Proven Guilty (Treadmill III)

XXIII

"Hey, did you finish it yet?"

Kennedy balanced her phone between her ear and shoulder as she tried to find a box cutter, which she was sure she had just used to open the package with the advanced copy of her book.

"The book?" Rebecca asked incredulously, "It just came in the mail, Ken."

"No, not the whole book. Just the foreword." Kennedy clarified. "I just finished it, and I think it's great."

"I'm glad." Rebecca replied, and there was a knock on Kennedy's front door. "I'll be interested to see how you decided to tell the stories that Brianne said you weren't allowed to tell."

"Brianne and I came to an agreement." Kennedy stood and carefully maneuvered around the boxes on the floor to reach her door. "I could put down anything that didn't blatantly indict me."

"That's fair." Kennedy heard Rebecca's voice through both her phone and from directly in front of her as she swung the door open to reveal her best friend standing on her doorstep. "Brianne's always been good at compromising with you."

Kennedy rolled her eyes and hung up the phone, trying to clear a path for Rebecca to walk into her new apartment. She truly hadn't unpacked a single thing yet, and the boxes were starting to make her feel claustrophobic.

Rebecca immediately got to work, pulling dishes out of a box marked 'Kitchen' and placing them in cabinets. Kennedy watched her for a moment before collecting herself and pulling some glasses out of the box.

The two women unpacked three boxes of kitchen products before sitting down on the one piece of furniture Kennedy had set up: an old yellow couch that she hadn't been able to part with since she had first moved out of the country almost a decade earlier.

"How's Bradley? Ready for the wedding?" asked Kennedy.

"He's more than ready." Rebecca rolled her eyes. "I think he just wants me to stop talking about it."

"Nonsense," Bradley's voice floated through the open window, "I love hearing you talk!"

Both women laughed and Rebecca shut the window.

"We'll have to remember that if we ever want to talk shit about him in the future." She mused, grinning conspiratorially.

One of the selling points of Kennedy's new apartment was that it was next door to Rebecca and Bradley's.

By late afternoon, 50% of the boxes had been unpacked, Bradley had joined them in Kennedy's living room, and all three of them were tipsy on the celebratory bottle of wine that Kennedy's mother had sent her as a housewarming gift.

Kennedy looked over at her best friend and the man who had come to be a close friend as well. Both were grinning at each other like fools, and Kennedy counted the days until the wedding silently in her head: one hundred and seventy-five. Or maybe it was one hundred and seventy-six. She couldn't think clearly, and she was quite alright with that.

When Rebecca and Bradley retired to their own apartment late that night, Kennedy locked her front door behind them and slid down the wall, falling until she was sitting on the floor, back against the wall and legs spread straight out in front of her. She looked around the apartment as if she were seeing it for the first time: the haphazardly placed coffee table in front of the yellow couch, the television sitting on the floor because she had forgotten to buy a TV stand, the books and vinyl records scattered around the living room as the threesome had decided what to put on display on the new bookshelf.

And then there was the book. Her book. Sitting on the couch, face-down, its glossy Carolina-blue jacket reflecting the ceiling light. Kennedy pulled herself up from the floor and walked over to the book, planting herself on the couch. She picked up the book and flipped it over in her hands, weighing it. 352 pages of her life's story. All laid out in front of her, and soon to be laid out in front of anyone with $19.99 to spend on a washed-up influencer's memoir.

Kennedy loved Rebecca's foreword. She had told her to write whatever she wanted to, and promised not to read it until the ARC came. For once in her life, Kennedy had kept true to her word, and she was grateful—reading the foreword while sitting in her brand-new apartment, right next door to Rebecca and her fiancé, had felt like kismet. Like everything in their lives had come full circle.

She opened the book and skimmed over the foreword again. Something inside of her was terrified to open up to the beginning of her own words, and her fingers hovered over the corner of the page, not ready to turn it yet.

Her mind flashed through what her life had been nine years earlier. The desperation she had felt to get rid of Hank. The terrible indifference she had felt towards Rebecca and what she was doing to her life. The justification she had tried to put on her actions that awful night on that back road: that she was just trying to hurt Hank. To scare him. That she hadn't meant to kill him. That it had been an accident, a result of heightened anxiety and a lead foot.

But if there was one thing this book reminded Kennedy of, it was that she had been fully aware of her end goal. And she could never tell anyone about that—least of all Rebecca. It was a secret she would have to live with, and one that she would have to take to her grave. Because Rebecca Eaves was the only person in her life whom Kennedy could trust. She couldn't lose that.

And Kennedy felt that, deep down, on some level, Rebecca knew. She knew, but the two women never uttered a word about it.

Kennedy looked down at the book in her hands; at her fingers still positioned over the bottom corner of the page. Without allowing herself any more time to think, she flipped the page and took a deep breath. Her eyes found the first words and she began to read:

I think I figured the whole thing out, you know.

THE END