I knew how easily a story could shift. How quickly the public could turn. I'd seen it happen, twenty years earlier. A game sliding into a crime. A tradition twisting into a nightmare.
I watched as an arc slowly emerged from the series of headlines and police bulletins, until the story had a shape, the truth a sharp end point.
Structure Fire at Perimeter of Wyatt College Burns Through Night
Two Local Men Deceased in Steam Tunnels Under Campus
Police Seek Public's Assistance in Locating Missing Student, Adalyn Vale
Person of Interest Named in Fire Deaths of Two Men
Wanted for questioning: Adalyn Vale
Wanted for murder: Adalyn Vale
In the days that followed, I'd felt a shift happening inside of me, too.
Confusion. She'd been my roommate for nearly four years—had been my closest friend in those earliest years of adulthood.
Denial. Thinking that the witnesses were mistaken. That she hadn’t meant to do it. It must’ve been an accident—flames in the wind, catching and spreading.
Anger. Because she had fled without a word. And in her absence, I was the only one left to answer for her.
And finally: Fear.
Fear that she’d done exactly what they claimed and I hadn’t known her at all.
Fear because the police thought I was protecting her. And now they kept coming back to me.
For the moment, nothing outside moved. Not the tall grass lining the highway, encroaching on the edges of the asphalt; not the haze in the sky, hovering over the mountains; and not the sinuous curve of brake lights disappearing into the landscape in front of us.
Only Delilah fidgeting in the seat beside me, checking the time on her phone yet again.
“We’re going to be late,” she said, her leg bouncing from either nerves or excitement. With her, sometimes, it was hard to tell. She was a theater kid, functioning at all extremes, with conviction. But the nuances were harder to discern.
“It’s just dinner,” I said. Which was only partially true. Tonight it was dinner at my parents’ house in town. But tomorrow it was dorm move-in. It was the start of my daughter’s first semester. It was time to say goodbye.
I didn’t understand how we had gotten here so quickly. The previous eighteen years had stretched into a lifetime, and suddenly time was catapulting, leapfrogging.