ADDIE
MY WHOLE WORLD feels like it has just turned upside down. What? What is going on? What is Kenzie talking about?
“He wrote it for me two years ago,” she says. “I… I have it memorized.”
Thankfully, she doesn’t try to recite the poem again, because I would have had to run out of the room, holding my ears and screaming.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “Why did he write you a poem?”
“Because Nate and I have been sleeping together since my freshman year.”
No. No. That’s not possible. She’s making this up just to torture me.
I refuse to believe it.
“I was on the school newspaper,” she explains. “We were both staying late one day while he was helping me with an article I was writing, and…we got to talking.” She takes a shaky breath. “My brother had cancer at the time. Well, he still has it but he’s in remission. Leukemia. He was getting chemo and he was sick all the time, and it felt like nobody in my family even knew I existed anymore. I know that sounds selfish but…”
I remember that bottle of pills I found in Kenzie’s medicine cabinet, prescribed for her brother. For nausea. I had no idea he had leukemia—they must have kept it quiet.
“Nate was so kind to me,” she murmurs. “He paid so much attention to me in a way that my parents never did anymore. And he’s so… I mean, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. So when he kissed me…”
This doesn’t make sense. Nathaniel told me he had never been unfaithful to his wife before. Also, if he was with Kenzie since she was a freshman, she was only fourteen years old then. Nathaniel would never…
“He told me I was his soulmate.” She lets out a barking laugh. “I completely believed it. I was so stupidly in love with him. I would’ve done absolutely anything for him. And then when all that stuff happened with you and Mr. Tuttle, he said we had to cool it. He couldn’t see me anymore because there was too much scrutiny.” She chews on her nail again. “That’s why I was so mad at you this year. Nate barely spoke to me, and I felt like it was all your fault. Even though I realize now how dumb that was. And…I’m sorry for how I treated you.”
“But what about Hudson?” I blurt out. “I thought he was your boyfriend?”
She shakes her head. “No, Hudson and I are just friends, that’s all. He’s a nice guy who has been really kind to me while I’ve been struggling this year, but nothing happened between us—I was too hung up on Nate.”
It’s true that I never saw Hudson and Kenzie kissing. They seemed to be together a lot, but I never saw them making out in the hall like some other couples.
“And then I saw that poem in your notebook.” She rubs her slightly pink nose. “And I realized he must have given it to you too. And I just felt… I felt so stupid. I realized that the whole time, he was playing me. I bet he said all the same things to you that he said to me.”
I don’t know what to say. I thought Nathaniel was the most amazing man I had ever met or would ever meet. And now I’m beginning to wonder if I might have had it all wrong.
“I don’t know what happened with Mrs. Bennett,” she says, “but I’m going to go to the police and tell them everything that happened between me and Nate. And I’m hoping you’ll come with me so we can do it together.”
I shake my head. Kenzie has a lot of evidence, and yeah, it sounds bad. But Kenzie is my enemy. She’s been tormenting me all year. How can I believe her?
“I was only fourteen, Addie.” Her lower lip trembles. “I feel so stupid for believing everything he told me and letting him do all that stuff to me. It messed me up so bad. I just want to keep him from doing it to anyone else.” She sniffles loudly. “Please come with me.”
Her shaky voice is breaking my resolve—I’ve never seen her be anything but perfectly poised. I wring my hands together. “They’re probably not even going to believe us. I don’t have any proof at all. We only talked on Snapflash, and all those messages are gone.”
“Nate and I talked on Snapflash too,” she says. “But I took screenshots.”
“You did?”
She bobs her head. “At the time, I did it because I wanted to remember what he was saying to me. But they’re all there. All the lies he told me.”
She digs into the bag hanging off her shoulder and pulls out her phone. She brings up a photo on the screen, and that’s when I see it.
You’re my soulmate.
The same words he had written for me. But for Kenzie.
I’m too sick to keep reading. I shove the phone back in her direction and turn away, blinking back tears. Is it all real? Could Nathaniel really have said the same exact words to Kenzie that he said to me? This must be some kind of prank.
Except when I look at Kenzie’s face, I know it’s not.
She reaches out and takes my hand in hers. “Please, Addie. Please come with me. I don’t want to be the only one.”
With my free hand, I reach into my jeans pocket, where I moved the card that Detective Sprague gave me earlier today. I pull it out to look at the number scrawled on the back. The ink is slightly blurred by the rain, but I can still read every single digit.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll go.”
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter Seventy-Five
ADDIE
I AM ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED.
When we came to the police station, they put us in a tiny room that gave me a creepy-crawly claustrophobic feeling in the back of my neck. The lighting is scary dark, and the two plastic chairs look uncomfortable. And when we sit on them, they feel uncomfortable. If I were here alone, I would be terrified.
But I’m not alone. I’m with Kenzie.
I didn’t tell my mother what I was doing. She would have insisted on hiring a lawyer and making it into a whole thing, and then I would’ve lost my nerve. So I told my mother I was going to take a walk with Kenzie, but instead we came here.
But now I think I might have made a mistake. I should have waited for a lawyer. Or maybe just said nothing at all. Kenzie sounded so sure of herself, but it’s not like she’s my best friend. She’s been tormenting me all year! And now somehow I trust her?
Kenzie is obsessively playing with a lock of her blond hair. She’s tugging at it hard enough that I can’t help but wince, and she frowns at the silky blond strands as if angry at them. “My hair is like straw,” she complains.
I look at her in disbelief. Kenzie has the most perfectly silky hair I’ve ever seen. And why is she worrying about her freaking hair when we’re at a police station? “You have beautiful hair.”
She rolls her eyes at me and goes back to making faces at her hair.
I am losing it, waiting for Detective Sprague to talk to us. Maybe she was nice to me on the street, but that could’ve all been a fake out. And what I am going to tell her is bad stuff. Kenzie had an affair with Nathaniel, but what I did is much worse. I helped him bury a dead body. And I’m not even entirely sure which of us was the one who killed her.
It feels like an eternity, but it’s really more like twenty minutes before Detective Sprague comes into the room. She’s still got her hair in that bun, but it has loosened over the course of the day, and that makes her face look softer. I hope she really is on my side. I hope I don’t spend the rest of my life in prison.
I look over at Kenzie, who is still playing with her hair. Very reluctantly, she tucks the strands behind her ear and raises her eyes to look at the detective.
“Hello, Addie,” Sprague says. Then she turns to Kenzie and gives her a curious look. “Kenzie Montgomery?”
Kenzie nods. “I… Addie and I need to talk to you about Nathaniel Bennett.”
Sprague doesn’t look particularly surprised. She sits in one of the plastic chairs across from us and folds her fingers together. “I’m listening,” she says.
Kenzie and I exchange looks. We hadn’t agreed beforehand who would go first. I don’t want to go first, and I guess I assumed Kenzie would since it was her idea to come here.