Chapter 14

I sat down the morning after getting fired with the intention of updating my LinkedIn. It had been years since I last looked for a job and I wasn't sure where people found them, but I was an expert at editing social media profiles and so that seemed like a good place to start.

I got distracted by the forum as I always did. It turned out that I was the same person whether I was employed or not. Jobs weren't as linked to our identities as we made them out to be.

It was there that I saw the post asking "Is anyone else going to the trial to investigate? Would love to meet up."

Up until that point, going to the trial hadn't occurred to me as an option. It was like asking if I wanted to climb inside of a wardrobe and find my way to Narnia. William wasn't wholly real to me and the prospect of seeing him felt as though I were being offered Turkish delight—a dessert I'd never had—and considering whether it was worth giving up my entire life to eat it.

I abandoned my half-finished LinkedIn profile and started researching how long it would take to drive to Georgia. After that, I checked my account balance and grimaced. I had enough money to get there, but not enough to stay for very long. Luckily, I only had a month left on my apartment lease. If I filed for unemployment and got a new credit card, I might be able to make it work.

I called my mom and told her, "I'm going on a road trip."

"A road trip?" she asked.

I understood her confusion. I never told her when I was going anywhere. I was an adult. But I needed her to know I was leaving in case, for some reason, I never came back. The way that Anna Leigh's, Kimberly's, and Emma's families all had a final phone call to say goodbye and didn't even know it. Or maybe I wanted her to dig deeper, to ask what I was really doing, to know, implicitly, that I was up to no good.

"Yes, to Georgia."

"The state?"

"I don't think it's possible to drive to the country."

"Why?"

"I need to get away for a bit."

"And work is giving you time off?"

"Yeah," I said. It was technically true.

I hadn't told my parents that I'd been fired. I knew they would be angry on my behalf, which somehow made it worse. Surely, their brilliant daughter hadn't messed up so much as to warrant being let go. Surely, there was something that I could do to rectify things.

"I'm so glad you're finally taking a vacation, honey," my mom said.

"Me too, Mom," I replied. "I really need a break."

As much as I was grateful that she didn't ask any further questions, it wounded me that she hadn't seen through my easily provided lies. A mother should have been able to sense when her daughter was traveling across the country to see the serial killer that she was in a committed relationship with.

I started packing immediately, tearing pictures down from the walls and stuffing my clothes into the tote bags that I had somehow accrued en masse over the years that I lived in the apartment. I worried that if I stopped, left too many shirts on hangers or books on the shelf, then the plan would fall apart.

Dismantling the life I'd built in the studio apartment caused a small sadness within me. In the years that I'd lived there, I'd weathered endless maintenance problems that took too long to fix. A brief infestation of fleas when a neighbor took in a formerly feral cat. Hours of tears and hangovers and heartbreak. Still, the apartment was the first place that really belonged to me and only me. For all its faults, it was who I was.

This romanticism was disrupted by the realization that almost everything I owned was garbage. I'd never had enough money to invest in nice furniture or good clothes. The furniture that wasn't acquired secondhand was all things I'd put together myself, which resulted in a multitude of crying sessions as I did my best to decipher poorly written directions. There was a direct correlation between the price I paid for an item and how well the particle board holes lined up where they were supposed to.

I notified the rental company that I wouldn't be renewing my lease and rented a storage unit for my things until I was ready to return to my life. I was too embarrassed to ask my friends for help moving, so I drove the smaller stuff one carload at a time to the unit and asked my neighbor for help carrying my larger furniture down the stairs, leaving it all on the curb.

I got together with Meghan before I left. She was in the midst of wedding planning, which seemingly took all of her free time. She acted like agreeing to go out for drinks was a gift that she'd bestowed upon me rather than something we used to do with regularity because it was fun.

Meghan looked skinny. When we were both single, she made fun of girls who went on extreme diets before their wedding day.

"If he doesn't love you the way that you are, then why are you getting married?" she'd said and swore she wouldn't diet before her own wedding. "If that ever happens," she'd added.

The Meghan in front of me ordered a skinny margarita and told me that I could order an appetizer, but she wouldn't be eating any of it.

"How's wedding planning going?" I asked, and then regretted it as she described all of the venues she and her fiancé had toured, the cakes they had tasted, and the photographers they'd interviewed.

"I just think the idea of a winter wedding is so romantic. People really need love at that time of year, you know?" she said before finally asking how I was.

"I left the nonprofit," I said.

Her face moved through an emotional range from sad to happy and then a pretend kind of neutral.

"Finally," she said. "I know that you haven't been happy there for a long time. Do you have a new job yet?"

"No, I'm going on a trip. Taking time for me."

"That's amazing, Hannah. Where are you going? We're trying to plan our honeymoon and it's a nightmare."

"Georgia."

"Like, the state?" She looked at me quizzically.

"Yeah."

"Oh my god, oh my god," she said. "You're going to see him, aren't you?"

I smiled. I couldn't help it.

"Who's ‘him'?" I asked, though we both knew.

"That serial killer that you're always talking about. William Thompson. That's his name."

I looked at her coyly.

"Maybe," I said.

"What the fuck? Why?"

"He's not like people think," I said.

Wasn't he? I didn't know if that was true or not. I hoped the trial, if nothing else, would help me determine who William really was.

"Do you love him or something?"

She stared at me like there was a disgusting bug on my face. I couldn't bring myself to answer. To say "no" seemed like a lie and saying "yes" was unforgivable. And the word "boyfriend," as much as I coveted it, would come across as comical in that context.

"You don't," she continued before I could speak. "You don't know what love is. Why can't you just find someone normal? I work with this guy who's really nice. I can introduce you to him."

"I don't want someone who's ‘nice,'?" I replied. Nice—what a milquetoast nothing thing to be, compared to someone that was potentially a killer.

"You know that I just want you to be happy, right?"

Our eyes locked and then we both looked away.

"Yeah. I know," I replied finally.

We finished our drinks in near silence. She asked about my parents and I asked about hers. She made vague references to things that we could do together when I got back from my trip. We paid our separate bills and she hugged me tight before we walked to our cars.

"Be careful, Hannah," she said.

"I will," I promised.

I thought it was true. Even then, I couldn't imagine a universe where William would be allowed to touch me.