Purgatory

But I couldn't believe it.

Not because the evidence contradicted it—the evidence actually supported it. But because I knew Mia. Not intimately, not as a close friend or a lover, but I had observed her enough to understand one fundamental truth: this girl did not surrender. She was broken, yes. Exhausted, cornered, with raw panic in her eyes. But she fought. Every time life knocked her down, she bit back. She clung to any anchor available—her job, her toxic relationships, the distant dream she shared with anyone who would listen.

At least, that's what I believed. Or wanted to think.

Bradley's serial killer theory hung in the air like an all-too-tempting label. Detectives loved serial killers; an external monster was a convenient scapegoat that absolved the community of responsibility.

But my instinct categorically rejected that version as well.

I didn't believe in a wandering monster. My brain sensed that the solution wasn't hidden in the highway dust of neighboring states. The most horrific secrets don't travel from the outside—they brew for years right under our noses, behind pristine white picket fences, feeding on domestic silence and long-held grievances.

That left only one logical conclusion: someone from her immediate circle. Someone whose pressure became the final, breaking straw.

I had to piece this puzzle together by hand, element by element, uncovering the hidden motives of those who had smiled at Mia in life. The evil here was local. It carried the distinct scent of our town's lake mud. And I was entirely prepared to turn over every stone in this fertile swamp.

I took a black marker and wrote a single name in the very center of the whiteboard: Mia.

The first contact points instantly erupted around her name, like the radiating threads of a spider's web. Our task force was already hard at work on the town streets: sheriff's deputies were canvassing Mia's neighbors, methodчески questioning anyone who might have seen the red-haired girl between midnight and five AM. But I understood all too well that ordinary people, guided by linear logic, would only see the surface of her final path. My job was to peer deep beneath that surface, to where the true motives lay.

The interrogation room door closed with a dull click, cutting us off from the noise of the hallway. It smelled of old linoleum and a bitter chill. Nancy sat on the edge of her chair, huddled, trying to occupy as little space as possible. Her festive housecoat, stained with lake mud, looked ridiculous and eerie. She was no longer howling. The acute wave of theatrical hysteria she had displayed on the shore had given way to a dull, glassy numbness.

I sat down opposite her, placing a blank notepad between us. I took my time. My mind demanded that I pause, letting her silence speak first.

“Drink, Nancy,” I said, pushing a plastic glass of ice water toward her.

She shuddered, looking up at me with vacant eyes framed by a network of deep wrinkles caked with running mascara. Her fingers, covered in cheap rings, clutched the plastic convulsively. The glass shook, splashing water onto her lap, but she didn't even notice.

“She's gone, Ed?” Her voice was surprisingly quiet, stripped of its previous strain—the hoarse, broken voice of a woman who had been silent for far too long. “My little girl is gone?”

“She's gone, Nancy,” I replied as dispassionately as possible. “And I need to figure out who helped her end up in that water. You mentioned the Kurd. Tell me about last night. What exactly did you hear across the street?”

Nancy took a shallow sip, her Adam's apple bobbing.

“They were screaming. God, how they were screaming... The Kurd arrived around nine. His old pickup truck was rattling the entire street. I was standing by the living room window, leaving the lights off so they wouldn't see me. He grabbed her by the arms on the porch, throwing her things around. He screamed that she had ruined his life, that she was a selfish bitch.”

“And Mia?” I leaned forward, intently reading her facial expressions.

“And Mia laughed,” Nancy said, suddenly flashing a terrifying, bitter smile. That smile instantly smoothed out her wrinkles, exposing a deep, ancient anger. “She always laughed when someone was hurting because of her. You know, Ed, my Mia... she was perfect to the world. The whole town worshipped her. Beautiful, successful, the top student, the pride of the school. But at home... at home she was a tyrant. She sucked the air out of the room.”

“A tyrant?” I latched onto the word.

“Yes!” Nancy slammed her glass down, spilling water across the polished wood. A poisonous flare of old resentment ignited in her eyes. “She controlled my every move. Ever since my husband died, she acted like I was her property, her stupid, worthless servant. ‘Mom, don’t take those pills. Mom, don’t wear that dress, you look ridiculous. Mom, you’re wasting my money.’ She wouldn’t let me breathe! Every word out of her mouth was like a scalpel—clean, sharp, cutting right down to the bone. She knew exactly where my weak spots were. Because of her, Chloe grew up living in the shadows. Mia took all the love in that house for herself, and left us with nothing but the rules. Her damn, perfect rules!”

The woman was breathing heavily, her pale cheeks flushing feverishly. She was finally venting the suffocation that had built up over the years, and beneath the mask of a grieving mother, I saw a monstrous, shameful sense of relief stirring.

“Did you hate her, Nancy?” My question was soft, almost intimate.

Nancy stopped short, her mouth hanging half-open. The volatile anger in her eyes vanished instantly, replaced by a primal, cowardly terror. She realized she had unmasked too much.

“No... no, what are you saying, Ed!” She began to shake violently again, burying her face in her hands. “I'm her mother! I loved her! She was my life! It was all the Kurd—he broke her!”

“Were you home all last night?” I asked, shifting my tone to a calm, businesslike register. “Who can confirm that you didn't leave the house after Mia walked out?”

Nancy blinked, visibly disoriented by the sudden shift in questioning.

“Chloe...” she managed to choke out. “Chloe was home. We went to bed almost immediately. I didn't go out. I just watched from the window...”

“Was Chloe in the same room as you?”

“No, but... she would have heard if I had left. The house is small, and the floorboards creak. She definitely would have heard me.”

I nodded, mentally logging the statement. An alibi confirmed strictly by a relative—meaning it was no alibi at all if they were acting in concert. But for the paperwork, it was technically clean.

“Last night, I saw her walking away toward the lake,” Nancy continued hurriedly, as if terrified I would cut her off. “Alone. In that same green dress. I wanted to scream out the window for her to stop... but I couldn't. I just drew the Kurdains and went to bed. I am so incredibly tired of her constant drama, Ed. You have no idea how exhausted I am... I just wanted the house to be quiet for at least one night.”

She burst into genuine tears this time, burying her face in the soiled sleeve of her robe. But these weren't tears of mourning for her dead daughter. These were tears for her own irrevocably broken life—a life she had voluntarily locked within four walls, trading motherhood for a dull, bitter resignation.

“Get some rest, Nancy,” I said, standing up. “The deputy will bring you some hot tea. I need to talk to Chloe.”

* * *

The interrogation room door opened quietly, and the officer on duty gave me an almost imperceptible nod. I stepped inside.

Chloe sat at the cold metal desk, her spine perfectly straight with a frightening, unnatural rigidity—as if she had swallowed a yardstick of solid iron. She wore the same dark coat, buttoned tightly up to her chin despite the stuffy atmosphere of the office. There were no tears, no fear, none of the typical girlish panic seen at this hour. She towered over the shabby desk like an unyielding wall. She looked at me with her faded, assessing, vacant eyes, her gaze presenting a cold challenge: Try and break me. I understood instantly that this icy armor was merely a façade. Something dark was hiding behind it.

“Thank you for coming, Chloe,” I said, sitting opposite her and deliberately leaving the gray case file closed. “I know how difficult this is for your family. But the sooner we can reconstruct yesterday's timeline, the—”

“I’m not upset, Ed,” her voice cut in. It was even, completely devoid of a tremor—a leather whip rather than a voice. “I’m disgusted. I’m disgusted that my family is now the headline of the town. This miserable place thrives on dirty gossip, and Mia’s death is just a free morning show for them. What exactly do you want to know?”

I mentally recorded her reaction. She was clearly far more consumed with protecting the perfect façade of their household, which had just developed a fatal fracture due to the death of the "red-haired princess."

“Tell me about last night,” I said, resting my chin on my hands and adopting my usual posture of a detached observer. “Your mother mentioned on the shore that Mia was in her room all day. Is that accurate?”

“Yes. She was stuck at home, reviewing legal contracts. Patrick, her business partner, has been riding her hard lately, squeezing every drop of productivity out of her. They were closing some massive, dirty deal involving a country estate,” Chloe spoke fluidly, her sentences rolling off her teeth like a memorized script. But then she leaned forward, a feverish glint illuminating her eyes. “Though to be perfectly honest, Ed, I wouldn't be surprised if Patrick had absolutely nothing to do with this. Mia’s been losing her grip lately. She's been acting insane.”

She paused, as if calculating whether to reveal more, before adding with the same detached coldness:

“You know she was seeing a psychiatrist, right? Dr. Fields, over at the city clinic. Mia visited him regularly, and he had her on heavy medication for her panic attacks. Strong drugs—I don't recall the names. Without them, she simply couldn't function. Any minor stress, and she'd completely unravel. So her late-night flight to the lake... it's not about a killer, Ed. It's about her own sick head.”

I jotted the name down in my notebook: Dr. Fields. I would need to contact him immediately to ascertain what medications he had prescribed and evaluate her psychological baseline over the past few weeks.

“That mechanic from the gas station, Ray King, was always harassing her too,” Chloe continued. “They were constantly screaming at each other. And then there was Martha... our saintly neighbor made a habit of hanging around her house in the evenings. I have no idea what they were doing in there—drinking tea or swapping pills—but Mia was never herself after those encounters.”

“Did you see her yesterday?” I asked.

“No, I only called her during the day,” Chloe said with a shrug. “We were discussing the renovations on my mother’s house. She sounded tired. Exhausted, really. But strangely calm. Like she had finally made a hard decision and resigned herself to it. Her voice was steady, not hysterical at all. I remember thinking how uncharacteristic it was for her to be so level.”

She fell silent, her gaze drifting away toward the corner of the room.

“Uncharacteristic in what way?” I prompted.

“It felt like she was saying goodbye,” Chloe said quietly. “I didn't think anything of it at the time. I just assumed she was drained. Now... now I don't know.”

“Chloe, the medical examiner documented extensive physical trauma on Mia's body,” I countered, locking eyes with her. “Bruises on her wrists, a torn dress, a severe laceration on her temple. Everything indicates she fought desperately for her life.”

Chloe’s mask slipped. A hard, tense crease flared near the bridge of her nose, betraying a flash of hidden rage, but with a sudden, practiced effort, she forced her features back into compliance.

“Mia had severe panic attacks, Ed. As a specialist, you should know how that works,” a venomous irony sharped her voice. “She was an expert at wearing masks. In public, she played the femme fatale, the high-flying realtor. But behind closed doors, she was deeply hysterical. If she ran out to the lake at night wearing nothing but a dress, it means she was having another psychotic break. And the trauma... that lake is abandoned, choked with rotting wood and rusty iron. She could have easily tripped, fallen, and mutilated herself.”

With alarming, systematic tenacity, she kept steering the investigation away from a homicide theory. A strange, telling ambivalence lurked behind her icy defense: Chloe acted as if she knew precisely what had transpired on that pier, yet was terrified that the police would unearth an entirely different, far more sinister secret.

“Perhaps,” I murmured quietly after a prolonged silence.

There was a sharp, rapid knock on the door. Miller cracked it open, beckoning to me with an excited wave.

“Ed, got a second? The team just got back from canvassing the neighborhood. We have a solid lead. Someone spotted Mia outside her house last night. And she wasn't alone.”

I glanced at Miller, waiting for the details, while the gears in the back of my mind began to turn. I would need to personally call Dr. Fields to find out exactly what medications he had prescribed for Mia, and more importantly, whether she was actually taking them—or if someone else had gained access to her supply.

I turned back to look at Chloe. Her face had drained of color, resembling a pale piece of chalk. For the first time, her stone mask had sustained a deep, irreparable fracture.

“Stay here,” I commanded. “We're not finished.”

I stepped out, pulling the heavy door shut until the latch creaked. The hallway air was cooler, but it brought no sense of relief. Chloe's face, frozen in the dim light, remained burned into my mind like a plaster cast—a white, lifeless mask. She was fighting so desperately to preserve the fracturing façade of her own perfection that her self-control felt like an act of physical violence against her own body.

But in forensics, as in mathematics, every blind fence has a dark reverse side—a dark side paved with years of suppressed trauma, silent envy, and that same rigid armor forged by buttons fastened tightly to the throat in the darkness of other people's family celebrations.

All buttons up to the neck

All of this was constructed among other people’s scattered belongings and the prickly fragments of someone else’s manufactured laughter.

I was just over a year old when my father first brought me into the Rockett household. I don't possess a single memory of him smiling. He was always a sullen, stoic man who used minimal gestures and spoke only when necessary. He was desperately searching for a quiet haven after his long shifts in the commercial garages, but instead, he found Nancy—a woman perpetually trapped in a state of selfish, bitter mourning for her lost youth.

From my earliest childhood, I grew up with a distinct, suffocating feeling that I was nothing more than an extra in this house. A piece of unwanted debris that someone had forgotten to sweep away. An absolute outsider. My stepmother looked at me like an irritating financial burden; my father quickly and cowardly retreated into the shadows of his junkyards, and at the absolute center of this claustrophobic universe, reigning like a fierce, blinding sun, was Mia.

My entire youth, for as long as I can remember, was spent living in the suffocating, heavy gray shadow of her damned red hair. This miserable, sleepy town practically worshipped her. They called her "our red-haired sunshine," thoughtlessly dismissing her volatile whims and lazily attributing her chronically failing grades to a "complex, creative nature." Nancy would spend hours cradling her through her endless, dramatic nighttime tantrums, tears streaming down her face.

I, on the other hand, grew up large, awkward, and angular, inheriting my father's heavy jawline and dull, perpetually unkempt hair. People only glanced in my direction when they needed a plain backdrop to highlight Mia’s brilliance, or to offer a reproachful comparison: “Well, Chloe, look at Mia. At your age, she’s already in full swing...”

It was then, inside my small, constricted child's chest, that my sole defense against daily devaluation was born. It became my personal armor. If this world stubbornly refused to recognize the real me, I resolved to rise head and shoulders above it. I made a silent, unyielding vow: I would never, under any circumstances, sink to their level. I would not cry, I would not beg for their love, and I would never stage their cheap, emotional scenes. I would become flawless. Rigid as iron. Completely silent.

Methodically, step by step, day by day, I engineered my own world. I studied until I secured top marks, I ironed my school blouses until the fabric was perfectly crisp, and I buttoned my collars all the way up to my chin—even when the classroom grew unbearably hot, like a humid greenhouse. I demanded total, absolute control over my own body and mind. I couldn't allow myself a single moment of vulnerability. Because I knew with absolute certainty: if I gave in for even a second, if I allowed myself to weep or complain about my reality, they would see my pain and weaponize it against me—just like they weaponized my invisibility.

And while Mia went into a slow downward spiral—wrecking real estate deals, having messy affairs, and drinking herself into oblivion—I simply stood in the wings, silently celebrating. Each of her public failures was a quiet, triumphant validation of my own righteousness. I watched her drunken, pathetic tears from the height of my cold pedestal and thought: You’re just a pretty, hollow shell. I’m the real deal. I’m pure. I’m in complete control of my life, while you’re drowning in your own sludge.

I despised her with every fiber of my being. I despised her because even when she was entirely destroyed, weak, and empty, she still managed to consume all the air in our house. Nancy expended her last remaining nerves on Mia's volatile swings over men, while my perfect, flawless existence was treated as something self-evident and gray. To them, I was just a shadow—a silent, functional backdrop in the endless, drawn-out celebration of her personal drama.

The only person who ever truly noticed me was my father. Not with words—he didn't know how to articulate affection. But with his gaze. Sometimes he would sit next to me in silence while the TV hummed, and I could physically feel that he knew I was there. He saw me. Not through the distorted lens of Mia's drama, but simply—me.

When he died—pancreatic cancer, six grueling months of physical decline played out before Nancy's indifferent eyes—I didn't shed a single tear. I locked myself in the bathroom, turned the tub faucet on full blast, and sat on the cold floor with my face buried in my knees until the water ran ice-cold. Then I walked out, buttoned my school blouse tightly up to my neck, and went straight to class. No one noticed. No one was supposed to.

But something fundamental inside me died along with him. It wasn't hope—hope had died years prior. It was the last shred of human warmth. The final thread connecting me to that household. After his funeral, I became truly ironclad. Not because I desired to be, but because there was no other alternative left.

I buried that warmth deep within myself, along with the last lingering expectation that someone would ever see the real Chloe. From that day forward, I made a strict covenant with myself: I would never wait for someone to come and offer warmth. I would warm myself. With iron. With cold. With absolute control. And no one would ever see me break.

I never even allowed myself a real relationship. It wasn't because men didn't attempt to approach me—there were a couple of clumsy, juvenile attempts. But because I couldn't bring myself to relax the parameters of my control. I couldn't break the armor. I couldn't risk showing another human being that beneath the iron facade was actual, aching flesh. I systematically rejected anyone who tried to breach the perimeter. Now, looking back across those years, I can't even recall a single one of their faces.

And now that Mia is gone too, and Nancy is left entirely alone with her advancing age and hollow emptiness, I look down at my hands and feel absolutely nothing. Only a dull, nagging ache where my father's silent presence used to anchor me. Perhaps that was true love? The kind you fail to register while it's there, and which remains entirely irreplaceable once it's gone.

But the stage scenery has collapsed. The party is over. And instead of the profound relief I had anticipated for so long, all that remains inside me is a vast, echoing vacuum—a cold, gray, empty void. Did I actually get what I wanted? Mia isn't stealing the spotlight anymore. So why do I feel so physically sick?

I don't know the answer. And I think, deep down, I'm terrified to find out.

Chapter 4

I walked out of the interrogation room and, ignoring Miller, who was waiting by the door with a walkie-talkie in his hand, turned into an empty office at the end of the hallway. I slammed the door shut and leaned my back against the wall. Silence. Only the steady, monotonous hum of an old ceiling fan.

I pulled out my phone and dialed the city clinic's psychiatric ward.

“Connect me with Dr. Fields,” I commanded.

I didn't have to wait long. A calm, even voice came through the receiver—the kind practiced on difficult patients, the kind that never betrays a single emotion.

“Detective? How can I help you?”

“Dr. Fields, I am currently handling the case of Mia Rockett,” I said. “I know you've been treating her for over a year. I need information.”

A pause. A long, heavy one. Then a short, sharp exhalation—either a tired sigh or a note of genuine regret.

“I knew this call would come someday,” he said quietly. “But I always assumed she'd be killed by an overdose or a tragic accident. I didn't expect to hear the word 'case.'”

“Why did you expect an accident?”

“Because Mia was fragile, Detective. Incredibly fragile. She was solid iron on the outside, but woven from spiderwebs on the inside. Severe panic disorder, recurrent depression—mild initially, but with a distinct tendency to worsen over time. She wasn't actively suicidal, no. But she was... exhausted. Like a battery that had finally run completely out of juice.”

“What medications did you have her on?”

“Alprazolam to stop the acute attacks—she referred to them as 'the waves.' When they hit, she'd tell me the entire world shrank to the size of a matchbox. And I had her on sertraline for background therapy. But over the last month, she’d been missing her doses; I could easily tell by her clinical condition. We increased the dosage, but...”

Fields fell silent for a moment. Through the line, I heard the crisp rustle of papers being shuffled on his desk.