great gasp, opened his mouth to release a river of blood. She looked him straight in the eye, the stench of him nearly overwhelming her; she watched his light go out, his eyes go glassy and still, felt the final shudder of his body. And then she screamed again, releasing all the horror, all the terror she’d carried, all the nightmares she’d had, all the things about herself and her childhood that she lost to him.
Hank pulled her off, and wrapped her up in his arms, and rocked and rocked her until she stopped screaming, weeping, until she was just whimpering.
“Itsokayitsokayitsokay,” he kept saying. “Imsosorrysosorrysosorry.”
She clung to him, his arms strong and safe, and he held her, weeping himself. She turned away from Kreskey, buried her face in the rough of Hank’s jacket.
That’s how Detective Harper found them.
“Holy shit,” he said, coming through the door, startling them both. Rain and Hank both froze, the three of them locked in a triangle of shock.
Detective Harper’s face was slack a moment; he put a hand to his head. “Oh, my god,” he breathed.
Hank and Rain clung to each other. She couldn’t stop sobbing, but Hank was silent and stiff.
The air was electric with all the horrible implications of what could happen next, Kreskey slowly bleeding out on the floor.
“Okay,” Harper said finally. “Let’s get this cleaned up and get the hell out of here.”
With Detective Harper’s help, they stripped to their underwear and burned everything they were wearing in the fireplace in his living room. Rain shook uncontrollably, crawling into pink sweatpants and T-shirt that read Sexy Lady. Hank got a pair of jeans and football jersey.
“Now,” Harper told them while everything burned, “this is done. You never speak of it to anyone. You forget it ever happened. No one will ever come looking for you. And if you ever have the urge to confess—to your shrink, to your priest, remember that you’ll be frying me, as well as yourselves and anyone who ever loved you, for a man who destroyed your lives, killed your friend and would likely do it again if the opportunity arose.”
Rain and Hank sat on Harper’s couch stunned, speechless, nodding.
“Don’t see each other for a while,” he went on. “Maybe never. Easier for you both to move on that way, you know. Like war. Don’t talk about it. Try to forget it.
“Can you drive?” he asked Hank, who nodded, still mute.
“Good,” he said. “Get out of here. And when the reporters come knocking? Don’t answer. Whatever you do, don’t talk to the press.”
They rode in silence back to the city. When he stopped in front of her dorm, she climbed out and never looked back at him. She heard him roll down the window and say her name, but she didn’t answer.
After Rain killed Kreskey, there was nothing. No regret. No nightmares. In fact, fewer nightmares than she’d had before. Rain felt, if anything, free. She’d freed the version of herself that Kreskey kept in his imagination. There was a giddy lightness, a raw sense of personal power. She’d faced down the boogeyman—and won.
Kreskey’s murder hit the news the next day, and the wave of calls from reporters, the storm of photographers waiting in front of her dorm on Eleventh Street was massive. She hid in her room, exhausted on every level, Gillian coming and going for her—food, materials from her teachers. Greg didn’t even call; she knew she’d lost him forever. Finally, Rain just went home. Her father sent a car, and she moved back into her old room.
On the third day of hiding out, Greg came back to her. If he suspected what they’d done, he never said so. And she spared him the truth, spared herself his reaction. If she told him, she made him complicit. If he judged her, she’d have no choice but to judge herself.
He forgave her for Hank, for being unfaithful. He wanted to protect her, came clean about some failings of his own. She wasn’t angry; in fact, she was glad he wasn’t as perfect as he seemed.
“I think we are—us together—bigger than our screwups,” he said. He sat on one of the rockers on her father’s porch. “I hope we are.”
“We are,” said Rain.
When she made love to him that night, she thought of Hank, how he held her next to the corpse of the man who’d killed their friend. She pushed the gloom of her past away, forced herself into the light with the man she chose