Page 119 of Sinners Reunion

She shuts her mouth and pulls her knees to her chest. “I’m not being a twat. You’re just taking a lot of fucking words to get to the end of your story.”

“You’re right. I forget that you have the attention span of a flea.”

“Fuck this. So much for helping me understand your side of things.” She stands from the bed and tries to get around me, but I grab her hand and pull her into my lap.

When she fights out of my grasp, I jump to my feet and haul her back to the bed by her waist. I toss her onto the mattress and pin her wrists above her head as I hover over her. I mean to tell the rest of this, and I mean for her to bloody well listen.

“When Jim learned who and what I was, he asked me to do what he couldn’t. He wanted me to kill his family, so I did. In turn, he reaped an inheritance that we’ve turned into even more money, but before we made money, we ran more experiments. One such experiment was a new fertility drug. Am I speaking quickly enough?”

She starts to fight, bucking against my chest. “Do you guys have a fucking breeding fetish or something? Fuck!”

“It’s not what you’re thinking! Stop jumping to bloody conclusions. We didn’t make them more fertile without their consent. We weren’t running an alien breeding encampment or whatever the fuck Quinn writes these days. We didn’t do anything without their consent. They reached out to Jim!”

She goes still beneath me.

“Four women reached out to Jim, to be exact. The first was from the bureau. As thanks for killing his family, Jim bought my position in the FBI. But one of the women on the inside wanted something in return as well. Something more than money could buy. She was lonely and wanted a child, but she was infertile and single. We presented her with a proposition. She could have the baby in exchange for joining an experiment. She was given the terms, complete with the fact that the semen would be from a notorious serial killer.”

“You mean, you didn’t⁠—”

“I did not impregnate her naturally. Not any of them.”

For the first time, her shoulders relax. And as I go down the line and explain each circumstance, the spines poking at me from all angles begin to retract. After learning about Frankie’s mother, she learns of Ezra’s—a kind woman who desperately wanted a child. The same for Bennett’s mother. All women with fertility issues who only wanted to love something more than themselves.

“What about Aven’s family? You kind of ruined them.”

My chest tightens. Maybe I have a third regret after all.

“Aven’s mother was a special circumstance. She didn’t need the fertility drugs, only the semen, since she suspected her husband was infertile. As we’d gone to school together and had been good friends, I agreed to help her. She understood the risks, but it didn’t play out in her favor. The little Scottish tyrant turned out a little too much like me, and without me to step in and warn him of where he was headed, he trudged headlong into misery. My poor boy.”

Josie puts her face in her palms. After grinding her fingertips into her forehead, she pulls her hands away. “None of this makes any sense. Frankie’s mom treated her like shit. Why did she so desperately want a child if she only planned to torture it? And she thought she was in love with you. Most of them did. Why didn’t they remember the experiment you claim they agreed to?”

This is it. This is the part I’m not so sure she can get past.

“For the same reason you don’t remember anything about being rescued from the water that night.” I look away from her, unable to look at her face when I next speak. “Not all of our experiments were good. As part of Jim’s contract with my initial handlers in the bureau, we worked on government projects. An early project could rewrite or smudge small sections of human memory. Unfortunately, the rewrites sometimes formed false connections, which created exaggerated beliefs, which only further supported the subsequent delusions.”

“Layman’s terms?”

“They were given a memory of how the child was conceived. A memory they chose, mind you. Frankie’s mother wanted to believe she’d fallen for a serial killer. It was meant to be a joke on her psyche. Well, her psyche played one right back and split into pieces. That’s how we learned that rewrites could go horribly wrong.”

“Are you still flashy-thinging people?”

I roll my eyes. “No, Agent J. That project was dismantled as soon as we realized, but the damage was done. We couldn’t reverse the stories we’d sewn in place. The smudges were safer, such as blotting Ezra’s memories of his time with me in Dover. That’s what was done to the Carter siblings. And you as well.”

“That’s disgusting, King. I didn’t consent to that.”

“You’re right to believe they didn’t. But you, Josie? You did consent.” I pull a cell phone from my pocket. It doesn’t have service, but Jim loaded some necessary files onto it for me. I pull one of them up and hit play, then sit beside her on the mattress.

“That’s me.” Josie snatches the phone from my hands. “How did I ever think I was fat back then?”

“Listen,” I tell her.

She quiets as she hears her younger self consent to having a memory wipe as part of the suicide experiment. She consents again when she’s told she also won’t recall the meeting where she agrees to have memories wiped. It would interfere with the accuracy of the final result.

She hands the phone back to me when the video ends.

“I can show you the mothers’ videos as well. We recorded everything. We might have been murderers, Josie, but we never wanted to hurt anyone.” I try to take her hand in mine, but she pulls it away. “We’ve destroyed the technology for the memory wipes. We don’t even do the smudges anymore.”

“You never should have to begin with.”