Page 102 of The Engagement Party

He sounded so unsure. “Mitch?”

He smiled. “But I hope you don’t.”

She just stared at him because...what?

He wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “I’m not as clueless as everyone thinks. I know what I want and hope you’ll let me earn the right to be with you.”

Oh...“Really?”

He winked at her. “Really.”

Before she could decide if she should grab him for their first real kiss ever, a man in a dark suit approached them. “Excuse me. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Sierra stiffened when she recognized the visitor as one of the detectives working on the twisty mess of cases the engagement weekend had dumped on them all. Before she could rush to Mitch’s defense—for what, she didn’t know, but she was programmed to react as far as he was concerned—the detective started talking again.

“I was hoping the two of you could tell me what you know about Ruthie Simmons. Do you have a contact number or any photos? I have descriptions from the officers and others who were at the hospital and saw her, but she managed to avoid the hospital cameras and took off before she could be questioned at the hospital.”

“Almost nothing. We don’t know her.” Sierra had never said a more truthful statement in her life. “She was best friends with Emily growing up, so someone in Emily’s family or in her hometown might know.”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. She wasn’t Emily’s friend. No one there has ever heard of her. The Ruthie Simmons name, no variation of it, appears in any school yearbook with Emily. No one remembers this Ruthie person. And I’ve talked with Emily’s best friend from back then. She’s a professor at Amherst. Her name is Leesa, not Ruthie.”

“But...” Sierra couldn’t think of anything else to say. None of that made sense.

The detective shrugged. “Related to that, what do you know about Dylan Richter?”

Mitch dropped his arm from around her shoulders and held her hand instead. “He’s dead.”

That was right...right? Panic raced through Sierra.That guy... alive?“Didn’t you find his body?”

“We fished a man out of the water. That wasn’t Dylan Richter. Dylan Richter is a woman.”

Chapter Seventy-One

Book Notes: The Painful Truth

This project started as a way to clarify what happened that night twelve years ago. When Emily’s life intersected with Brendan’s, his loss got added to the pile. The public dragged him into the center of the messy aftermath and labeled him as a young man to fear.

As the truth spills out and the real story blows wide, slipping into new podcasts, documentaries, and true crime shows, a clear vision will emerge. One of innocence, lies, and deadly mistakes. One of a tragedy that claimed lives over decades. A killing on a college campus that ended on an island in ways no one could have foreseen.

These book notes. Stray thoughts on slips of paper. Notebooks filled with thoughts for a possible future book. Ideas never meant to be seen and now they wouldn’t be because the book can’t be written, at least not in this form or with this author. The story won’t end with a triumphant public reveal. All those plans died when a man dressed as a police officer showed up uninvited to a party on an island and pretended to be Dylan Richter.

His real name was Vince. A smart and at one time well-intentioned guy deep in grief for the sister killed by a boyfriend at college years ago. One of thousands of individuals out there broken by grief and looking for a way to feel whole again.

His sister’s murder sharpened his focus and gave him a purpose. It changed the course of his life. A computer genius who morphed into a guy who spent years on forums, searching down clues, and desperate to solve cold cases and help people because he hadn’t been able to help his sister. His initial goal was to give answers to family members like him who were reeling from loss... but that changed.

An inheritance gave him financial freedom. All those hours stoking his anger stole his life.

His computer skills and experience made him invaluable, but his dedication made him easy to manipulate. All those hours together spent spinning tales of revenge. With every interview and medical record review and all those long talks about theories over dinner, his obsession, guilt, and fury coalesced into a driving need to inflict damage. He became a warrior for justice. His form of justice.

The real Dylan Richter used him. Worse, she’d accidentally weaponized him. She’d taken his skills and his determination and bent both to serve her ends.

I know because “she” is me.

The problem with obsession is it can backfire. Vince became uncontrollable. Dangerous. Cutting him off had been a risk. It fueled a sort of demented anger that couldn’t be suppressed. He acted before all the answers had been collected. He’d been snooping and never disclosed that. He wasn’t supposed to know about the planned island weekend for fear he’d attack, and that fear turned out to be valid.

Killing Tyler? A total surprise and unrelated to any plan. In some ways, a red herring.

By the time he showed up on the island, VincewasDylan... or acted as if he thought he was. He merged the details of his life and his pain with what he knew about Dylan’s. He played the role to perfection, adopting Dylan’s life, skills, accomplishments, fortune, and anger over Brendan’s death and the failure to be heard.

Dylan wasn’t supposed to be on the island. The goal was to gather intel and write an exposé. Finally unveil Brendan’s killer and see the killer or killers locked up then step into the spotlight and sayI told you so,like I’d been wanting to do ever since I gave a statement to the police all those years ago.

Vince, by pretending to be Dylan, ruined that. There could only be one Dylan—the real one. But admitting who I really am now, after pretending to be Ruthie, would shine a different kind of spotlight on me. Thanks to Vince, I lacked credibility. I couldn’t argue that I didn’t know what Vince had planned. I watched Vince play the role of Dylan and said nothing. I let the Bowdoin group assume Brendan’s gamer friend and cousin was a boy, which meant I now had to be someone else. I had to let someone else tell Brendan’s story.

The only solace? I’d been desperate to avenge Brendan. Over time, the need for justice shifted to a palpable need to punish those who deserved to be punished. And now they have been.