Chapter 182: New England

Chapter 182: New England
Del's apartment was on the second floor of a house that had been divided sometime in the nineties, which suited her fine. The ceilings were low, and the kitchen window looked out onto the back of another building rather than anything scenic. She'd chosen it because it was cheap and quiet and nobody in this town knew her face yet.
Three months since Texas. Three months since she'd driven north.
The place still didn't fully feel like hers. She'd put up one thing on the wall—a small print of a botanical illustration she'd found in a secondhand shop. The rest of the walls were bare. She kept meaning to do something about that.
She'd started sketching again. Nothing finished—just pages of starts, lines that went somewhere interesting and then stopped, hands and windows, and the view from the kitchen. Her sketchbook was always open on the table.
The mornings were the best part. The town woke up slowly and quietly, and Del woke up with it, made coffee in the small kitchen with the window that looked at nothing, and sat at the table with the sketchbook open and the radio.
That morning, she had the television on instead of the radio, which she didn't usually do. She'd turned it on for background noise while she moved around the kitchen and then left it when she sat down because changing it required getting up again.
She was on her second cup of coffee and working on a loose sketch of the window frame when the program that had been on shifted. The music changed.
She looked up.
The title card read: The Many Faces of Liam Cole.
Del set her pencil down.
The reporter was a woman, and she said his name—Oliver Clarke, born Liam Cole. And monster was not a word she used to describe Oliver, but her tone did it.
The documentary moved through the aliases first. Names and dates and photographs: a timeline assembled from the investigation over the past several months.
Del watched it with both hands around her mug. She knew most of this. She'd lived the investigation from a specific angle that the documentary didn't have access to.
Then the footage started.
Not crime scene footage. Not evidence. The reporter explained that investigators had collected video material from multiple sources over the course of the investigation—phone recordings, social media clips, and footage submitted by people who had known Oliver Clarke or any version of him and had come forward after the story broke.
The first clip was from a party. Someone’s apartment, dim and crowded, the camera shaky in the way of phones held by people who weren’t really trying to record anything properly.
Oliver was in the background at first, half-turned toward someone, drink in hand.
"— No, but that's the thing, you can't just apologize for it after,” he was saying. “You can't unring a bell, man, you just have to live with the fact that you recommended that movie and now everyone in this room has seen it, and we're all worse off —"
Laughter from someone off camera. The person next to Oliver said something Del couldn't make out.
More laughter. Oliver's head went back slightly with his own, the way it did when something genuinely got him, and his whole face opened up with it. Del had seen that laugh. She knew the difference between that one and the others.
The camera had caught the real one without him knowing it was being caught.
He looked completely normal.
He looked like someone's friend at a party. He looked like the most approachable person in the room, the one you'd gravitate toward because he made things lighter just by being in them.
The next clip was longer. Someone had been recording a group conversation — five or six people around a table at what looked like a work event.
Oliver was at the end of the table, and he was the one talking.
"Okay, but genuinely, hypothetically—" he was saying, leaning forward and pointing at someone across from him—"if you had to survive a week in the wilderness with one person from this office, and I'm including myself as an option, who are you picking and why?"
Someone said something that made him shake his head.
"Wrong answer. Sandra would absolutely leave you for dead on day two. I've seen how she handles the printer jam situation, and that is not a woman who shares resources under pressure—"
"Sandra has a crush on you, actually," someone said.
The table immediately reacted — a few people laughing, someone making a noise, the camera wobbling slightly because whoever was holding it was also teasing him.
Oliver sat up slightly. "What?"
"She does. Everyone knows."
"That's —" He shook his head, looking genuinely caught off guard. "That's not — no. She's never —"
"She brought you soup," someone said. "When you had that cold last month."
"That's just a nice thing to do."
Oliver glanced around the table. Everyone was watching him now, a little too interested, like they’d finally found the one thing that might actually make him uncomfortable. He let out a small breath and dragged a hand through his hair.
The reporter's voice continued over the footage. The aliases, the victims. The confirmed deaths. The investigation was still ongoing in several jurisdictions. Del listened to it run underneath the images of him laughing and walking and existing in other people's recordings.
She watched a clip of him talking to someone at what looked like a barbecue, outdoors, in the summer, gesturing with a bottle of something in one hand. The person he was talking to was nodding and laughing.
Oliver was charming. Right up until the end of the clip, he was just genuinely, naturally charming.
Del picked up her coffee cup and found it was empty and set it back down.
Del didn't feel vindicated. That wasn't the right shape for what she felt. Vindicated implied she'd been waiting for something to be confirmed, and she didn't need confirmation. She'd been there. She knew what she knew.
What she felt was more like the full size of it, landing all at once. Everything she'd been through, the whole shape of it, was hitting her in the way that things sometimes hit you when you finally had enough distance to see them properly.
She felt lighter just due to the fact of having made it. The fact that she was the one sitting here and he was the one being documented. The fact that she was still herself.
Del got up and crossed to the window on the far wall and worked the latch, which always stuck slightly in the cold, and pushed it open.
The air came in immediately. She stood there and just breathed it in.
She didn't know what came next. She had rough ideas, loose directions, things she was vaguely moving toward rather than definite plans. She didn't know exactly what that looked like. But she was going to find out.

— Fin —