By her twentieth birthday, there are a few things Valarie Ricci knows for certain.
She knows that her waitressing job barely covers the costs of living out of a beat up old van. She knows she's stuck in the dead end hometown her high school friends...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Alice and Valarie and Grace walked for a long time in silence. Alice, crossing her arms against her chest like armour, and Valarie in a half daze, imagining the sight of blood on an old rug, the wet crack of a fractured skull, and Theo watching as Grace took an hour to die.
The longer they walked, the more guilty Valarie began to feel at how easy it was to visualize Theo losing her temper like that. It made terrible sense. Valarie knew better than anyone that Theo was not harmless, that she could be cruel in countless little ways without batting an eye. But this wasn't cruelty. This was violence.
She took an hour to die.
Valarie shivered, tugged her coat tighter around her body.
She ran through everything Theo said over and over, trying to make it sink in. Her mind kept wandering, seeking out alternate paths. If Theo had crossed the street to knock on Valarie's door instead of stealing the car that night. If Grace's Mom had taken her back in. If Jared had gone home for Christmas that year. If they'd never left Valentine in the first place. If Theo never injured her wrist, if she let it heal properly and had gone away for school. If, if, if...
She couldn't grasp how avoidable the whole thing was, how it didn't have to happen, and yet there was nothing anyone could do to change it. Her brain worked at unspooling the thread of events as if there was a knot somewhere that she could undo and everything would be fixed.
Aside from the guilt and sadness, the main thing that struck her was the waste of it all. She wasn't built like Theo. She couldn't ever view a person as nothing more than garbage. Grace was dead, gone, thrown away like trash, and Theo and Jared had ruined their own lives for nothing. For absolutely nothing.
She remembered Alice's hope for finding Grace's body, and Alice struggling to articulate that I just want her to be safe again.
They'd failed. There was never any chance at finding Grace. It was–
Valarie bumped into Alice, who had halted in her tracks. They were standing in a park bustling with people and dogs and squirrels. She blinked the sun out of her eyes, which was doing nothing to combat the chill in the air. It took her a moment to realize Alice was looking around for something, a hand raised over her face to shield her eyes from the brightness.
"I think..." Alice twisted around, looking over her shoulder. "It's over here." She stalked off towards a line of benches that encircled a huge statue of some royal-looking guy on a horse.
Valarie hadn't realized Alice was walking with any particular direction in mind. She continued to follow. Alice stopped in front of a wiry bench that looked like the ones Valarie recognized in pictures of Central Park. Grace stood beside her. "This is it," Alice said.
Valarie read the inscription etched into a silver plaque.
