“What about what happened at Simon’s apartment?” My next stab was neither slow nor gentle, hitting quick and hard into his bare shoulder.

“Well, I don’t know your side of it, but Simon and Chelsea declined to press charges. Apparently Simon is saying he stabbed himself, though no one is believing that. I think the detectives are more focused on pinning the attempted murder charge on them right now, and will deal with you later.”

Surprising. Christmas has come early for psychopaths this year. I glance toward the windows and wish that I had asked Lily to open them. “Can I ask you a favor, Mike?”

“Anything.”

“I need a new ID. And a credit card attached to it. How long would that take?”

“I’ve got those I made for you back in the day. There’s nothing wrong with them; they’ve been collecting dust waiting for some excitement.”

“What are the names?” I reach for the ice water and come up short. I scramble for the bed control and lift myself closer.

“Damn you are picky.” His voice drops away for a moment. “Just a second, let me pull them out.” I can hear movement and picture him walking through the house. “By the way, are you gonna want your stash back?”

I succeed, the edge of my fingers dragging the cup closer, until I can wrap my hand around it and bring it to my mouth. My stash? I think of the knives, all carefully picked out during late-night fantasies, the sadistic thoughts that pushed me to each and every purchase. My guns, some of them with sins already to their credit. “No. Not right now.”

“Good.” He huffs out a breath. “’Cause they’re in a place that’s a bitch to get to. Okay, let’s see… I got a Mindy, a Whitney, and a Marisol.”

I wait, because surely he has something else. “And…”

“And… what?”

“That’s it?”

“God you are high maintenance. Who needs more than three backup aliases?”

“The names suck.” I huff out my own breath and set down the water. “What real-life individual is named Marisol?”

“You don’t have to go by Marisol, you can go by…”

“Mary?” I finish. “I’m twenty-three, Mike.”

“Actually, you’re twenty-six on this batch of IDs.”

I grunt out a laugh. “You are worthless. Not that I’m complaining, mind you, I just want to put that in as a side note.”

“Pick one. Mindy or Whitney, since you hate Marisol.”

“Whitney. Can you overnight it to me?”

“Yeah. Are you running?”

I smooth a hand over the blanket. “I can’t go back, Mike.”

“It’s only a few weeks, Deanna. Jail isn’t so bad.”

Says a man who has never been. “Just send it, please.”

“Anything, babe. You know that.”

We say our good-byes, and I hang up the phone.

“I can’t go back, Mike.”

“It’s only a few weeks, Deanna. Jail isn’t so bad.”

I hadn’t been talking about jail. I’d been talking about my life.

CHAPTER 91

Present

THERE WAS A time in my life, a very short one, when I thought that my sickness might be a gift. At that time, I had just saved a little girl’s life and killed a very bad man. I thought that maybe all of the self-imprisonment and urge suppression had been building up to some greater purpose. I had driven back to my apartment with peace in my soul, and had closed the door and returned to my life with warmth in my heart.

But then, the cold came back. And the two people closest to me in the world suffered. And so I closed further off. Removed any element of freedom, scaled down more, plucked away temptation points until there was just Jeremy and me and Jess Reilly. That layer of sequestration didn’t stop anything. Jeremy still, for all intents and purposes, died. Because of me. Because of my ridiculous systems and connections and the world I built with a thousand sharp edges and safety nets with predesigned holes, because, let’s face it, I like to fall out.

Jeremy is the first man I have ever loved. But our love is a safety net riddled with holes.

I love him because he looks at me like I am normal. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know the whole of my depravity. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know that the reason my box spring was missing was because I used it to carry out a dead body. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know that I once chopped off a man’s finger and mailed it to Mike as a cute little joke. He looks at me like I am normal because he doesn’t know that I killed my own mother and then drove back to my grandparents’ house.

I love him because he has shown me a life outside of 6E. He took me on a first date where I tried not to stab him. He drove me to buy a car and I came home and called my shrink. He gave me a taste of freedom in outside foods, outside experiences, in the scent of fresh air, in the rumble of fireworks, in the sound of I love you. I became a freedom addict and he was my pusher. I loved seeing him because every moment included one more push for more more more Deanna and I yielded to him and ripped my fragile world open wider and wider.

I love him because in our relationship, I see a normal future. I cried in his bed and thought about the possibility of more fuckin’ bacon. About a life where I might forget my old memories and make new ones. About a life where we watch cartoons and go for walks and he pulls me to him and laughs into my neck then makes love to me on the floor of our house. I picked up a photo on his mantel of him and his niece and thought about having his child. I love him for a future that can’t exist, that isn’t possible because fuck all the other roadblocks, I am not normal. And staying with him will mean a hundred more lies to myself, omissions of thought, excuses of self, a house of cards built to justify an existence that will never be.

I love him for a hundred reasons that are paper thin, an illusion I’ve created and he’s bought into. He is my finest Jess Reilly moment and he has no idea. He is my knight in shining armor made of tinfoil. I cannot be rescued; there is no Happily Ever After because, at the end of all this, Cinderella isn’t allowed to kill the prince.

I should have, from the beginning, run from him. Run from anyone. I can’t take back that mistake. But I can, right now, end the madness.

This isn’t about whether it’s true love. It’s about whether the love is true. And it’s not. My love for him is selfish and wishful. His love for me is pure and naïve. He may never wake up. But if he does, I won’t be here to break any other pieces of him. He doesn’t deserve that, not anymore. I’ve been too unfair to him as it is.

And right now, I’m going to give him the only thing that he does deserve.

The truth.

I unfold my letter to him and read it one last time. It’s my third draft of the letter. The problem with confessing all of your sins is that you try, for some perverse self-preservation, to paint yourself in a good light. I did that with the first few drafts. I was ending things, confessing my sins, but I was trying to retain his love, trying to justify my actions. It was great for me, I was practically beaming with pride by the end of it, but it was useless for the purpose I was trying to accomplish. So I sat back down and wrote a fourth, then a fifth draft. This one is as close to perfect as I can do. And by perfect, I mean ugly and real. He will not love me by the final word but he will know me. And that is what he deserves, to really know the girl that he, at one point in his life, loved. And I can only hope that one day, that is all he will think of me as. The girl who passed through his life. The girl he loved, then got over. The girl who was a pain in the ass until the day when she wasn’t. The girl who lied more than she told the truth. The girl with the brown hair and all the webcams. The girl in 6E.