Page 122 of Darkwater Lane

I’m the one who survived. Who willkeepsurviving.

Who will do more than survive: who will live.

I smile as tears track down my cheeks. “I win,” I tell him.

Then I walk out the door, leaving Melvin in my past for good.

EPILOGUE

One Year Later

“Happy birthday, dear Saraaaaahhhh… Happy birthday to you!” We sound horrendous—not a singer among us except, perhaps, for Kez. That doesn’t matter to the guest of honor. One-year-old Sarah sits in her high chair, pudgy fingers flexing and reaching for the giant cake in front of her.

We finish the song with a round of applause that has little Sarah squealing and clapping gleefully. Kez crouches next to her high chair, puffing out her cheeks dramatically to show Sarah how to blow. This only causes Sarah to place her hands on Kez’s cheeks and squeeze, like deflating a balloon.

“Bueno, mi vida,” Javi says, dropping a kiss on both his wife’s and daughter’s heads. “Time to make a wish!” He waves his hand around the table. “Everyone!” he commands.

He and Kez crouch on either side of Sarah and pause for a moment, eyes scrunched in concentration. I take a moment to look around, watching as everyone else does the same.

We’re in Javi and Kez’s barn, which Javi has slowly been converting into their future house with Sam and Connor’s help. The first floor is almost complete, and we’re crowded around a large, homemade dining room table just off the kitchen.

Sarah sits in her high chair at one end, her parents flanking her and her grandfather perched on a stool next to her. Detective Diakos—or Andreas, as I now think of him since we became friends once the Norton DA decided not to bring charges against me for Madison’s death—brought his new girlfriend, the infamous Kathy of Kathy’s Kakes. Though I’m not sure he could have avoided inviting her, given that she provided the birthday cake.

Connor is here with his friend-who-is-a-girl named Patricia from the barn where he still works part-time. He claims they’re not dating, and I don’t push him on it because I know he’s still working through trust issues. But she’s over at our house all the time, and I hear them laughing a ton, so whatever their relationship is, they’re enjoying each other, and that’s what matters most.

Lanny drove up from Duke with Florida last night. It’s ACC basketball season, and while neither of them has ever shown much interest in sports in the past, there have still been a few snide comments now that Florida is a Tarheel and Lanny is a Blue Devil. Given that I’ve barely seen them not holding hands or giggling with each other, the ribbing is clearly all in good fun.

The two stopped by Knoxville on the way here and picked up Vee so she could join us. Vee offered to steal a car and drive herself, but I told her I didn’t think that was the best idea. She said she was joking, but it’s always hard to know with her. She’s shaved one side of her head since I saw her last, and dyed the other side a light gray bordering on lavender. Despite the cold outside, she’s wearing a short-sleeved prairie dress and combat boots. Her entire left arm is covered in a tattoo of a dark, ominous, hauntingly beautiful forest. It’s her own work, and with Connor’s help, she’s set up a social media profile to promoteherself. According to Connor, she’s got a waiting list several months long.

Then there’s Sam. He stands beside me, his arm wrapped around my waist. When I look over at him, his eyes are closed as well, and I wonder what he’s wishing for.

A year ago, that would have been an easy answer. We both would have wished for the same thing: to be free of Melvin Royal.

It’s amazing how much can change in a year.

In the end, Madison was actually right about a podcast changing people’s minds. As the dust settled after Madison’s death and Sam’s exoneration, Connor approached me with the idea of finishing the podcast I began with Madison. I’d been hesitant, not wanting to stir the pot. But Connor was persistent, and it was the first time in a while I’d seen him so excited about a project. I decided to give it a chance.

I’m glad I did. He called itBeyond the Royal Shadow, and it was an instant hit. He held nothing back in making it, and neither did the rest of us. The episodes were raw and honest. I discussed my guilt over not recognizing who Melvin really was, and Connor talked about what it was like to worry that something of the monster in Melvin might have been passed down to him and how it sometimes caused him to second-guess himself.

Lanny opened up about the rage and powerlessness she felt when she watched her entire family get torn apart by the legal system, only for it to nearly happen again with Sam. In a painful episode to listen to, Sam admitted the difficulties he still sometimes faced while trying to reconcile his grief over Callie with the fact that he lived with her murderer’s family.

Throughout those episodes, Connor wove the story of Melvin’s crimes and the subsequent accusations against me. He dedicated an entire episode to walking through the process of escaping an abuser, chronicling the specifics of our lives post Melvin and going into detail about how we changed our names, what we kept in ourbug-out bags, and how we buried caches of money and IDs across the country in case we needed them.

He covered the case against Sam as well, walking through the evidence they discovered in Madison’s storage unit that explained how she was able to set him up for the murders she committed. How she paid a hacker on the dark web to help track down Melvin’s grave. How she snuck into Rowan’s house one night and found physical letters from Leo Varrus that led her right to him. How she sat on that information for months, just waiting for the right time to pounce. Connor even read off the names from Madison’s hit list.

All the people she planned to kill just to impress me. To prove to me that she was worthy of being my partner. It still makes me sick to think about it. Recording that episode was difficult for me—recounting what happened out on Stillhouse Lake and my confrontation with Madison. While Sam recovered some of his memory, there were still frustrating gaps. He’s never been able to remember how she was able to overpower him, though he assumes she pulled a gun on him and disarmed him before he could defend himself.

Connor began and ended each episode with quotes from letters Melvin sent me over the years, and the vile threats I’d collected via Sicko Patrol. He wanted people to understand what it was like for us. For me. He wanted people to know what it was like to live in Melvin Royal’s shadow for so long.

The podcast was such an enormous success that it helped turn the tide of public opinion. I still had my haters. Most of them pointed to Madison’s murder as proof that I was complicit in Melvin’s murders as well. They thought the episode where I described my confrontation with Madison out on the lake was self-serving.

Of course, it was. That was one of the points of the podcast: to reframe the narrative and gain sympathy. Madison may have been a psychopath, but she was also pretty damn smart. When she pitchedthe idea of a podcast to keep Sam out of jail, she knew what she was talking about. Though I doubt she ever realized we’d use it to keep me out of jail as well. She’d probably have been pretty pleased about that.

The other point of the podcast was to direct the vitriol where it belonged: at Melvin Royal and Madison Westcott. With that, we were also pretty successful.

Since the podcast’s debut, several media companies have approached Connor with job offers, despite the fact he hasn’t even graduated high school. For now, he’s decided to remain an independent journalist. Plus, he doesn’t have the same free time he used to, now that he’s returned to school in person. Over the summer, he reconnected with his old Dungeons and Dragons buddies. They started up a new campaign and gather in our living room every Thursday, just like they did when we first moved to Stillhouse Lake all those years ago.

He still carries emotional scars and continues seeing his therapist, as do the rest of us, but I can see him slowly reclaiming himself. He’s allowing himself to trust people again, to open up, and make friends. To build a community. He’ll still say “fine” when I ask him how his day went, but more often than not, it’s just a typical teenager response and not one borne of any moodiness. Usually, he ends his day in the kitchen with me, helping prep dinner as he tells me about whatever he’s found interesting lately: books, podcasts, games, videos. It’s my favorite time of the day.

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