Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead

Dr. Nazari’s Office, Seven Years Earlier

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Everyone who was there, or pretends they were there, says the same thing: the tabloids got it wrong. But they didn’t, not really.

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The articles said: Charlotte Colbert escaped unscathed. Which is true. While the others were in surgery or stretched out in the morgue, I was in the shower, scrubbing their blood from my neck and shoulders. The others were carried out; I walked out—or, more accurately, according to the photos, I was walked out, a paramedic hooked under each arm.

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But I don’t remember it. Which is why I’m here, as it happens.

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They wrote: There were no signs. That’s true, too, unless you knew what you were looking for. Which I didn’t. I was twenty-three, for God’s sake, charmed and clumsily in love. I didn’t know shit.

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They wrote, gleefully, about the bloody handprints on the white walls, the crack as the body—bodies—struck the ground. The reams of ivy that clung to the hundred-year-old building. True. True. True.

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(That fucking ivy has nothing to do with anything. But this was never a story about murder, was it? Not for them. It was about pedigreed kids with blue eyes and Carroll University School of Journalism’s six- figure price tag. The death toll, that was a bonus.)

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Sometimes they wrote, Charlotte Colbert, victim, and sometimes they wrote, Charlotte Colbert, survivor, like they couldn’t make up their minds.

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The first thing you should know, Dr. Nazari, is that neither of those things are true.