Page 64 of What Comes Around

Deep down, I had always known it wasn’t some stranger. It was either Marissa or Brandon. It had to be. There was no universe where my mother’s murder was random. Not with the way things were left in that house.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand, stood up, and dialed my father.

He answered on the second ring. “Ashley?”

“Did you know?”

A pause. “Know what?”

“They arrested her.”

“Who?”

My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Marissa. They arrested her this morning. They have DNA. It matches the bite mark on Mom’s arm.”

Silence stretched across the line.

Then a broken exhale. “Oh God… I’ve been at work since early morning. I had to go in because there were problems in the company. I didn’t know.”

“You know this is your fault,” I said quietly. “Mom is dead because of you. You let a snake into our lives.”

“Ashley, please…”

“What does it feel like,” I cut in, “to realize you’ve been living with Mom’s murderer for years? That you married her. Slept next to her. Built a life with her.”

He made a sound I had never heard from him before. A choked, ugly sob.

I didn’t stop.

“Did you know she was related to my mother?”

“What? No. That can’t be true.”

“Well it is. DNA doesn’t lie. She was her half-sister.”

“She never told—”

“You know she did something to Elena too,” I cut in again. “You know it. Now Evan has to grow up without a mother. Just like I did.”

Brandon broke. I could hear it through the phone, raw sobs tearing out of him, the kind that came from somewhere deep and hollowed out.

Then his breathing hitched and I heard the faint scrape of a chair.

“I… I need to go home,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “Evan will be home from school soon. He…”

His voice cracked on the last word.

Then the line went dead.

For a moment I just stood there, staring at my phone, listening to the silence he left behind. A man unraveling on the other end of the line, and nothing left in his house except the consequences he had built for himself.

And while Brandon was finally facing the truth, Apple was doing the exact opposite.

She was still pretending she could come back from all of it, as if there was any coming back from that high school graduation exposé video resurfacing.

Apple posted a response video where she claimed everything was fake, that it had been “proven fake years ago,” back when the clip first surfaced at her own party.

Then she went further and accused me directly. Said I was evil and out to get her, that I had always hated her.