Chapter 66 - The Husband I Buried

Now

Elena

I used to believe in rules.

If you told the truth, if you were patient, if you waited your turn, the world would eventually right itself. My sister believed that, too.

Hannah was the kind of person who said hello to strangers, believing that the rules, the laws that were in place, kept the world safe enough to trust in.

When Hannah disappeared, I still believed. When they found her three weeks later – dumped, degraded, treated like she was disposable – I believed harder. I thought if I held that belief long enough, someone would figure out who did this and put them away.

The police had a suspect within days.

He was charming. Educated. The kind of man who looked like you could trust him.

The kind of man Hannah would have said hello to on the street without a second thought. He had unexplained scratches on his arms, a story that didn’t quite add up and a lawyer who looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine.

Mackenzie Morgan.

I didn’t know her name then. I just remember watching her stand when it was her turn, smooth as glass, calm. As if this were an intellectual exercise instead of the dissection of my family. She didn’t look at Hannah’s photos for long. Didn’t linger on the crime scene images. She focused on process. On what couldn’t be proven. On what might have been mishandled.

She didn’t say he was innocent.

She didn’t have to.

She suggested it.

She took the worst thing that had ever happened to my family and broke it down into a questionable series of events, while my mother tried to cry quietly enough that no one would stare. When I walked into the courtroom, she only glanced over for a minute. But she was kind. She smiled. She seemed empathetic. That was the cruelest part. Then, she picked apart Hannah’s anxiety. Her medication. Her tendency toward recklessness when she wasn’t well. She made it sound clinical. Concerned. As if she were helping me understand my own sister better. By the end, I wasn’t sure anyone believed Hannah was a victim of this man, as much as she was a lost soul inviting trouble.

The verdict came quickly.

Not guilty.

I remember the sound I made. Something animal. Something that surprised even me.

The man who killed my sister hugged his family. Smiled. Walked out into the daylight and stretched his arms behind his head, like he was just waking up.

Mackenzie packed her bag neatly. Didn’t look back.

Somehow, I was supposed to believe that was justice.

They told me the system worked the way it was supposed to, that Hannah would want me to move on.

That’s when something inside me split.

At first, it was just anger. Directionless and loud. I drank. I didn’t sleep. I replayed the trial in my head until the words lost their meaning.

Then came the clarity.

If the system could be used like that, then morality wasn’t real. Only leverage was.

That’s when I stopped asking why and started asking how. I ran away, and found the Institute soon after. Or maybe it found me. I don’t remember which. They’re good at making inevitability feel like a choice. They took me in and gave me a new name. Made me one of their own. They didn’t know who I used to be. They said it didn’t matter.

I was starving when I arrived on the doorstep of the Institute. Luis walked right up to me and invited me to eat dinner with them. I went in to figure out why Hannah had to die, what she’d done to deserve it.

I didn’t understand that Hannah was the price my mother paid for failing to choose.

I stayed with them and learned what I could, but I never spoke about her. They didn’t tell me to let go of my anger. They told me to listen to it. They said the Shadow wasn’t something to be cured – it was something to be honored. That the part of me capable of destruction was the same part capable of truth. They taught me that I didn’t have to accept her death.

And I believed them, because the alternative was believing my sister died for nothing.

The institute was where I met Brad. In the beginning, he was kind. Funny. Charming.

But then the monster started to creep in. When he raised his voice. When he got upset or angry. When he lost his temper with me.

That last time, he was drunk. Staggering home. ‘Look at you,’ he’d said, tugging at my mousy brown hair and laughing. I left it natural at home. The only place I could be myself, or what was left of it. I liked the earthiness of my skin when I wasn’t wearing makeup. The natural spray of freckles across my nose. Subtle, but a mark unique to me. Something I didn’t need to erase.

Rebecca was a name I borrowed from my sister. Hannah Rebecca Lyon. I hadn’t used my own name in a long time. It felt like that name belonged to someone else, a version of me that had been swallowed by the world a long time ago, like a shoe I’d outgrown. At the Institute, I went by the name they gave me. Elena.

Now I knew. Brad reminded me of the man in the courtroom. The man who got away with murdering Hannah.

So when he’d lain down to sleep that night, I’d encircled him in flames. There was no escape. He was too drunk to even get up, and when he did stir, he was already burning.

I’d strapped the tiny vial of blood to my arm as I left. Luis Tyndale’s blood. When I moved, it moved with me, leaking just enough that he might’ve opened up an old wound, or nicked his arm on something. Planting a seed.

Why Luis? Because Mackenzie Morgan owed her name on a plaque at her law office to him. Because she loved him, even though he didn’t deserve to be loved.

He was just as guilty as she was.

I requested Mackenzie to represent me because I knew if she could help Silas get away with what he’d done, maybe she could help me too. They were all so wrapped up in themselves that they didn’t notice the persona I wore. They didn’t realize I’d stopped being the Elena they wanted me to be.

Mackenzie hadn’t even recognized me as the girl sitting at the back of the courtroom, quietly waiting to find out what would happen to her sister’s killer. I had been just a girl then.

The man in the car had to die for what he’d done to my sister.

I had watched her defend him.

Hannah didn’t get a chance to tell her side, and I never forgave Mackenzie, or Silas, for keeping her voice silent.

I had waited long enough to make amends.

I wouldn’t wait any longer.