Chapter 13

Once the floodgates opened, all we had were feelings.

You think I'm beautiful? You must know that everyone is talking about how handsome you are,I wrote to William while I was at work.

You're indescribably beautiful,he replied. I hung your picture on my wall. I look at it at night before I go to sleep.

I think about you more than I should,I confessed.

I talk about you like you're someone that I've met in person,he said.

I showed Carole the letters. I couldn't stop myself. I needed someone else to see how much William liked me. I giggled as I did it. A fake laugh meant to make the situation sound trivial, unimportant, like it wasn't the only thing.

"You sent him your picture?" she said. Her forehead creased, an unattractive look.

"It wasn't like it was a naked picture."

"Doesn't it frighten you?"

"What?"

"That he knows what you look like."

"Why should it frighten me?"

"Because he's a killer."

"He's in jail," I replied, like jails had ever done anything to keep communities safe.

"Please be careful," she said.

It bothered me how worried she was. I didn't like the way in which it dampened my joy.

I still read the forum the way that celebrities read social media in search of their own names. Whenever I saw the words "William Thompson" my brain interjected "the man who thinks I'm beautiful" behind it, no matter what kind of atrocities followed. I still cared about Anna Leigh, Kimberly, Jill, and Emma, but in the way that I also cared about historical atrocities. Yes, their deaths mattered. Yes, I could barely remember their names when William told me things like Your words are the best part of my day.

There were still some people on the forum who argued for William's innocence or at least insisted that he hadn't acted alone. It bothered me that of all the things that William and I had discussed, his guilt was never one of them. It was always something that was implied, a starting premise that was so obvious that it didn't need addressing. Part of me wanted him to tell me that he was innocent so that I could love him without shame. Another part of me wanted him to trust me enough to tell me about every wrong he'd ever committed, secrets that could bind us together from the rest of the world.

As it stood, I knew equally as much as every other person who had been obsessively scrolling the forum for months. I hated feeling so ordinary.

I was looking at the forum when my boss approached me at my desk and asked if she could speak to me in her office. I wasn't certain how long she'd been standing behind me. Had she seen the pictures of William? Watched me as I giggled over a comment that one of the forum members made and typed out a response?

"Hannah, please sit down," my boss said when I arrived in her office. She wore pearl earrings and I wondered if they were real.

I didn't anticipate what was about to happen—as a middle-class white woman, the system typically ensured that I was successful in my pursuits. When my boss said, "We have to let you go," I thought I misheard her.

"What?" I said.

"I'm so sorry, Hannah."

I couldn't take her apology as sincere, even if it sounded like it was. Someone who was actually sorry wouldn't fire me. Someone who was actually sorry would give me another chance and then another one. They would recognize my absentmindedness, my procrastination, as a cry for help instead of a symptom of who I was.

She gave a list of reasons why they were letting me go: frequent tardiness, neglecting my duties, doing personal tasks while at work, distracting my coworkers, insubordination. I struggled to register what she said. I thought I might vomit and regretted eating a donut from the break room for breakfast.

When she finished speaking, I stayed seated in my chair.

"Hannah? Are you okay?"

I nodded numbly. I didn't want to stay inside of her office but I also didn't want to leave. I knew what happened when people were fired, how people whispered about them. A couple of years prior, someone was fired for sexual harassment and everyone knew about it. The harassment itself wasn't what got him fired; rather, it was that he tried to retaliate after the woman he harassed reported him to HR. He wrote her an email warning her to never do it again. "Learn to take a compliment," he said. It was that email, more than the constant texts and phone calls, the cornering in small rooms demanding that she go on a date with him, that got him fired. Surely, I was less bad than him. I hadn't hurt anyone. I had merely been negligent, distracted.

I imagined Carole talking about me once I was gone, if she wasn't talking about me already.

"Hannah's obsessed with this serial killer," she would say, her voice lowering to a whisper. She would say "She sent him a picture" like it was the ultimate crime.

The comments, though manifested entirely by my imagination, were hurtful. I wished I could wither away and disappear.

I left my boss's office with a cardboard box in hand. I had recently watched the entirety of the show Vampire Diaries while working on a knitting project. Aside from bloodlust and immortality, what differentiated the vampires from the humans was that they had the ability to turn their emotions off. That was what I pretended to do as I carried my box back to my desk and loaded any personal items inside. I didn't take much. A couple of coffee mugs, some pens, and Post-it notes that probably technically were company property, but I didn't care. I didn't take the time to sort through the desk drawers or riffle through the filing cabinet. I didn't say goodbye to any of my coworkers, not even Carole, whom I had been sitting next to for years. The concept of "work friends" suddenly seemed meaningless. I was made of stone, impenetrable.

On my way to the car, the box slipped out of my hands and the coffee mugs broke. It seemed symbolic in the way that all tiny tragedies seem symbolic when a larger bad thing is occurring. I left the box outside of the building.

"Let them clean it up," I muttered.

I cried in the car, big gulping sobs that were so heavy that I couldn't drive.

"I need to go home," I said out loud to myself after a few minutes. "Things will feel better at home."

I managed to stop crying long enough to make it out of the parking lot, but the tears came back each time I was stopped at a light, which made it difficult to drive. Somehow, I made it back to my building, and a new flood of tears arrived as I realized that without a job, I wouldn't be able to pay rent much longer.

"What am I going to do?" I wailed.

I contemplated the life in front of me. I would have to move home to my parents' house, admit to them all the ways in which I had failed. My résumé was short outside of my job at the nonprofit and surely, no one would want to hire me without references from the job that I'd held for almost a decade. Worse, I was sure that I would never get a date again once I was jobless and living in my childhood home. Life, it seemed, was over. All I had in front of me was misery.

Thankfully, there was a letter waiting from William like he knew that I needed him. There were kindnesses that should've been attributed to the efficiency of the postal service that I granted to William himself.

My face still hurt from weeping when I sat down on the couch to open the letter. One of the greater injustices of having a body was how much it physically hurt to be sad. I could cry one day and wake up the next morning with my face still swollen from tears.

I read William's words and suddenly, I was floating.

This might be wrong of me to say, but I can't hold it in any longer. I'm tired of being alone in this world and though I know that we cannot physically be together and for that I'm sorry, I want you to be my girlfriend. That is, if you'll have me.

It had been years since anyone had used the word "girlfriend" in reference to me. It was so taboo that I thought of it almost as a slur. I was attractive enough for men to want to sleep with me, even for months on end, but it was different for a man to express the desire for monogamy. To indicate that there was something about me that made him feel less alone.

Possibly, if the letter had come at a different time, when I hadn't just been fired and the future didn't feel like a giant black hole waiting to swallow me up, I would've spent more time considering the situation rather than reacting with elation. William, after all, came wrapped in red flags the way that the murdered women were wrapped in tarps before they were disposed of in the ravine. As it was, I couldn't make myself care. Boyfriends who were serial killers were still boyfriends. In some ways, William was better and more attentive than the men that my friends dated. He was smart, well-read, considerate. He listened to Taylor Swift and liked a house that smelled good. Most importantly, he wanted me, just me.

I wrote him back right away.

Yes, I'll be your girlfriend,I said. I hesitated before writing the next line. Like all jokes, it was also serious and I wasn't sure if that translated over paper. I decided to put it down anyway. It needed saying, like asking a man to be sure to put down the toilet seat after taking a piss.

But you have to promise not to kill me,I wrote.