The Girl I Used to Be

The voices urge Olivia to keep moving. She follows the deer into a stream to wait out the fire. When she runs out of air, she covers her mouth with her t-shirt and surfaces just enough to breathe in more, repeating this process until she thinks it’s safe. The deer are still alive, too. Spaulding calls out to her, and she turns to find him badly burned but still holding his gun. Olivia ducks back under the water to protect herself from the bullets he fires. It’s difficult to swim away while she’s handcuffed.

Spaulding shoots the deer, which upsets Olivia. She hears Duncan call for her and shouts a response, warning him that Spaulding has a gun. She sees Duncan appear with a shotgun before Spaulding shoots him in the chest and turns to shoot Olivia. Before he can, a flaming tree limb falls off a tree and hits Spaulding.

Olivia dreams of Spaulding standing over with a knife and her murdered family behind him. She wakes to find that she’s in the hospital, strapped to the bed. She panics and asks about Duncan. The people in her room assure her that he’s out of surgery and down the hall. Olivia asks if they’re under arrest. The woman introduces herself as Chaplain Steves and the man as Detective Elemon. They explain that the restraints were due to her unconscious flailing. She is doing well other than some first- and second-degree burns and has been sedated. Spaulding is at a burn unit in a different hospital and might not survive. He confessed to three murders on the way to the hospital. Olivia tells them that Spaulding killed Nora because he discovered who Olivia was, and that the other two murders were her parents.

This chapter opens four weeks later. Duncan and Olivia are preparing to repaint the walls of the house to the color she remembers. She doesn’t want to faithfully recreate her grandmother’s home, but she has accepted some of Nora’s furniture. Hundreds of people attended Nora’s funeral.

Olivia and Duncan kiss. Their burns are healing well. Duncan’s shotgun was unloaded, but he hoped the sight of it would deter Spaulding. Spaulding lived and is being treated; he’s going to plead guilty to all of the murders. Jason has also been arrested for dealing and using meth, explaining his paranoia. The last words of the novel are Duncan calling Olivia by her real name: Ariel.