The interrogation room hadn’t changed. It still smelled of pine cleaner and stale aggression, a chemical cocktail designed to make you feel small and guilty. The only difference was that this time, the door wasn’t locked, and I wasn’t wearing handcuffs.
I sat in the metal chair, wrapped in a gray wool blanket that smelled like the back of an ambulance. My hands were wrapped around a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee that a rookie deputy had brought me with wide, terrified eyes.
I wasn’t a suspect anymore. I was a survivor. And in Oakhaven, that made me something closer to a ghost than a citizen.
The one-way mirror to my left was a dark, reflective slab. I caught a glimpse of myself—hair matted with mud and rain, a bruise blooming purple along my jawline where I had hit the floor of the sawmill, eyes that looked like two burnt holes in a sheet of paper. I looked like something Elias would have put in his shrine.
The door opened.
Sheriff Miller walked in. He looked older than he had yesterday. The swagger was gone, replaced by a slump in his shoulders that spoke of paperwork and liability lawsuits. He wasn’t wearing his hat. He carried a file folder and a digital recorder, setting them down on the table with a heavy sigh.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the wall, at the table, at his own hands. Anywhere but my face.
“Ms. Vance,” he said. His voice was gravelly, stripped of the bluster he used to wear like armor.
“Sheriff,” I replied. My voice was flat. I had used up all my screaming in the woods.
He pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down. The metal legs screeched against the linoleum, a harsh sound that made me flinch. He noticed, and for a second, a flicker of shame crossed his face.
“We need a statement,” he said. “For the record. The state police are here. The FBI is on their way from Seattle. I need… I need to know what happened in that mill.”
I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like ash.
“You know what happened,” I said. “You saw the body.”
“I saw the aftermath,” he corrected. “I need the narrative.”
He pushed the recorder toward me. The little red light blinked. An unblinking eye.
“Start from when you escaped custody,” he said.
“I didn’t escape,” I said calmly. “I was released by an officer who knew you were making a mistake.”
Miller’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue. He knew if he pushed that point, he’d have to explain why he ignored the evidence about the clay, the shoes, and the missing boy.
“Fine,” he grunted. “Start from the woods.”
I told him. I told him about the trail markers—the twisted saplings that only a child would recognize. I told him about the root cellar, the shrine, the photos of me plastered to the plastic walls. I told him about the confrontation in the dark, the chase, and the final stand at the sawmill.
I spoke with the detachment of a reporter filing a story about a stranger. The subject approached. The subject brandished a weapon. The subject fell.
It was a survival mechanism. If I turned it into a story, it couldn’t hurt me. If I made Elias a character, he wasn’t the boy who had shared his candy bar with me.
Miller listened in silence. He took notes, his pen scratching frantically across the paper. When I got to the part about the “Wedding,” about the bodies arranged in the pews, he stopped writing. He put the pen down and rubbed his face with both hands.
“Jesus,” he whispered. “He really thought…”
“He thought he was saving them,” I said. “He thought he was saving me.”
“He was a monster,” Miller said, his tone defensive, trying to put the world back into black and white boxes.
“He was a boy you left in the river,” I countered.
The silence that followed was heavy. The hum of the HVAC system seemed to grow louder, filling the space between us.
I reached into the pocket of my coat—still damp, still smelling of the mill—and pulled out the composition notebook.
It was swollen with moisture, the cardboard cover warping. I placed it on the table between us.
“Here,” I said.
Miller stared at it. “What is this?”
“The motive,” I said. “The confession. The history of Oakhaven that you tried to bury.”
He reached out and touched the book. He opened it to a random page. I knew the handwriting he would see—the jagged, angry marker strokes of a man losing his mind.
“Read it,” I said.
He read. I watched his eyes move back and forth. I watched the color drain from his face as he read about the “Bad Prince” and the “Dragon.” I watched him realize that the killer hadn’t just been lurking in the woods; he had been reacting to us. To the town. To the investigation.
He turned the page.
“He… he watched us,” Miller murmured. “He watched the station.”
“He watched everything,” I said. “He knew when you arrested Julian. He knew when I came back. He thought it was a signal.”
Miller closed the book. He didn’t push it back to me. He pulled it toward his side of the table, treating it like a piece of radioactive material.
“This corroborates your story,” he said. “The details about the crime scenes… the tea party… only the killer would know this.”
“And me,” I said. “Because I was the source material.”
Miller looked at me then. Really looked at me. The suspicion was gone, replaced by something that looked like pity. I hated it. I preferred the suspicion. Suspicion I could fight. Pity just felt like being covered in warm mud.
“Elara,” he started, then cleared his throat. “Ms. Vance. The charges against you… the escape, the theft of the vehicle… they’re being dropped. Obviously. Under the circumstances of extreme duress and… necessity.”
“And Julian?” I asked.
Miller winced. The name was a sore spot. A reminder of his own incompetence.
“Detective Thorne is currently at the hospital getting his leg set,” Miller said stiffly. “The internal affairs review has been… suspended. Given that his actions, while technically illegal, likely prevented a mass casualty event and led to the neutralization of the threat.”
“He saved my life,” I said. “He saved this town.”
“Yeah,” Miller grunted. “He did.”
He leaned back in his chair, the springs groaning. He looked small. The authority he wore like a badge had been stripped away by the truth in that notebook.
“We didn’t know,” he said softly. “Twenty years ago. The shoe… it looked real. We searched the banks. We didn’t think a kid could survive that storm.”
“You didn’t want him to survive,” I said. “It was easier if he was gone. It was cleaner.”
Miller didn’t deny it. He couldn’t. The truth was sitting right there on the table, written in crayon and blood.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
It was a small sentence. Two words. But they hung in the air, heavy and inadequate.
“Sorry doesn’t fix the wall,” I said, standing up. The blanket fell from my shoulders, pooling around the chair. I felt cold without it, but I needed to stand. I needed to be vertical.
“Am I free to go?”
Miller nodded. “Yes. We’ll need you available for further questions from the FBI, but… yes. You can go.”
I walked to the door. My legs felt hollow, like they were made of glass tubes filled with nothing but air.
“Ms. Vance?”
I paused, my hand on the knob.
“What are you going to write?” he asked. “About this?”
I looked back at him. He wasn’t asking as a Sheriff concerned about the case. He was asking as a man concerned about his legacy. He was wondering if I was going to burn Oakhaven to the ground with my words.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “The truth, I guess.”
“The truth is ugly,” he warned.
“The truth is all we have left.”
I opened the door and walked out.
The bullpen was quiet. Heads turned as I passed—deputies, state troopers, clerks. They watched me with a mixture of awe and fear. I was the girl who walked into the woods and came back. I was the girl who killed the Sandman.
I didn’t make eye contact. I just kept walking, following the scuffed linoleum path toward the exit.
I pushed through the glass doors and stepped out into the morning.
The rain had stopped. The sky was a bruised purple, lightening to gray in the east. The air was cold and clean, smelling of wet pavement and exhaust.
I took a deep breath, expecting relief. Expecting the weight to lift off my chest.
But it didn’t.
I felt empty. Scraped out.
I was legally free. The monster was dead. The mystery was solved.
But as I looked out at the town—at the storefronts waking up, at the mist clinging to the surrounding hills—I realized that the game wasn’t something you won. It was just something you survived.
Elias was gone. But he had left his fingerprints all over my mind, just like he had on the plastic cup.
I walked down the steps of the station. I didn’t have a car; Julian’s truck was still at the mill, probably being processed for evidence. I didn’t have a home; the Glass House was a crime scene.
I stood on the sidewalk, shivering in the dawn chill.
“It’s over,” I whispered to myself, testing the words.
They sounded like a lie.
Because in the silence of the morning, I could still hear the echo of the mill collapsing. I could still see the look in Elias’s eyes as he fell.
And I knew, with a terrifying clarity, that while I had cleared my name, I would never clear my conscience.