I looked down at the completed puzzle and smiled.

“You really are good at puzzles,” I said.

“Thanks,” David said.

And when I looked back up at him, I saw my smile reflected in his eyes as he smiled along with me.

Later that night after dinner, I sat on the couch next to David while we all talked. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, and I wasn’t angry with him anymore either. I would pick up where my mother left off. I would show him that he could trust someone again.

I think the guys became surprised when David started to live up to my expectations of being a better man. As all four of us started turning the little cabin into a comfortable home, David started to plant flowers in the garden with me and help the guys with the firewood and even took a few hikes with them in the mountains. After a time, Michael even turned the small, spare room into a bedroom for David. It started to feel like we were all making a life here together and that David was more like my brother and less like my half-brother. I even caught Adam playing chess with him one night and instead of getting mad when David beat him at the game, Adam laughed at the clever checkmate and gave David a brotherly pat on the shoulder.

“Your mother would be really proud of you,” Adam told me one night as we were standing outside together and looking up at the stars.

It was well into the late summer months now and soon it would be autumn again.

“I think she would be proud of David,” I said as I looked at the vast sky above us.

“I’m sure she would be, but I think she would be the proudest of you,” he said. “If I remember right, there was something your mother used to always say to the runaways at the shelter. She used to tell them that resilience was the key to affecting change. Even though she’s gone, you finished what she started. That was the best way to avenge her death and honor her life, if you ask me.”

And for the first time in what felt like years, the tears I shed as he held me against his side were tears of happiness.

Finally, it felt like the hellhole we had all dropped into was finally alleviating.

17

Now that the guys were a bit more accepting of David and less worried that he was going to attempt to kill me or create some sort of havoc, they eased up a little on their overprotectiveness.

They were still super watchful, but less suspicious and overbearing. I was able to get out of bed and go out to read by the fireplace in the morning without needing all three of them to escort me everywhere inside the house. It was a nice sense of balance and family that we had created.

When I crawled over their still-sleeping bodies in the morning, I went out to make coffee and then to see if David was awake yet. He had been working on a surprise in the garden the day before and I was anxious to see what it was. He wasn’t in his bedroom when I went to go check, which meant that he was probably already in the garden waiting for me to come out so that he could show me what he’d been working on.

The garden had become almost as special to us as our time building puzzles. We had long chats among the plants and flowers and there was something about getting your hands dirty in the soil that appealed to both of us. It was a sort of “grounding with nature” thing which I think made us both feel tethered a bit.

I went back to the kitchen to finish making the coffee before I headed out to the garden. When it was done, I poured us both a cup and went outside to see what surprise awaited.

The surprise that met me there sent both of the coffee cups crashing to the ground and my blood-curdling scream hurling through the mountainside.

Within an instant, all three men were at my side looking at the same sight that I had hoped to never again see in my lifetime.

There, lying face-down in the soft, dark dirt of the garden, was David with a suicide note tucked perfectly between the fingers of his right hand.

No, no, no….

I couldn’t do this again, not again.

Michael bent down and put his fingers to David’s neck. He didn’t need to say anything, though. I already knew that David was dead. He pulled the piece of paper out from David’s hand and read it.

Sorry.

The single word was all that was written on the paper. It was happening again...

“He didn’t kill himself,” I said as I started to cry.

Adam wrapped an arm around me and held me as I watched Rob help Michael gently turn David’s body over on the ground. The knife that David had held in his hand, the one that he had set down in the garden when I first decided to offer him a chance, was protruding out of his chest and the dirt was stained by his spilled blood.

Then, Michael looked up at Adam and then spoke the words I already knew to be true. “Lisette is right, he didn’t kill himself.”

“How do you know?” Adam asked.

Michael stood and sighed. “I can just tell. Look at the way the knife is positioned. He would have had to have been holding it upside-down.”

I knelt down beside David’s body on the ground and wondered what the chances were of having two family members lost to fake suicides. I bet the odds stacked against that happening were astronomical. I held his cold hand for a moment and closed my eyes. He had just been starting to live the life he was supposed to have.

But when I opened my eyes again, something caught my eye.

There was a hair stuck in the blood that was sticking to the handle of the knife. I reached my fingers to it and pulled as a long, golden-blonde hair lifted off. I held the hair tightly between my pressed fingers in the air in front of my face. It had to be at least two feet long.

And none of us had hair like that.

We buried David’s body on the side of the mountain, and I laid some of the flowers from the garden on top of his grave. It was strange to me that I didn’t cry more and for longer, but then I realized that I had cried so much already in my life that it was likely there were no tears left to shed. Instead, I was angry at the way David’s chance to be better in his life was cut short and angry that all of my work of forgiveness and resilience had been for nothing.

“Who could have done this?” Adam asked as we sat around together. “I mean I know there were plenty of enemies that David had, but who could have found him here and done this without us even knowing?”

“Do you think that whoever killed David is still here in the mountains with us?” Rob asked.

He reached for his gun that was lying on the table and tucked it into the waist of his pants.

“I don’t know,” Michael said with a shrug. “Possibly.”

A shrug. As if this were a natural phenomenon for us.

It would have made me sick if I already didn’t live my life with a sickened stomach at all times.

“No,” I said with a fair amount of certainty in my voice. “But, I think I know who this belongs to.”

I remembered the bloodied blonde hair that I had found and remembered seeing that same kind of hair before. The beautiful girl from the Lineage Winter Gala masquerade party had that hair. The girl that had been on David’s arm for the entire night.

Then, I knew what we had to do. “We need to go back to Lineage.”

“What?” Michael looked shocked. “You can’t be serious. Go back? To the place that we spent years trying to escape from?”

I looked up at him. “We were trying to escape from my father, and from David, and from the past… none of that is there now. Now it’s just a school.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Michael said.

He was stressed, and I heard the high level of tension in his voice.