Beautiful Villain

Neil?

Back in town?

I had no idea.

All of these years I’ve been writing to him and he’s never written back. How could he? I never gave him my damn address. I’ve written to him every week for five years, though, and used him as a sort of sounding board for my own thoughts. If I’m honest, me talking to him has been therapeutic: kind of like keeping a diary.

Only, it’s a diary that someone – maybe – has read.

I’ve told him all of my secrets and all of my failures and sometimes, I’ve even told him my hopes, but I never really thought he’d come back, and now I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.

“What’s he doing in town?” I ask. I try to keep my tone casual. There’s no chance this guy knows that I used to know Neil. This guy definitely doesn’t know I’ve been writing to him.

“Who knows?” The old man says. “But it can’t be anything good, now can it?”

He shakes his head, waves goodbye, and takes off down the street. Now it’s just me versus the world. I carefully make my way to my dark blue Nissan Versa Note. It’s a beautiful car, but tiny and compact. It works for my needs, though. It gets me where I need to go and nowhere else.

That’s fine.

Right now, though, I have a million questions running through my head. I had no idea Neil was getting out of prison. I seriously had no idea. Was it for good behavior? Is that actually a thing? I don’t know. I start driving home, but instead of turning down Brookside Lane and heading to my house, I find myself over on East Perry Avenue. My car slows to a crawl all on its own as I pass by Neil’s old house.

It’s shuttered over and the pain is peeling. Nobody ever moved in after he was taken away. He rented the house with another guy. They were freshmen in college when it happened. The landlord tried to sell the house several times, but everyone started calling it The Murder House, and well, nobody wants to move into a murder house.

I peer at the house.

Is he in there?

Would he have gone back?

I don’t know.

I don’t think so, but…

Neil’s a murderer. A villain. A bad guy. Bad guys are weird and they don’t exactly make the best choices. Maybe he thought crawling back into that hidey hole of a house would be a good idea, but maybe not. It looks pretty empty to me: totally abandoned. Slowly, I pull my eyes back to the road and drive the rest of the way home.

I park in my little driveway and head up to my front door. My two-story house is pretty damn small: only two bedrooms. Still, it’s enough for me. I don’t make much as a librarian, but I make enough to afford a cute little house in Kurlin, and that’s what I care about. Fidgeting for my keys, I start shaking as I try to open the door. I don’t know why the news about Neil has me all shaken up.

I don’t know why I suddenly care so much.

Shit.

It’s not like we were ever an item. My obsession with him isn’t healthy, I know. I can’t want him to come talk to me and be like, “Hey, thanks for all the mail!” I mean, if I really wanted to talk to him, I probably should have just told him who I was, right?

Instead, I flaked out. I lost my nerve. I signed every letter with a pseudonym: cupcake.

It’s a name I was given in high school after winning our yearly baking competition. It was a silly event we did to raise money for our town’s nursing home, but every single year I’d make a different kind of cupcake.

And every single year, I’d win.

He couldn’t possibly know which girl from his high school was writing. As far as I know, he never so much as looked at a carb in his life. Not Mr. Coleman. Not him.

I finally manage to get my door open and move inside the house. I slam the door shut a little too hard and the walls shake.

“Shit,” I mutter, and I turn around to lock the door. Then I kick my shoes off. I’ll never be one of those women who can wear shoes in the house. I don’t know why, but it’s just not something I’ve ever been able to get comfortable with.

It feels good to be barefoot again, though, and I smile to myself as I wiggle my toes against the carpet.

“Echo!” I call out for my little black kitten. “It’s dinnertime.” I have a can of wet cat food in my bag that Echo is going to go absolutely nuts for. One of my patrons brought it to me today as a gift because she knows just how much Echo loves to eat.