Chapter 8 - The Bus Ride Home
The heavy steel cuffs clicked shut around Marcus’s wrists as Detective Miller slammed him face-first onto the living room floor. He thrashed and screamed curses, but his reign of terror was officially over.
As the officers hauled him away toward a flashing wall of red and blue cruiser lights outside, Detective Miller paused by the doorway, looking back at me with a nod of deep respect.
"We found the remaining heavy metal vials in his desk drawer at the office, Mrs. Vargas. Between this, the metadata, and the reopening of his first wife's cold case, he's never seeing daylight again."
"Thank you, Detective," I whispered.
Hours later, after the police statements were signed and the apartment was finally quiet, I sat alone on the edge of the living room couch. The rain had stopped, leaving the city washed clean under a pale, starlit sky.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. A text from an unknown number.
Did it work?
I stared at the screen, a slow, genuine smile spreading across my face for the first time in years. I didn't know who the elderly woman on the bus was—whether she was a guardian angel, a ghost, or simply a survivor who had walked this exact dark road before. But she had given me a second chance at life.
I typed back a single word:
May you like
Yes.
And as I stepped out onto the balcony, breathing in the cool, crisp night air, I knew I would never look at a stranger on a crowded bus the same way again.
