❝ I genuinely thought the worst of this nightmare was over ❞
Halle Brewster told a lie, and the secrets kept growing. After slaying one stalker, another reared its nasty head, and Halle was starting to wonder if she'd ever be free from the friendshi...
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Hanna Marin kept her mouth shut. She didn't even say 'no comment' when asked a question. She kept utterly silent in the conference room. They put her in there instead of an interrogation room; Halle told her the state police had done that when she gave her statement on Wilden. These new cops were making it known they weren't shoving teenagers in rooms without adults, pressuring them to confess to things they weren't guilty of. They were treating them differently — softer — more delicately.
With her back towards Hanna, Lieutenant Tanner busied herself with stirring her coffee. Her lips were pursed, but the teen couldn't see that. It wasn't intense like all the other police interrogations Hanna had been forced to sit through. If anything, it was off-putting with how casual Tanner was. "You won't say why you had the gun, or where you got the gun," she pretty much stated back to Hanna, who tore apart a Styrofoam cup. "Or why it appeared you were burying the gun on a college campus."
It drained on Hanna. Staring up at the wall, the one Tanner was next to, Hanna met the face of Detective Wilden. It was a formal photograph, him in his uniform blues, but it still drove home the point that it didn't matter how differently the state police would treat her and her friends, they were all the same.
Right beside it, her head positioned near to Wilden, Tanner faced Hanna and asked, "You want some?" She referred directly at the coffee, but Hanna wouldn't have known; Hanna kept her gaze away from the framed photograph and covered her face with her hand. Tanner wanted her attention, "Hanna, you don't need a lawyer to tell me whether or not you'd like a cup of coffee."
Lifting her head, Hanna stared straight at the woman. "No," she said stubbornly, "thank you." Again, Hanna turned her head away and put her hand over her mouth, covering it, as her mind prayed Halle was staying just as quiet as she was in the other room.
"How about I tell you what I know?" decided Tanner, as she joined Hanna at the table. She set down her coffee and rounded the swivel-chair to sit beside the girl despite Hanna being angled from her. "You were carrying a concealed fire-arm without a licence," Tanner spoke. As Hanna cast her gaze down to the table, the lieutenant swiped the ripped pieces of Styrofoam in to the palm of her hand. She continued, "The gun is a thirty-eight calibre revolver. Yours holds six bullets--" she dropped those pieces in the trash then looked up, "but you only had four."
Coming back over, Tanner posed, "Straight away you got to wonder where the other bullets went, right?" The woman didn't get the sense Hanna, who refused to move her lips and stewed in silent turmoil, was interested so Tanner elaborated, "You could be looking at a third-degree felony charge for carrying a concealed weapon. That's up to a seven year sentence, added onto another sentence of attempting to alter a serial number, which your friend was also present for." Tanner said, spotting true terror in Hanna's eyes for the first time, "It was her quarter, done on her word." But then Hanna huffed, and Tanner began to get annoyed. She took off her glasses and sat down. "Hanna, I do not want to see that happen to you. Neither do you. Neither do your parents." Her voice had gotten serious now. "But I need you to think about who you're trying to protect — and why."
