“His name is Kyle. He’s a police detective. I met him when I reported you missing. I met him when they thought I was involved in the death of James Finley. I met him because Bethany Jarvitz was taking over my identity, which was given to her by you.”
Her eyes widened in shock. “Leah,” she said, and she held out her hand like I had everything all wrong. “Bethany Jarvitz killed James Finley. I found out what Bethany was doing. I protected you. I did it for you.” And I could see it in my head, the story playing out in a film. Emmy sitting at the edge of the woods, that day with the owls, watching for her. Protecting me. The version of her I’d hoped she would be.
But the beginning didn’t match up with the end. There were too many pieces that wouldn’t fit, no matter how desperately I wanted to believe it.
“Really?” I said. “Because this is how I see it: You lived as the woman in the basement apartment in Boston, using her name. Taking my money. You stole my wallet, used my identity when you needed a job. And then you ran. You ran and did God knows what, but you weren’t leaving for the Peace Corps.” I was shaking now, unable to control the anger in my words. The betrayal. The realization that there was no other explanation than that she’d been using me from the start.
She flinched, and I realized she had underestimated what I knew, what I had learned.
I pressed on, showing her that I’d figured her out. That she couldn’t fool me any longer. “You hopped from one identity to the next until Bethany got released. And then you came back for me. Eight years later. Eight years later when you knew Bethany would be released from jail. I was like a gift you brought to her. Until you didn’t like what you found and got rid of her, too. Left the murder weapon in my house. The call from my school. I was the only one left behind.”
“Leah, I can explain it. You know me. I know you.” She kept coming closer, as if by mere proximity she could prove none of this was true.
I held up my hand to stop her. “No, this is what I know. You killed a man, with Bethany, long ago. And now she’s dead. And here you are, finally able to live as yourself. You’re out. You’re free. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I didn’t kill that man. That was Bethany again. I swear it—”
“He was from your hometown, Emmy. Melissa. Whoever you are. You were the one who must’ve known him.”
“You of all people should understand, Leah. You don’t know what he was like. What he did.” I thought of the scar on her ribs. The fear in her eyes. The pieces I was fitting together on her behalf as she spoke. But I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it was true. If I believed her. A nonexistent fiancé who’d scared her; a boyfriend who’d kicked her out—so many stories, and I wasn’t sure if even she knew who she was anymore.
If she herself was anything more than a story, with gaps that she left for us to fill in ourselves. Never telling me anything real, letting me fill in those blanks with my own story. Appealing to something so basic, so needed—that I wanted to find another person like me, who was strong, who had made it. I had constructed her in my own likeness.
There was a twitch above her eye, and her gaze darted quickly to the side, and I took inventory of the room—all the things she could be looking at. The knives, the base of the candlestick, the stakes beside the fireplace. I knew what she had done to Bethany. I had seen her not even flinch when she’d taken a knife to Aaron’s arm so many years ago. If she hadn’t killed that man years earlier, she’d at least gone along with it.
And for the first time, I was afraid of the woman before me.
Paige could see that there was something wrong with Emmy. But I was too blinded to her. She was, I believed, the person I wanted to be. Capable of anything. I had let her too close, it was true, but she had let me come so close as well.
“Kyle’s probably up by now,” I said.
“So? Time to go, then?” I felt her excitement in the air, that she was gaining the upper hand again.
I shook my head. “No, I left this address for him this morning with your name. Sent him a picture of you getting out of the car a few minutes ago.”
She shook her head. “No, Leah. You didn’t.” Because wasn’t that the Leah Stevens she knew?
I held up my phone for her now, showed her the string of responses from him. The fact that he was calling the local police. The What were you thinking. The Hold on, I’m coming.
A sound escaped her throat, and she looked around the room.
“Leah,” she said, “what did you do?”
“I gave you a head start,” I said. “It seems only fair after all you’ve done for me.”
This house was her beginning and her end. The thing she was working back toward. The only way she could get there—without Bethany, without James Finley, without me. I saw her stare at it longingly, then set her jaw, a version of her stripped bare.
“You have to take nothing with you when you go,” I said, repeating the words she’d spoken to me years earlier. “That’s how to do it, right?”
She blinked once more at me, as if truly seeing me for the first time. And then she was gone.
It’s when she runs that I know the truth from the fiction. It’s when I’m finally sure—of her, of me.
She left the front door open in her rush. Her footsteps raced to the side of the woods. She didn’t even have her coat.
I knew she didn’t stand a chance.
I could feel the net closing around her even now, before the police arrived.
Even if she got away today, began to make her way as someone else, her face would be up on news programs. These pictures on the mantel would identify her. A paper trail, exposed. She would no longer be a ghost.
I brought her to life. Like I promised to do all along.
* * *
I KNEW KYLE WOULD say this was reckless of me, that I acted on impulse, coming here first all alone, stepping inside her house, and confronting her. Why not watch from the woods, call it in, once I was sure it was her?
But he didn’t know—I owed it to the anonymous girl I’d hidden away years earlier.
Part of me needed to see whether I would believe her now. Whether I could see the truth from the story myself.
And if I’m honest, there was another part of me that wanted her to know I was the one who had done it. To be standing face-to-face with her when she realized what was happening. I wasn’t the Leah Stevens she thought I was.
I had been the one to shake the truth free this time. The thrill as I watched it finally rise to the surface, unstoppable.
Read on for an excerpt of Megan Miranda’s bestselling thriller
All the Missing Girls
PART 1
Going Home
Man . . . cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE