Chapter 40

I took the notes from William's room with me to the coffee shop on Monday after our usual early morning yoga session. Already I was becoming stronger, more flexible. I purchased several matching sets of workout clothes that I'd seen Jill wear on her Instagram posts that I'd never been able to afford before I had access to William's credit card. I looked good, like one of those fitness people. The other women in class continued to watch William and me, but I was beginning to enjoy their eyes on me. Yes, I have sex with an accused serial killer, I hoped my body said with every pose.

"I'm off to work on my novel," I told William before I left.

I got a croissant with my latte even though William and I had already eaten breakfast, my anxiety about money already dissipating like a snake shedding its old skin. I took my usual table by the window and carefully took out the notes. I wished I had the white gloves of an archivist.

That math test was so hard,the first note began. I studied so much and I'm sure that I failed it. I swear that Mr.Seager wants us to fail. The questions looked nothing like what was in the study guide.

There was no response from William. Presumably the sender of the notes kept his responses; perhaps they were even stored in a childhood desk somewhere. It was like listening to a single side of a phone call. I could tell from the handwriting that they were written by a girl. It was popular girl script, letters that were cute and looping.

Did you know that Samantha has a crush on Tommy? Don't tell him. She would kill me if she knew that I told you. She wants him to ask her to prom. Do you think that he will?

The notes were a disappointment, not even good gossip by high school standards. It was a reminder that other people are fundamentally boring. I didn't care who liked whom decades prior. I wanted to know about William and any signs that he showed of being a potential serial killer as a teen. Occasionally, the note writer delved into emotional confessions.

I can't wait to get out of here,she wrote. I want to go to college somewhere in California. Somewhere as far away as possible where I don't know anyone.

Mostly, though, she recounted the things that happened in school, the small dramas of each day, and her anxieties about schoolwork. She was hyperbolic, claiming that she had failed nearly everything, only to come back and report straight As. There was no clear romantic connection between her and William, but I presumed that at least one of them was interested in the other due to the longevity of their correspondence. There was a single reference to violence.

I heard about the fight. I don't think it's fair that they suspended you.You're not even going to get this until you get back, the note said, confirming my suspicion that they were passing them back and forth during the school day.

Other than that, the only piece of information I was able to glean from the notes was the writer's name.

Sometimes I think to myself, god Gracie, you're so dumb.

I tried to remember if I'd ever heard William mention someone named Gracie and came up empty. I spent the rest of the morning refreshing the forum until I exhausted all possible content and went home to watch television for the rest of the afternoon, making sure to clean up before William came home and found me sprawled across the couch.

My investigation stalled after that. I kept waiting for something to happen, but there was little news on the forum and I was certain that I'd searched every corner of the home that I shared with William. Every once in a while, I checked the box in William's desk and found it undisturbed. If the objects truly were mementos of murder, they weren't ones that William liked to look at often. I was eager to get back into the Thompson estate, but William had told me that he saw enough of his family at the law firm and would rather spend his free time as just the two of us.

In lieu of material proof, I hoped that William would reveal something in his actions.

He came home from a run one day with his clothes bloodied.

"Are you okay?" I asked, though I already knew that he wasn't the one that was hurt.

"Yeah," he said through panted breath. "I found an injured dog and I stayed with it until the shelter could come pick her up. Thankfully, they said that it's just a surface wound and that she's going to be all right."

The story was suspicious, but sure enough, the following week a dog showed up on the "Adopt Me" page that matched the description of the one that William had found.

Another time, I walked into the kitchen to find several bags' worth of equipment from a home improvement store including tarps, bricks, and a variety of tools. I wondered if William was building some sort of murder cave or planned to brick me inside of our home like the villain in an Edgar Allan Poe story.

I spent hours strategizing how to best broach the question of whether my fiancé planned to encase me in brick, only for William to excitedly announce that he planned on building a pizza oven in the backyard. After an afternoon of enthusiastic progress, the supplies were abandoned in the grass, never to be lifted again.

I thought for sure William's dark side broke through when he pulled out a pair of handcuffs one night during foreplay. I prepped myself to die, an emotional state that had lost some of its vigor after doing it so many times—my body crying "Wolf!" only for the wolf to reveal itself to be a man who enjoyed performing cunnilingus. This time, I insisted, waiting for my pulse to quicken. This time he's really a murderous beast.

"What's this?" I asked.

"I want to try something new," he said and secured me to the bedpost.

"Be right back," he said and disappeared from the bedroom.

In the forty seconds that I waited for him to return, I contemplated all the ways that he might be planning to kill me. There would be strangulation involved, certainly, but I knew from the forensic testimony that whoever killed those women liked to take their time. Before I could make any headway in my halfhearted attempts to escape from the handcuffs, William returned with a can of whipped cream. He smiled deviously.

"I thought we could use a little treat," he said.

I hoped that I was able to properly hide my disappointment.

Other days, he was simply in a bad mood for reasons that I suspected were related to his family.

"It's hard working with my father and brother," he told me over dinner one night. "I was determined never to work for my family. I wanted to make my own way in the world, and here I am, working for them."

He repeatedly brought up his mother's comments about my lack of an engagement ring. He stared at my naked fingers.

"Just wait," he said.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that the ring wasn't the real issue that Cindy had with our engagement. It was because she could smell it on me, the stench of being one of those women, like I was a body already starting to rot even as I was still alive.

"I'm so excited," I told him.

While I waited for him to kill me, William and I settled into a rhythm.

We went to yoga every morning and ate wholesome meals for dinner that included every food group. On Saturdays, we went to the farmer's market and purchased fresh cut flowers to brighten up our home. We took selfies that I wasn't allowed to post online because it was a security risk. William lived with the knowledge that there was always going to be someone out there who thought he should've been found guilty and wanted him dead because of it, and he didn't want me to have to share that risk. What I failed to mention was that the forum had already figured out who I was and spent an entire day in a flurry, posting whatever pictures they could find of me, critiquing every facet of my being, and suggesting that maybe I was the one who killed Kelsey Jenkins before moving on to their next topic of conversation. What the forum didn't know was that I was sitting there reading every word they said about me, chiming in with a couple of quips of my own about my crooked bottom teeth and cheap clothes. Even as their insults wounded me, I felt haughty in my invisibility, pausing only briefly to consider that if I was an anonymous member of the forum, there was no telling the actual identity of the other users. At least in that space, I was able to acknowledge the engagement publicly even if they hated me for it.

I thirsted for the attention I would receive if I posted a photo of William and me together. I wanted the people who didn't know who he was to see his handsomeness. I wanted friends from former lives to search my name and say, "Oh my god, Hannah is dating that guy who was acquitted for serial murder" and tell everyone they knew about it. Because I couldn't post a picture that revealed his identity, I made a point of posting a photo of our fingers intertwined suggestively.

Meghan and Carole were the only people who seemed to take notice.

Are you dating someone??? I can't wait to hear all about it at my wedding!!!Meghan said, texting me for the first time in weeks. My coupledom seemed to reopen possibilities in our friendship that were previously closed.

Carole left me a voicemail that said, "Hannah, I saw the picture you posted online. Please tell me you're not with that man."

I responded to Meghan and said, Yes!!! I imagined taking a weekend trip with William to Minneapolis to attend Meghan's wedding. We could book a suite instead of staying at my parents' house and I would parade him in front of all my friends while they whispered amongst themselves about William's identity.

I didn't reply to Carole. I didn't want to hear her disapproval. I couldn't even assure her of William's innocence because I wasn't totally convinced myself.

Still without a ring, William and I started planning our wedding, settling on a local art gallery as the perfect place. We both agreed that a small ceremony was best.

"My parents can make anything a circus," William said.

I made an invite list in my head that included my parents, my two cousins, my aunts and uncles, and a series of question marks next to Meghan's name. I considered inviting Dotty and Lauren and ultimately kept them off the list when I couldn't decide if it was weird to have other women who harbored obsessions over my fiancé at our wedding ceremony. As far as I knew, neither of them had heard about the engagement. Every time I considered texting them, my gut filled with a mixture of guilt and satisfaction that I was the one, me, who had successfully persuaded William to settle down, and I ultimately decided that it was better if they didn't know.

We picked a date nine months in the future, an amount of time that William described as "soon" and I took as evidence that William wasn't going to try to kill me before then.

We set a wedding date,I wrote in the "innocent" column of my notebook.

While William was at work, I either spent my time binge-watching trash reality television or at the coffee shop where I scrolled the forum and played games of solitaire.

"How is your novel going?" William asked occasionally.

"Great," I always responded, though I still had the same two sentences that I'd had since the first day I started writing.

"I hope you'll let me read it someday," he replied.

"Yes, absolutely. When it's ready."

The forum grew dejected. Not only were there no leads on who killed Kelsey Jenkins, but the truth about what had happened to the original four girls was still unknown. Even as users swore they were committed to finding the killer, conversation lapsed into talking about our favorite true-crime documentaries and books. Things that were already documented were so much more satisfying than things in action because they already had a resolution, or if they didn't, the lack of resolution had become a thing of lore, like the Black Dahlia. William resided in an uncomfortable murky area.

"If only he would commit another murder so we would have more evidence to work with," one user joked.

"Don't say that," said another. "These are real people we're talking about."

The day that everything changed, I was eating avocado toast and drinking a caramel latte while eavesdropping on the Bible study group sitting next to me.

"This passage really spoke to me," a girl said. "I realized that the reason Brett broke up with me is that he sensed we're not meant to be together. We're not soulmates."

I lazily refreshed the forum, more out of habit than anything else. Someone had posted a picture from the bar where Kelsey worked and I started to scroll by when I noticed a bowl of matchbooks sitting on the bar behind her. I zoomed in and though it was blurry, the image on the front looked familiar. I got out my phone and flipped through pictures of the gourmet meals that William had cooked, a cute dog I'd met on a walk, and an embarrassing number of selfies, until finally I reached the pictures that I'd taken of the contents of the box hidden in William's desk from the very first week we moved in together.

"Holy shit," I said loudly, and the entire Bible study table turned to look at me.

The matchbook was identical to the ones in the picture.

I didn't know how to make sense of it. What I'd just discovered seemed to imply something impossible, something that certain users on the forum had been claiming since it happened: that William, from his jail cell, had somehow played a role in the murder of Kelsey Jenkins.