Her blood.
Her body.
Her white dress.
Broken glass close to her thin fingers. A single raspberry on top of one of the shards, blending in with the blood. Her blood.
Georgia screamed again, backing away into a corner to get away from me, her eyes wide and her hand pressed to her mouth. Never had I seen Georgia so afraid.
“Ivy!” she screamed hysterically. “What did you do? Oh my God! Please! Please don’t kill me!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
GEORGIA
I have to admit it, Ivy. You were hard to track down on my own.
It took me a lot of digging to find the name of the Hills—surprisingly, not many people wrote about the wreck and two people dying; it was almost like no one cared that your parents had died except for that one conspiracy theory journalist—but fortunately, I discovered their names, and your mother had a Facebook page she didn’t keep very private.
I had done a quick search about the crash around the time I thought to make Lola rewrite my contract and discovered the couples’ name. I had no luck finding your father—I assume he was a pretty private man—but I found your mother with ease.
I discovered then that she had a fourteen-year-old daughter at the time of the crash—a daughter she was very proud of and loved with her whole heart.
She’d named you in one of her public posts, and from the moment I found your name, I knew I needed to find the real you. I knew you could help me in ways I couldn’t help myself, so long as you had the right information and so long as you were smart.
So, with the check I received from Lola every month and the money I had been saving for the baby prior to my miscarriage, I hired a private investigator. He found you in a matter of three days and filled me in on all the details about you. You were seventeen at that point.
According to him, you were a rebel. You’d gotten into many fights at school and you were bounced around from foster home to foster home. When I found you, you were living with a woman named Miss Cathy. Remember her? Boy, she wasn’t good to you, was she?
I can recall the times I drove by Miss Cathy’s house and saw you sitting on her rickety wooden stoop. She’d always be yelling at you about something. I guess I can understand why you ran away from her to live with that older guy. Miss Cathy’s house was no home for you. You were lost. Sad. Broken. That was a good thing for me.
My investigator informed me that you were seeing a therapist named Marriott Harold. Marriot seemed like a lovely woman, like she had your best interests in mind. As much as you pretended to hate her, I think you rather enjoyed your visits with Marriott. Though she was a strange bird, she was protective of you, and she showed that she cared and you secretly loved that.
You loved when anyone cared about you. That’s why you moved in with your now ex-boyfriend, right? Because he showed you a little attention, told you that you were pretty? He was no fool. He took advantage of a young girl, and you were desperate enough to stick around for two years and endure his sick ways.
When I found out you were seeing a therapist, I needed to know why. The government had covered your trips to see Marriot which meant your mental condition had to be serious.
And what did I find out? That you have a serious disorder. An obsessive-compulsive disorder with people, which I didn’t even know was a thing until the investigator told me what your therapist had on file for you. You also suffered a while with abandonment issues and from a post-traumatic stress disorder, which was understandable. You lost your parents in a horrible tragedy because of someone else. It was a thing you couldn’t control, and perhaps that tragedy is why you’d developed your other disorders.
Please don’t hate me for realizing you were the perfect candidate to carry out some of my plans. Granted, I knew nothing about you when the wreck first happened, but when I found out the Hills had a daughter, well, it was game on.
I didn’t exactly get the chance to start grooming you to hate Lola until you were eighteen. Do you remember attending a group discussion for lost teens? It was rather easy to put together, held in the gym of a middle school. I paid the coordinator of that little group discussion and told her to pretend to care about the teens, to act as a mediator. I knew you’d go once and never go again.
I left a flyer on your boyfriend’s doorstep while you were on your way to school and you picked it up. You read it, then stuffed it into your back pocket. The next thing I knew, I was in the parking lot, watching you enter the school for the discussion. You didn’t say much. You just sat there, listening to other people’s stories, desperately trying to relate to someone else. To make a friend. I’d spent a lot of my vacation time looking out for you, Ivy.