By the time the river gave up the body, everyone in Briar Hollow already knew who had killed Eli Turner.
Everyone, that is, except Eli.
The town gathered the way it always did—quietly, carefully, like people afraid of waking something that slept beneath their feet. Sheriff Harlan stood on the bank, hat in hand, eyes lowered, as if respect alone could absolve him of what he had chosen not to see. Mothers pulled children closer. Men stared at the water too long. No one said Jonah Reed’s name out loud, but it moved through the crowd like a held breath.
I stood apart from them, the way I always had since I came back.
Ten years away hadn’t loosened Briar Hollow’s grip on me. It still smelled like rusted iron and wet leaves. Still pressed memories into my ribs until it hurt to breathe. I told myself I’d returned only to sell my mother’s house, only to put a clean ending on a place that refused to give me one.
Then Eli Turner floated to the surface.
He was face-down, hair splayed like dark weeds, one shoe missing. The scar above his eyebrow—my doing—was still there. I felt a sharp, shameful urge to roll him over, to make sure he was really dead, as if the past might be lying to me again.
Someone murmured, “Poor Eli.”
Someone else whispered, “Jonah warned him.”
And no one contradicted them.
Jonah Reed. The golden boy who had curdled into something bitter and violent. The man everyone had watched spiral and yet somehow excused because his father owned half the town and his mother sang in the church choir with a voice that made people forgive sins they could not name.
I had loved Jonah once.
That was the secret I carried back with me, wrapped tight and hidden so well even I pretended it wasn’t there.
The memory came back to me that night, uninvited.
I was in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by half-packed boxes, when I found the notebook. The blue one, frayed at the edges. I hadn’t seen it in years. My hand shook as I opened it.
Inside was my handwriting—small, looping, hopeful.
Jonah says we’ll leave together. He says Briar Hollow can’t keep us.
I closed the notebook, heart pounding. I remembered that night now with a clarity that felt cruel.
The bonfire by the quarry. Eli drunk, loud, cruel in the way small men are when they feel cornered. The way he had grabbed my wrist and laughed when I told him to stop. Jonah’s face in the firelight—something breaking behind his eyes.
I remembered shouting. The sound of a body hitting rock. The way the world went silent afterward.
I remembered Jonah grabbing my shoulders, saying, Go home. Forget this. I’ll handle it.
And I remembered doing exactly that.
The town had ruled Eli’s death an accident back then. Boys drinking. Bad footing. No one wanted to look too closely. Not when the truth would stain so many hands.
But Eli hadn’t died that night.
He had lived. And Jonah had warned him—again and again—to leave town. To stay away from me. From the past we shared like a wound that refused to scar.
Eli hadn’t listened.
The next morning, I walked into the sheriff’s office with the notebook in my bag and ten years of silence burning my throat.
Sheriff Harlan looked tired when he saw me. “You shouldn’t get involved,” he said gently. “It’s all but settled.”
“Everyone knows Jonah did it,” I replied.
He flinched. “Careful.”
“No,” I said, voice shaking. “Everyone knows. And no one’s saying it. That makes us part of it.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then looked away. That was his answer.
So I went to Jonah.
He was at his father’s old house, sitting on the porch steps like a boy waiting to be called in for supper. He looked older than his years, grief and rage carving him hollow.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he said before I could speak.
“I know,” I said.
His eyes snapped to mine. “You know?”
“I remember,” I whispered.
The past stood between us then, no longer buried. He told me how Eli had come back drunk and threatening, how he’d said my name like it still belonged to him. How Jonah had shoved him, only meant to scare him, only meant to end it.
The river had done the rest.
“I protected you,” Jonah said, desperate. “All those years ago. I’d do it again.”
“That’s the problem,” I said, tears finally falling. “I never asked you to carry it alone.”
When I left him, I went straight to the state police.
The town turned on me quietly, the way it did everything else. No shouting. Just closed doors. Averted eyes. My mother’s house sold within a week—cheap, eager to see me gone.
Jonah was arrested. The truth came out in pieces, messy and incomplete, as truths often are. Some people said justice had been served. Others said it had been betrayed.
But something else happened too.
People started talking.
About the things they had seen and ignored. About the cost of silence. About how knowing the truth and burying it had poisoned everything it touched.
As for me, I left Briar Hollow again—but lighter this time.
The past no longer chased me. I had faced it, named it, and let it change the shape of my future.
Eli Turner was finally heard.
Jonah Reed would have to live with what he’d done.
And I—at last—was free to live honestly, no longer shaped by what I refused to remember.
In a town where everyone knew the murderer except the dead, the truth had waited patiently.
It always does.
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