Page 57 of Under Their Watch

“It’s heartwarming to know how similar the two of you are,” Casey says with a smile.

“Thank you,” I say to her. “Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome,” she smiles. “Would you prefer we continue calling you Rhea?”

“Uh… Yeah. I might not respond to Rachel,” I say. “I’d like to go home now.”

“Let’s go home,” Theo says sweetly.

As Casey is walking us to the parking lot where the others are waiting, a woman sprints over to us and drags the detectives aside.

“Hey,” Quinn says, kissing me. “How’d it go?”

“She was a badass,” Emma says.

“What’s that about?” Anika asks, pointing to the detectives.

“No idea. That woman just came out of nowhere and pulled them aside,” I say. “Here they come.”

“Okay. I’ll give you a very brief update, but I would like for you all to go straight home,” she says.

“Okay?” I say.

“DNA on the tools came back. There is a match to an unsolved murder from right before you married him. We will be issuing a warrant for Marvin’s arrest in just a few minutes,” she tells us.

“Oh my God,” I sigh. “Finally.”

“We will let you know when he is in custody,” Logan says. “Go straight home.”

“You can come to the house,” Rowan says to Dad. “It’ll give you two a chance to talk.”

“We have a bunch of pictures that Jace and I took over the course of her childhood. It’s a lot of random shit, but I’m glad we had the wherewithal to know to document these things,” Quinn says.

“That would be amazing,” Dad says happily.

“We need to go,” Casey says. “Call if you need anything.”

We wave them off and Quinn wraps me in a tight hug before kissing me. “Did you get to say your peace?”

“I did,” I smile.

“Good girl. I’m proud of you,” he says.

“I also got to say my peace to Marcus,” I add.

“Aw. I totally would have loved to be in the room with him,” Quinn says.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I laugh. “Good riddance to all of them.”

Chapter Nine

Rhea

Six Months Later

It’s been six months.Six months that Marvin has been on the run. Six months that I have had my biological father in my life. Six months since my mother and stepfather went to prison. They both plead guilty and are serving life sentences for the things that they did to me. Marcus was charged in connection to the murders as his DNA was found on the tools as well. When confronted, he admitted everything. Marvin is now connected to ten murders and at least thirty rapes across three states. It wasn’t hard to exonerate me from any wrongdoing based on Marcus stating that he knew I was tied up in the closet. No one doubted my story, but they still needed to be sure.

I am sitting on the couch working on the edits for my book. It’s nearly finished, and the next step is to hand it off to Anika for the next steps. Everyone should be home soon from running errands. We have fallen into a routine of sorts. At first, we holed up in the house and stayed paranoid that Marvin was close. Eventually, that got old, so we are moving on with our lives. We are as vigilant as possible, but we live our lives.