“Hey, have you seen Adam?” the girl that I had met previously asked when she saw me walk by her doorway. “He’s been gone for a while now and we were supposed to make dinner all together last night.”

“What do you mean gone?” I asked.

“I mean he hasn’t been here, in the halfway house, not for like two days. No one has seen him.”

I looked at Michael and we both knew that something was wrong. Adam wouldn’t just disappear on these kids. He was much too dedicated to them and to this halfway house to simply up and leave without any sort of an explanation.

And suddenly, I wondered if the increasing amount of notes were apologizing for Adam’s disappearance.

22

We looked everywhere on campus for Adam. Michael tried to call and text him a million times, and so did me and Rob, but Adam’s phone just kept going right to voicemail as if it had been shut off. I was starting to panic, and Michael looked as if he were too.

There was more damage on the campus too, mostly pertaining to the new projects that we had created since I took over as Headmistress. The stargazing observatory on the top of the auditorium had been trashed. The telescopes appeared to have been thrown from the roof and were in shattered pieces on the ground below. The glass dome had a hammer taken to it and there were holes punctured all throughout the entire dome.

And the floor where the constellations had been painted was covered in more of the same red painted words that all said “sorry”.

Rob went knocking on dormitories to ask the students if they had seen or heard anything unusual and if anyone had seen Adam recently, but no one had. And as more time passed, I grew more worried that Adam’s body would turn up lifeless.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

I didn’t care about any of the rest of it. Not the garden or the college. Not the students or the notes. Not the halfway house or the planetarium or any of the other fucking projects I had used to get my mind off the tumultuous hell my life had become.

The only thing I gave a shit about was finding Adam.

There wasn’t any other place for us to search on campus that we hadn’t already checked, though, so we went back to the apartment to think about what to do next. Rob suggested canvassing the surrounding area, Michael thought maybe we should drive back to Asheville to see if Adam had gone back to the cottage, but none of us could think of any reason that this was happening. It wasn’t like before when we knew where the danger was coming from. This time we had no idea. Anyone that had been tied to my father’s illegal operations or David’s takeover of the schools and city, had been either arrested or had completely fled the area. And even then, there wasn’t any reason for any of those people to want to come after us now. None of it made any sense and the only thing I could think of now was how I should have never insisted that we come back to this place at all.

We should have stayed in Asheville and never left.

But when we got up to the apartment and opened the door, my eyes fell immediately on Adam lying in the middle of the floor.

“Oh my god, Adam!” I screamed as I ran up to him and dropped down beside him on my knees.

He was face-down and shirtless on the floor and had numerous cuts on his back. Michael carefully turned him over and Rob checked his pulse.

“Adam, please,” I said with tears in my eyes, “say something. Anything.”

If he was dead—or if he died because of this—I’d never forgive myself.

Adam groaned when Michael moved him, however, and relief rushed through my veins. Aside from all of the cuts, there was nothing else wrong with him, it seemed. But the cuts were atrocious enough. It looked like someone had used a small, sharp blade to carve the single, haunting word into his flesh over and over until it covered his back, chest, and arms with the word “sorry” spelled out in his own blood.

“Jesus Christ,” Michael hissed.

“Come on. Help me get him up,” I commanded.

We helped lift Adam up onto the couch and Rob went to get some antiseptic and bandages to cover up all of the words that stared back at me. I gingerly tried to hold him without hurting his skin.

“Who did this to you?” Michael asked.

“I don’t know,” Adam said weakly.

Rob came back and handed Adam a glass of water which he guzzled down. He was super thirsty, which I remembered from the masquerade party was a sign of having been drugged.

Holy shit, is that drug still out in this world?

Then, Adam cleared his throat. “I was in the halfway house painting, and then something hit me in the back of the head. Next thing I remembered was waking up on the floor a few minutes before you guys got here, covered in all these painful cuts. Aren’t you guys supposed to be in Asheville?”

“What day was it when you were painting?” Michael asked as Adam took another giant swig of water.

“Friday. Why? What day is it now?”

“Adam, it’s Monday evening,” I said.

While Rob and Michael made some more calls and asked around to see if anyone could help with information, I sat with Adam on the couch and the two of us tried to figure out what the importance was behind the word. After a bunch of aspirin and water, he was starting to feel better and his thoughts were clearer.

“Okay,” he said as we tried to start coming up with any viable ideas as to what this message meant. “The note in David’s hand said sorry, but we know that he didn’t kill himself and now that he’s dead, he couldn’t be the one doing all of this. So, I don’t think the apology was coming from him, do you?”

“No, I don’t think so either,” I said as I shook my head.

“Is there anyone who would have wanted to apologize to David?” he asked.

Michael snickered. “I can’t think of anybody. I mean, most people kind of hated David.”

I puffed out my cheeks with a sigh. “True.”

Then, Adam looked up at me. “The message seems like it’s targeting you, Lisette. You were the first one to see it in David’s hand, you were the first one to see it here on campus in the garden and then pretty much everywhere you look. Now it’s appearing on the projects you’ve made here on campus to honor your loved ones. And then finally it’s on me, another way to get at something or someone that you care about.”

Adam was right, the message was completely targeting me.

“Who would want to apologize to you?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I have no idea. But if they’re trying to apologize, this is a really messed-up and twisted way to do it, by destroying and harming things that I love.”

“Yeah, good point,” Adam agreed.

Michael stood slowly to his feet. “Wait, what if someone thinks that you owe them an apology? Maybe they’re sending you this message to try to get you to apologize to them.”

I started feeling tears well in my eyes. “But I don’t even know what I’m supposed to apologize for,” I said as I held them back. “I don’t even know what I’ve done wrong.”

“Shh,” Adam said as he reached his arms around me and pulled my head up against his chest. “You haven’t done anything wrong. We’ll figure this out, don’t worry.”

But I was worried. I was so worried that I stayed awake all night sitting on the couch by Adam as he slept. Someone had hit him over the head, drugged him, and taken him to carve marks in his body for three days, and none of us had the first clue why. I watched Michael pace back and forth in front of the apartment window. I couldn’t tell if he was watching the perimeter outside or simply trying to think and pace; maybe both. He didn’t sleep at all that night either.

“Maybe the four of us should just leave and go back to Asheville right now,” I whispered to Michael so that I didn’t wake Adam up. “Just like we did before, just get the hell out.”

“I don’t think that’s going to work this time,” he said.