The Things We Couldn't Forget

Chapter 39.

"Oh my god." My fingers shake so hard I drop both the wallet and the phone to the ground.

Aries is there in a second, wrapping his arms around me and squeezing me tightly as the whole world around me once again shatters into a billion tiny pieces like the snow falling all around.

"I'm so sorry, Missy." He breathes into my hair. "I'm so fucking sorry."

He rubs his hands up and down my back as I scream and cry into his chest.

Dallas?

How could it possibly be Dallas?

But how could it not be?

He's my fucking brother, my family, my own flesh and blood betraying me all over again. He made it all happen once again.

I knew Dallas took what our father had done hard. How could a person not? But this? This was so wrong on so many levels.

Maybe the Jacobs men are all tortured souls. The bad blood running from one generation down to the next in a succession of evil doings to ease the monsters deep inside of them.

Again, I'm left asking myself how I could be so blind? How did I not see it?

Why?

Why?

Why?

How could Dallas do this to me, knowing what I'd already been through? How could he kill innocent girls and destroy their family's hearts and lives so viciously?

I know my brother. He isn't cruel or dark or twisted like someone who could do this has to be. He was a good person, a good son, a good brother. He never talked bad about anyone, was always a friend, was so smart and kind.

How had he turned into this without my even having an inkling of what he'd one day be capable of doing?

It just all makes no sense but perfectly fits at the same time.

Aries couldn't have possibly been driving that truck the night it watched Amie and I. I know that with absolute certainty. And if Aries wasn't the one stalking her, then it was someone else.

Now here is the truck, and Dallas's wallet tucked inside. A monster's collection of keepsakes from his victims in the shed. Amie's car stashed away in the house that both Dallas and I knew so well.

He'd been here.

He'd come back to this town to send it right back into the era of fear and desperation. He came back to this awful house and did terrible things and then lied so easily right to my face.

Had the police not have seen him at my house, and the detectives not decided to stay, he'd still be out here. Collecting, torturing, hiding...killing.

"I don't...I don't...how?" I cry, my brain working tirelessly to make it make sense. To wrap around the idea that Dallas is the one we've been looking for all along.

Dallas, sitting on my back porch standing guard from a threat he knew wasn't coming.

"I don't know what to say." Aries admits. "I don't know how to make this better, Missy." His heart beat slams against my cheek and I find myself trying to balance myself by counting the steady thump thump thump.

"I can't go through this again." I continue to weep. I know how this plays out. I've done this sick dance before. How they'll drag him away in handcuffs and I'll have to watch and hear the stories the media will tell. The tv specials that will bombard my life, two serial killers in the same family.