Zayne POVIn the evening, the three of us were sitting in the living room while Ava was in her room, sleeping.Irish was reading something on his phone, Steve was staring at the ceiling, looking miserable, and I was trying to figure out our next move.“How did it go with Rebecca?” I asked Steve quietly, making sure Ava couldn’t hear us from upstairs.Steve shook his head. “Terrible. I told her I was in a relationship and just wanted to be friends. She got upset and left. I don’t think she’ll be talking to me again anytime soon.”“So we’re back to having no leads,
Steve POVIt was Saturday morning, and I didn't want to go on a date with Rebecca. But I knew that I had to keep my promise. I was inside my room getting dressed when the door suddenly burst open and Ava entered.I froze with my shirt halfway over my head. This was the last thing I needed right now. Ava and I still weren’t on good terms, and seeing me getting dressed up early in the morning was going to raise questions I couldn’t answer.“What are you up to, dressing early in the morning?” Ava asked, looking at me with suspicion. “Are you going outside?”I was lost for words. Ava had not forgiven me yet, and she was still angry about everything that had happened. If I told her now that I was going on a date with another person, it would be like adding petrol to the fire. The thought of her reaction made my stomach turn.So I could only stand there and watch while Ava asked me questions. I wanted to lie, to come up with some excuse that would satisfy her curiosity, but nothing came to
Ava;s POVI watched as the three of them walked away from my room, their footsteps heavy on the stairs. That’s exactly what I meant by them changing. If this were before, if this were the old them, they would have stayed with me. They would have sat on my bed, held my hands, and refused to leave until we worked everything out together. They would have kept talking, kept trying, kept pushing until we found a solution.But now? Now they just walked away when I told them to leave me alone. They gave up so easily, like they were relieved to have an excuse to go.I shifted off the thought, trying not to let it hurt as much as it did. There was no point in dwelling on how different they were acting. I needed to focus on taking care of myself since they clearly weren’t going to do it anymore.I went to my bathroom and turned on the cold water, letting it run until it was freezing. The shock of the cold water against my skin felt good, like it was washing away all the confusion and anger from
Irish and I looked at Steve, waiting for him to give a further explanation of what had just happened with Ava.Steve shook his head, looking just as lost as we felt. “I’m sure as hell that Ava was beside me the whole night,” he said firmly. “She never left the bed. She was sleeping right next to me when we went to sleep.” The three of us tried to gather everything together, piecing through what Ava had said and what we knew to be true. I could feel the frustration building in my chest as I tried to make sense of the conflicting information. Ava was accusing us of abandoning her to go to a party, but Steve had been with her that night. It didn’t add up.Then suddenly something switched in my head, I stood up with realization. “Wait,” I said, looking at both my brothers. “Maybe the person who told Ava that we went to the party did not specify which day we went to the party.”Irish and Steve both looked at me with interest, waiting for me to continue.“Because it sure as hell wasn’t the
The house felt different now that Caleb was gone. We sat in the living room, Irish and Steve were playing games on the console while I pressed my phone, but none of us were really focused on what we were doing.Caleb had taken his own life. After everything we put him through in that forest, after all the questions and the pain we inflicted trying to get answers about Marcus, he had gone home and ended it all. The police said they found a letter in his room confessing to killing Marcus out of jealousy, then taking his own life because he couldn’t live with the guilt.I kept replaying that night in my mind. The way Caleb had looked at us with those frightened eyes when we cornered him in his house. How he’d trembled when we dragged him into the forest. The way he’d refused to speak, no matter how much we hurt him. Had he been planning it even then? Had we pushed him over the edge he was already standing on?Irish threw down his controller with more force than necessary. “I can’t concen
Zayne’s POV The next day, I woke up with my hands still sore from the night before. After all our attempts to make Caleb talk, he had refused to even lift his lips to say anything. We had punished him, tormented him, threatened him, but he just kept quiet like his life depended on staying silent.Eventually, we got to a stage where we were just fed up and decided to leave him in the forest and come back home. We were worried that Ava would be awake and looking for us, wondering where we had gone in the middle of the night. But when we got home, Ava was still fast asleep in her room, completely unaware that we had even left.I rubbed my knuckles, feeling the ache from hitting Caleb so many times. Part of me felt bad about what we had done, but another part of me was frustrated that we still didn’t have any answers. We were no closer to understanding what was happening to us or who was behind all the strange events.I stood up from my bed and went to take a bath, trying to wash away th