started at Cal State, but we were still so different, and…after you lose someone, you start to wonder what you could have done differently. I wish I'd been more understanding and supportive of her social media. Maybe she never would have started with the podcast stuff, and she'd just be in her room, reading weird shit."

"It wasn't even that weird," I say.

"Let's go back to the accident…"the reporter prompts.

They go back to high school—the letters, the bullying, and the kidnapping. They talk about my alternative school, how I changed while I was there, and what I was like when I returned to my old high school.

That part isn't hard to listen to. It doesn't even feel like it was the same lifetime anymore.

Then, they jump to when I left for the concert and didn't come home. They try to lay out a timeline of what happened, starting with my relationship with Luca and speculate on what happened behind closed doors.

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