PART 2: The mountains in New Zealand didn’t feel like escape at first.
The mountains in New Zealand didn’t feel like escape at first.
They felt like silence.
Not the peaceful kind either. The kind that forces you to hear your own thoughts too clearly. I remember standing at the edge of a trail just outside Queenstown, watching the wind push across the valley, thinking how strange it was that the world could still look beautiful after everything I had survived.
People back home thought my story ended in that church.
Arrests. Sentences. Headlines.
Justice, they called it.
But justice doesn’t erase what comes after.
It only clears the ground.
And what grows on that ground… is something else entirely.
I had been in New Zealand for three weeks when I first noticed I was being followed.
It started small.
A man in a gray jacket at a café I visited twice. Same order. Same seat. Same way of watching the door instead of the street.
Then a second sighting on a hiking trail near Lake Wakatipu.
Then a third in town.
Different faces. Same pattern.
I told myself it was paranoia at first. A leftover instinct from everything that had happened. When your life has been stolen once, you start believing it can be taken again anywhere.
But paranoia doesn’t usually book the same flight path twice.
The message came on a Tuesday morning.
Unknown number.
Just four words:
“You didn’t finish it.”
I sat in the small rented cabin staring at the screen until the words stopped looking like text and started looking like intent.
Someone knew I was alive here.
Someone from before.
That night, I called Brenda.
She picked up immediately.
“I thought you were finally breathing again,” she said.
“I was,” I replied. “Someone knows I’m here.”
Silence.
Then her voice changed.
“Loretta… the case isn’t as closed as you think.”
That sentence pulled something cold through my chest.
She told me something I hadn’t known.
After the trial, investigators had found inconsistencies in Russell’s financial records. Offshore accounts that didn’t match his profile. Transfers routed through intermediaries no one had named in court.
But what made it worse was the timing.
Some of the transactions had continued… after his arrest.
Which meant one thing.
Russell hadn’t been acting alone.
Or worse—
Someone had been protecting him from the outside.
I didn’t sleep that night.
Instead, I went through every memory I had ignored. Every odd detail. Every moment that didn’t fit cleanly into the story I had built.
And one name kept resurfacing in the cracks.
Garrett.
He had helped. He had testified. He had cried in front of me.
But he had also known too much, too quickly.
And he had survived untouched.
The next morning, I walked into Queenstown under a gray sky and bought a prepaid phone.
Then I sent one message.
“I know you didn’t tell me everything.”
It took twelve minutes for a reply.
“I think we need to meet.”
Garrett arrived in New Zealand two days later.
He looked thinner than I remembered. More tired. Like someone who had been carrying something heavy for too long and finally realized it wasn’t going away.
We met at a small dock near the lake where tourists fed ducks without thinking about anything important.
He didn’t sit down right away.
“I didn’t lie in court,” he said.
“I know,” I replied. “But you didn’t tell the whole truth either.”
His jaw tightened.
Then he exhaled.
“There was someone else,” he said quietly. “Someone Russell answered to.”
The wind shifted across the water.
And suddenly, the silence didn’t feel empty anymore.
It felt watched.
Garrett continued.
“A few months before your accident… Russell started meeting someone. Not socially. Not casually. Business. Control-level business.”
“Who?” I asked.
He hesitated too long.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “I don’t know his real name.”
But he knew the alias.
A name used in wire transfers. Shell companies. Legal documents that never reached court.
“Elliot Crane.”
.
.
.
The moment he said it, something inside me reacted before my mind caught up.
Not recognition.
Instinct.
Like hearing a door you thought was locked… click open again.
Garrett watched me carefully.
“You’ve heard it before,” he said.
“No,” I replied.
But I had.
Just not in this life.
In fragments.
In emails I never fully understood.
In conversations Russell once took outside when he thought I wasn’t listening.
In a tone he used when he said he “had investors.”
Investors don’t make hikers fall off cliffs.
People like Elliot Crane do.
That night, I couldn’t stay in the cabin.
I drove instead, no destination, just distance. Roads carved through mountains that looked ancient enough to keep secrets better than people ever could.
My phone buzzed again.
Unknown number again.
This time longer.
“You survived the fall. That wasn’t the plan.”
I pulled over so fast the tires skidded on gravel.
My hands were shaking, but my mind was clear in a way I hadn’t felt since the accident.
This wasn’t about Russell anymore.
This was about design.
About structure.
About someone who didn’t improvise murder—
but organized it.
Back in Queenstown, I met Brenda again via video call.
She looked worried before I even spoke.
“Loretta,” she said carefully, “I need you to listen to me very closely.”
She had received something.
An anonymous envelope.
Delivered to her office.
Inside were copies of documents from my case file.
But annotated.
Corrected.
Expanded.
As if someone had been tracking the investigation from the beginning.
And at the bottom of the last page, one handwritten line:
“She was never the target.”
I felt my stomach drop.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Brenda shook her head.
“That’s what scares me.”
Because if I wasn’t the target…
then the question became unbearable.
What was?
Or who?
That night, I didn’t return to the cabin.
Instead, I drove into the mountains until the road disappeared and only gravel paths remained. The kind of places where phone signal dies and silence feels absolute.
I parked near a trailhead.
The same instinct that once saved my life on Carson Ridge now told me something was wrong again.
Not behind me.
Ahead.
And for the first time since waking up in Mavis’s cabin, I realized something terrifying:
I had never actually left the story.
I had only moved to the next chapter.
And someone was still writing it.
Behind me.
Quiet.
Patient.
Waiting for me to keep walking.
And this time, they were not going to let me fall by accident.