✯ North Star ✯

14 - The Aftermath

I sit in the living room with Sarah, Wheezie, Rafe, and Rose.

No one speaks.

The only sound is the quiet click as the video begins to play, and I feel my whole body go rigid, bracing for something I already know I'm not ready for.

Dad appears on the screen.

"A great man once said that if you're born poor that's not your fault but if you die poor well that's on you.

I think in the end it was my fear of going back of losing everything I have that made me lose sight of everything I am... everything I wanted to be.

I killed Big John Routledge. I murdered Sheriff Peterkin. I shot Gavin Barnstead.

I know there's nothing I can do to ease the pain I've caused. Many will say I took the easy way out. But I leave this world with the terrible pain of knowing that I leave behind my family shattered by grief broken by my sins.

I don't expect you to forgive me for leaving you this way. I just pray you understand that... I can't go on ruining your lives anymore. This had to end.

To all of you I leave my estate to be divided equally and I leave a love deeper than I could ever express. Take care of each other."

The video ends.

The silence that follows feels louder than anything that came before it.

Wheezie lets out one trembling breath and rushes out of the room in tears, and the sound of her crying trails away down the hallway, fading but never quite disappearing.

Sarah slams the laptop shut, her jaw shaking, the sharp crack of plastic the only thing that breaks the stillness after that.

No one moves for a long moment, all of us sitting there in a grief too large and too strange to know what to do with.

Finally Sarah and Rafe walk away in opposite directions, and something in me understands that neither of them can carry this in the same room as anyone else right now.

I stand, my legs unsteady beneath me, my whole chest hollowed out in a way I don't yet have words for.

"Stella—" Rose starts gently.

"No— please. I don't want to hear it right now," I whisper, and head outside, needing air, needing distance, needing anything that isn't this room and this house and the weight of everything he just said.

---

I grab my bike and start down the driveway when I hear footsteps behind me.

"Stella. Hey wait." Rafe calls, running toward me. "Wait wait wait wait wait. Slow down. Slow down."

He reaches for my shoulder, and every nerve in my body recoils before I've even decided to move.

I whip around and shove him away, something raw and violent surging up too fast for me to stop it.