Chapter 172: From Now On, You're Tara

Chapter 172: From Now On, You're Tara
Nina’s POV
The safe was heavy.
I dragged it across Raymond's bedroom floor, the metal scraping against the hardwood. It was too heavy to carry on my own, so I found a rolling suitcase in his closet and wrestled the safe inside. The wheels made it manageable, but barely.
I didn't have time to think about what was inside. Not yet. Opening the safe would come later, after I was far from this blood-stained villa.
Raymond's deaf housekeeper and the bodyguard Kevin had drugged wouldn't remember Raymond being at the villa tonight. They had no idea he'd planned this quiet dinner with me. When the police eventually came, there would be no trail leading directly to me.
But to make absolutely certain I was free, I needed Nina to disappear completely from this world.
I'd thought about this for weeks, planned every detail. The solution was simple. Fake my death. And for that, I needed someone who looked enough like me to be believable.
Tara was perfect. Same height. Similar enough features. Close enough.
Yesterday, I'd called Tara and invited her to Jackson for my birthday party.
At first she sounded confused. "Why Jackson?" she asked. "Why not New York?"
"Raymond wanted to surprise me," I said smoothly. "He knows I'm from Mississippi, so he thought it would be nice to have a Southern-style celebration. Something with that hometown feel."
"That's so sweet," Tara said, her voice warming with envy. "Raymond treats you so well."
"He does," I agreed. "And honestly, I owe it all to you. If you hadn't introduced us, if you hadn't stepped aside for me, none of this would have happened."
Tara laughed on the other end of the line. "See? I told you he was worth it. I knew you'd figure it out eventually."
When I left New York with the safe and my savings from the past two years, the fear and tension that had been crushing my chest for so long started to ease. Freedom felt close enough to touch. Real. Possible.
Tara did drown. But not in some tragic accident. I drowned her myself in a hotel bathtub in Jackson.
We met at the hotel I'd booked. I told Raymond I had some work issue to handle, so the party would need to be postponed by one day. To apologize for the inconvenience, I'd already bought Tara a gift. A beautiful dress, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a ribbon.
When Tara opened the box, her eyes lit up. "This is gorgeous! You have great taste."
"I'm glad you like it," I said. "I thought you could wear it tonight. We'll go to a club first, have some fun before the party tomorrow."
She held the dress up against herself, admiring the way the fabric caught the light. She had no reason to suspect anything. Why would she? We were friends, weren't we? Or at least, that's what she believed.
I poured us both glasses of red wine. The sleeping pills dissolved quickly, invisible in the dark liquid.
"Take a nice hot bath first," I suggested. "Relax after your trip. Then we'll get dressed up and hit the town."
Tara agreed immediately. She carried her wine glass into the bathroom, already talking about which shoes would look best with the dress.
I waited. Listened to the sound of water running, the splash as she settled into the tub. Then silence.
I knocked softly on the bathroom door. "Tara? You okay in there?"
No answer. The sleeping pills had worked.
I pushed the door open. Tara was slumped in the bathtub, her head tilted back against the porcelain, eyes closed. The wine glass sat on the edge of the tub, empty.
For a moment, I hesitated. My hand hovered over her shoulder. This was the point of no return. Once I did this, there was no taking it back.
Then I remembered everything. I remembered Tara selling me to Raymond like a piece of merchandise. I remembered waking up drugged and violated in a strange bed because of her greed. I remembered how casually she'd destroyed my life for money.
I grabbed her head and pushed it under the water.
Tara's eyes flew open immediately. Her hands came up weakly, trying to push against me, but the drugs had made her movements sluggish and uncoordinated. She thrashed, but without real strength. Water splashed onto the bathroom floor.
Watching her struggle sent a strange pang through my chest. Guilt. Regret. Some fragment of the person I used to be before Raymond, before all of this.
But then I thought about what she'd done. How she'd betrayed me. How she'd handed me over to a monster and never looked back.
I held her head down until she stopped moving. Until the water went still and the bathroom fell silent except for the sound of my own ragged breathing.
After, I dressed her in the new clothes I'd bought. I wrestled her limp body into a large suitcase, the kind designed for international travel. Heavy-duty. Durable.
I drove through the night, back to Willowbend. The roads were empty. No one saw me return to my childhood town in the dark hours before dawn.
The Mississippi River was high this time of year. Rainy season. The current was strong, pulling at the banks with relentless force. I knew from reading old newspaper articles that bodies recovered from the river during catfish season were often unrecognizable. The fish did terrible things to flesh. Time and water would erase Tara's features, make identification difficult if not impossible.
I tied a rock to her ankle with river grass, heavy enough to keep her submerged until nature could do its work. Then I pushed her into the dark water and watched her sink beneath the surface.
Back at the boat where I'd grown up, the Harlan, I placed all my identification there. My driver's license. My credit cards. Everything that proved Nina Harlan existed. Let them find those things. Let them think Nina had come home one last time before something terrible happened.
From now on, I would use Tara's passport. Her identity. Her name.
To make the transformation complete, I cut my hair short. The long brown waves I'd had my whole life fell to the bathroom floor in thick clumps. Then I opened the box of blonde hair dye I'd bought and carefully followed the instructions. I watched in the mirror as my brownish hair turned golden, strand by strand.
When I was finished, I barely recognized myself. The woman staring back at me from the mirror looked harder somehow. Sharper. Like someone who'd survived things that would have broken other people.
I met my own blue eyes in the reflection and spoke the words out loud, making them real.
"From now on, you're Tara."