IV.

Amanda was the one on clean-up duty. It didn’t seem right to make Adam mop up his sister’s splattered brains. Normally Amanda had a strong stomach, was honored to be trusted with the physical labor John couldn’t manage himself, but today, cleaning up a mess that was in every way her fault, she felt nauseous.

Her corpse was easy to move. It bothered Amanda. She wanted this to be hard, to feel a physical weight to mimic the stone sinking in her stomach. John liked to leave the bodies where their games were, save for their missing jigsaw piece, but Amanda couldn’t sign her work that way. She hadn’t earned it, when she’d failed so miserably.

Evie’s test wasn’t supposed to end in her death. 

How was Amanda supposed to succeed John when she couldn’t even run a trap by herself? How had she managed to fool herself into thinking she was anywhere near ready? Nobody was going to change because of her.

Amanda thought she’d made Evie see the error of her ways, to realize the importance of family, but even though she’d succeeded at her trap, she hadn’t actually learned anything. And now Amanda was rearranging her body in the bathtub to dissolve in acid.

It was a bitter reminder that for everything she and John poured into their tests, so few people actually had it in them to change. Even the ones who won their games.

It was what Amanda worried she was like on her worst nights, when all she could do was fuck up again and bandage herself up afterwards. For all the care John had shown her, for all of his limited time he’d dedicated to teaching her, sometimes she felt like she was still as broken as when she woke up in the reverse bear trap. 

And really, wasn’t this whole mess proof that Amanda was still as fucked up as ever? She actually thought that she could make it work with Evie. That she could somehow fake her way into being a normal person and having a happy relationship. But she couldn’t. She didn’t have it in her. She wasn’t enough.

She wasn’t even enough for John, and she was dedicating everything she had to him. Or she had been, before she let herself get distracted. 

She wouldn’t let that happen again. She’d prove that she could be enough, that John had made the right decision putting his faith in her, that his test had made her better.

If not…

Amanda glanced back at the body in the bathtub, the one that had belonged to someone she’d, however briefly, however foolishly, believed in. Trusted.

There was no if not. She had to.