Homewrecker

50 - 𝓭𝓲𝓿𝓮

It was only around a fifteen-minute drive from the Starbright Drive-In to Izzie's father's pool business downtown called Dive Right in! according to the seemingly hand-painted sign at the storefront with the letters shaped and colored like squiggling water formations, but I still spent most of it staring down at my phone, scrolling over the comment section of Andi's video with the volume on mute.

There were some congratulating her on reaching one million subscribers, some about being there from the very first video or loving her makeup tutorials, but the girl at the drive-in had been right when she said most were about me. Some had links to the time they could best make out my face in the window behind Andi, others bet it wasn't even me and it was just something Andi did to get views because of the hype the scandal was causing in the media right then which probably already boosted her subscriber count to one million, but the majority were about the leaked murder investigation.

WAIT did you see that her mom was actually murdered?

Guys her mom didn't die in the tornado like they said, it was leaked the police are treating it a homicide case.

Anyone have links for this?

I bet you the dad did it to stop paying child support.

You guys all know that her dad probably did it to keep her from coming clean about the affair, right?

He probably didn't do it, he probably paid someone to kill her because she wanted money or something, maybe take him to one of those court shows and do a DNA test, exposing what a deadbeat he is.

OMG, could you imagine him on Lauren Lake?

YOU ARE THE FATHER AND THE KILLER!!!!

I kept glancing occasionally over at Andi in the driver's seat of the car, watching as she adjusted the bikini straps over her shoulders at the red light or nod her head along to the rhythm of the song crooning through the car's speakers as she drove.

I knew she must have seen the comments, some of them were nearly a week old, but she hadn't said anything to me or David, that I knew of anyway. She seemed normal then, about to go late night swimming with her friends and me, and like thousands of people on the internet weren't accusing her father of murder right then, but maybe she was distracting herself, like swimming in display models at Dive Right in! was her version of commenting on Ethan's abs or something.

Or maybe the thought was just that ridiculous to her, barely even worth a second of her thoughts or a bend in her summer. She had been surrounded in public opinions for almost her entire life, she was probably used to outrageous rumors and this just seemed like another one.

But there was something I couldn't totally brush away or nudge aside like her. Most of the theories commented online didn't even make sense—like him hiring someone to kill my mom to keep from paying child support when he never had and my mom never fought him for it, never talked about before she died either, and now he was having to pay much more as my sole provider.

It also didn't make sense if she was threatening to expose their near decades old affair, which again she never mentioned to me before, because killing her meant I had to live with them and expose the affair themselves. None of it really made any sense, killing my mother didn't erase what happened or that I was the result of it. It actually brought me to their doorsteps, something they should've figured out.

But David let his campaign team pay off the mayor to keep the investigation quiet.

And what if that wasn't just because of the state senate elections?