I am smarter than Simon. I suspect I’m smarter than Chelsea. I am definitely, at this moment in time, more awake, prepared, and motivated than either of them. I walk down a hall I’ve lived on for a thousand days yet walked down less than fifty times. Pass my door and eye the new lock. Go down two more doors and stop before Simon’s. The last time I knocked on his door, I had almost killed someone. I had been a barely contained mess of emotions. Funny how, this time, I am falling apart in a thousand different ways. The madness in me, it is pushing, stretching, filling my body down new and unique paths, my skin growing accustomed to its heat, its darkness. I reach up my hand to knock, and realize, it hovering in the air, that it is not trembling. I frown, unfolding my fist and rolling it over, looking at it for a moment. I am in control. I am here, with instruments to kill, a plan of attack in place, and I am in control. Is this the madness, my hereditary push toward the darkness? Or is it just me, is this the person I am becoming, a person with full faculties and awareness of the actions she is about to take? That thought, that realization… I step away from Simon’s door for a moment and take a deep breath. Right now, my world breaking apart at the seams… I can’t do what I need to do and be in control. In control means responsible. Responsible means that, if I go batshit crazy and everyone inside dies, that I, Deanna Madden, in full control of her actions, was responsible. Not the demon inside, not the loss of control. I close my eyes and search for the deep, scary part of myself, the part that I’ve run from so often. I search for it, I find it, and I dive into the cool pool of its depths. I push further, imagining my kills, the thirst I had had, the feeling I had gotten, the high I had experienced. I plunge into the past, make it my present, and inhale the sexy stench of evil.

When I open my eyes, I am the girl I never wanted to be but have been for a long time. I am the madness, the demon, the insanity. I step forward with purpose and pound my fist on the door.

CHAPTER 83

Present

ALL IS NOT lost; it will be fine. There was a rebleed, but he’ll come out again. Lily knows it. She stands in the doorway and watches the nurses work. Everyone quiet, the monitor behaving. The doctor left a few minutes ago but said he’d be back. This is a good sign, he’d said. His brain is tired, he said. We’ll give him some time to recoup, then pull back the drugs in a few days. See what happens. See what happens. Like it was Olivia’s softball practice and they weren’t sure if it would be rained out. She doesn’t like the doctor. He fidgets and doesn’t ask her name and doesn’t look her in the eye. Like he doesn’t want to connect with someone who might get hurt. She told him, what Jeremy said, those five little words that brought everything crashing down. He blinked down at his phone and then took Jeremy’s pulse.

It’s not fair, that he came to life for a few minutes and uttered only five words. Even more unfair that every single one of them were about her. The girl that, just hours earlier, Lily had been cursing to an early grave. She had literally spent all of last night planning out and practicing the speech she would give jurors, the stories she would tell about Jeremy, and the final dramatic moment when she would gasp back a tear, point toward the bitch and scream, She took it from him! She took everything from him! before collapsing into an inconsolable mess, right there, on the stand. It had played out very nicely in her head, a potent nail that would push every juror to decide, in their final deliberations, to send Deanna Madden to Death Row. That, Lily Ortiz had decided, was her rightful punishment.

Granted, she hadn’t always thought that. She had actually believed in her innocence. Had scoffed a little at the detective’s questions about Jeremy’s girlfriend. Yes, Deanna seemed weird. Antisocial. Yes, Lily had been irritated and put off by Jeremy’s resistance to introduce them. But why would his girlfriend try to kill him? Jeremy wasn’t the type to piss off a girlfriend. If anything, he’d always been too nice, too forgiving, too willing to overlook a flaw or two. So she had pushed that option from her mind. But then the girl had confessed and everything, in that quick line of news, had changed in Lily’s mind. A dark, venomous hate had grown in her gut and eaten every bit of compassion and understanding in her heart. She had sat in that hospital room¸ stared at his still form, and begun to hate Deanna Madden with a black madness previously reserved for any person who would think of harming her child.

I love you, she had sobbed to Jeremy.

Deanna, he had responded.

She’s in jail, she had said.

Simon. It was Simon.

Who the F is Simon? Not one of his friends, no one he worked with… She digs deep and comes up blank. She turns away, toward the hall, and takes a few steps, then stops, leaning her back against the wall. She cups her hands around the cell phone and unlocks the screen. Stares for a long moment at the home display, the time changing as she watches it, one more minute lost forever, one more minute she will never get back.

Simon. It was Simon.

Slowly, she scrolls down the call log, her finger hovering over the number of the detective, their last chat a couple of days ago, when Deanna Madden had confessed.

Simon. It was Simon.

Who was to say that Jeremy was coherent? That he even knew what was going on? That he even remembered what had happened? Who knew if Simon was a real person or just a figment created by a morphine-high brain? Why should she listen to him?

Simon. It was Simon.

He’d only managed five words during his journey to the surface. It only makes sense that she should listen to what he said, damn the validity. She presses on the number and lifts the phone to her ear. Hears the ring and worries, for a moment, about waking the woman.

When Brenda answers, there is the rush of road noise in the background, and Lily breaths a sigh of relief.

“Detective Boles? This is Lily Ortiz, Jeremy Pacer’s sister.”

“Lily, we’re headed to you now, we’re about twenty minutes away.” She says something to someone else, a muffled conversation occurring out of Lily’s earshot.

“There’s no point in coming.” Her voice cracks and she swallows hard, forcing her vocal cords into submission. “I mean… he’s back asleep. He probably won’t talk again for another twelve hours or so.”

“Oh.” The disappointment in that one word is clear and pronounced.

“But he did say something. Right before he fell back asleep.” Asleep, that’s all it was. The heavy medication, his injuries… he was asleep. Asleep with his eyes open, that’s the part she can’t erase from her mind. That’s the scene that, if this doesn’t end well, she will never ever forget.

“Yes?”

She squeezes a chunk of hair in her fist, her nails biting into the pad of her palm. “He said it wasn’t Deanna. That it was someone named Simon. Do you know who he could be talking about?”

There is a long pause, the hum of background noise the only thing verifying their connection. “Simon?” the woman says warily. “That’s what he said? Are you sure?”

A stupid question but she’d asked the nurses a hundred of them that day alone. Will he be okay? Is he thirsty? Will he wake up? Is that medicine helping? “Yes.” She says shortly. “I am a hundred percent sure. He said the name twice.”