To Save Her I Became the Monster

After my best friend was raped and took her own life, I covered for the man who did it.

Lily’s mother fell to her knees on my porch, her forehead hitting the worn wooden planks as she begged me, but I just shut the door. When the townsfolk came with torches and threats, I let my dog bite them.

Ten years later, on the verge of death, my other best friend, Sloane Davenport, came back. Now the richest self-made woman in the country, she returned with the righteous fury of a god. The first thing she did was drag me to the center of the Havenwood town square and strap me into the Memory Extractor, a machine typically reserved for death row inmates.

“Wren Bishop, you filth,” she spat, her voice broadcast across the square. “You protected a rapist. Lily and I were fools to ever call you our friend.” Her words were acid. “Lily’s been gone for ten years, and for ten years you let her killer walk free.”

Her eyes, once so warm, were now chips of ice. “Today, I’m going to use the technology I developed to see exactly who you’ve been protecting. We’re going to watch your memories, Wren. All of them.”

But when the killer’s face finally materialized on the massive screen behind us, Sloane’s own face went dead white.

1

The spectacle Sloane orchestrated was immense. The entire town of Havenwood was packed into the square, a suffocating sea of bodies. News crews had set up tripods and satellite trucks, their live feeds plastered across every major network.

I was half-dead already, my organs failing, kept alive by a drip of medications and nutritional fluids. They hauled me from the hospice van like a convicted felon and secured me to a steel chair on the stage.

A man lunged from the crowd, his hands closing around my throat. “Wren Bishop, why did you protect him?” he roared, his face purple with rage. “You animal! You ruined my family! Why don’t you just die!”

My vision swam in black spots as I choked for air. The crowd erupted, a wave of pure hatred.

“That’s her! The heartless bitch! Her friend gets raped, and she knows who did it but stays silent!”

“Her friend jumped in the river, and she wouldn’t even open the door for the poor girl’s mother! Let her break her head on the porch!”

“She even sicced her dog on people! She’s disgusting!”

The insults washed over me, a filthy tide.

Sloane stood to the side, her brow furrowed into a knot of cold fury. Besides Lily’s family, there was no one on earth who hated me more than her. Ten years ago, the three of us—me, Lily, and Sloane—were inseparable. After Lily was defiled in the woods near my house and drowned herself in the river, our bond shattered.

It was all because of Lily’s suicide note. A single sentence: Wren saw him.

I became an accomplice.

And the truth was, I had protected him.

Sloane approached me now, her voice devoid of any warmth. “Wren, I’m giving you one last chance. Name him now. Confess to the police. It’s not too late…”

She leaned in, her voice dropping to a hiss. “But once I turn this machine on, the high-frequency pulses will make every bone in your body feel like it’s been ground to dust. There will be no more chances to save yourself.”

My face, already pale from sickness, lost its last trace of color. I thrashed against the restraints, my voice a raw croak. “Sloane, no! You can’t! You can’t see my memories!”

Sloane grabbed my hand, her grip like a vice. “Scared?” she sneered. “You don’t have a choice. I have to get justice for Lily.”

Tears streamed down my face as I begged her. “Sloane, please, listen to me. My memories can’t be made public. You’ll regret this!”

She let out a short, bitter laugh, her eyes bloodshot. “Regret? The only thing I regret is ever being your friend.”

Two of her security guards forced me back into the chair, the cold steel locking around my wrists and ankles. Ignoring my struggles, they slammed a heavy helmet onto my head. A thousand tiny needles pierced my scalp, sinking into my brain.

Pain, white-hot and absolute, seized me. My body convulsed, a scream tearing from my throat as my very soul felt like it was being ripped apart.

Even then, the crowd wasn’t satisfied. They hurled rotten vegetables and eggs at the stage, their curses relentless.

“Traitor! Backstabbing bitch! Go to hell!”

And on the giant screen, my memories began to rewind.

The first scene appeared before them all.

2

The first image: three days after Lily’s death.

I was being dragged before her casket at the funeral home, everyone screaming at me, demanding the killer’s name. They spat on me. They threw rocks. Hands grabbed my arms, tore at my hair until it hung in wild clumps. Fists rained down on me until my face was a swollen, bruised mess. I broke free and ran, the sound of the angry mob chasing me through the streets.

Ahead of me, the sky glowed orange. My house, the only home I’d ever known, was engulfed in flames, a bonfire built by their rage. I could only stand and watch, helpless.

Homeless, I fled with my dog, Buddy, into the deep woods of the ridges. But they found me. As I watched, screaming, they cornered Buddy and beat him to death with tire irons.

They cooked him over a fire.

I clutched a piece of his charred leg bone and sobbed until my throat was raw.

That year, an orphan with no one in the world, I was sixteen years old.

On the stage, Sloane stared at the image of my weeping, teenage face on the screen and laughed without humor. “Wren, you deserved every bit of it, didn’t you? Do you really think you were the victim here? Would any of that have happened if you hadn’t protected a monster? Of all the people in the world, you’re the last one who gets to feel sorry for herself. This was all your own doing.”

Others in the crowd chimed in.

“Shameless! Acting like she’s the one to pity.”

“Trying to get sympathy with this sob story? Pathetic! Covering for a criminal makes you a criminal! She should rot in hell!”

“Who does she think she’s fooling? Lily’s family was destroyed. Their daughter is dead, her mother lost her mind. Anyone is more pitiful than her!”

Just then, a girl’s bright laughter echoed from the screen.

“Lily! Slow down!”

Lily’s young, innocent face filled the display. We were on a snow-covered mountain, and she was running toward me, her eyes sparkling with joy.

“Heads up!” she yelled, tossing a snowball at me.

“My baby girl…” Lily’s father cried out, stumbling toward the screen. Looking at his daughter’s smiling face, he finally broke, his body wracked with deep, gut-wrenching sobs. In the ten years since Lily’s death, this once-jovial man had become a ghost, his hair turning white overnight. Every year, he went to the sheriff’s department and asked the same question: Have you found him yet? And every year, the answer was a sad shake of the head. Our town had no cameras back then, and my house was isolated. No one knew who had followed Lily into the woods that night.

Except for me.

In the memory, after our snowball fight, I knelt reverently before Spirit Rock, a local landmark where kids made wishes. “Please,” I whispered, my breath fogging in the cold air, “let my friends be healthy and happy, and let our friendship last forever…”

Seeing my earnest expression, Sloane’s control finally snapped. “You two-faced, hypocritical snake! You ungrateful parasite!”

She stormed onto the stage, jabbing a finger at my image on the screen. “How dare you remember our childhood! Who are you trying to fool with this act? For ten years, you never once told the truth. Do you have any right to call yourself our friend?”

As if on cue, the next memory showed me secretly throwing away a mango Lily had given me.

The crowd went wild.

“What the hell? She takes their food and then throws it out behind their backs!”

“Sloane and Lily were so good to her, and this is how she repays them? She’s nothing but a selfish, cold-hearted ghoul!”

Sloane knew I had a severe mango allergy.

But she didn’t explain that to the crowd. She let their insults continue.

“She probably never imagined Ms. Davenport would become the richest woman in the country and come back to settle the score!”

“Come on, Ms. Davenport, get on with it! We’re all waiting to see the killer’s face!”

Amid the jeers and curses, the scene on the screen shifted again.

3

Sloane’s heart-wrenching scream filled the air.

“Lily! Don’t you die on me! Lily!”

It was the day they pulled Lily’s body from the river. The rain was a cold, miserable drizzle. Sloane and I were kneeling on the muddy bank, our cries tearing through the gray air. Lily’s body was bloated and swollen, her skin icy and rigid. She looked nothing like the girl I remembered, the girl who loved to laugh and dress up.

I stumbled home in a daze, collapsing in a corner, sobbing uncontrollably.

“Ah!” I beat my fists against my chest, the pain of losing my dearest friend threatening to tear me apart.

On the platform, my eyes were squeezed shut, tears tracking silently down my hollow cheeks. My own broken scream echoed from the screen.

“Lily! Why did you do it? Why?”

My grief was a raw, gaping wound, a bottomless pit of despair.

The sight of my anguish on the screen stunned the crowd into a momentary silence.

“What’s going on?”

“Why does she look so heartbroken? How could she…”

Lily’s father’s voice cut through the confusion, dripping with venom. “Crocodile tears!” he shouted. “That year, my wife knelt on her doorstep, begging her, bashing her own head on the wood until it bled, and she wouldn't even open the door! She let her dog attack us! Is that the kind of person who feels grief? Lily was her friend since they were kids, and that’s how she treated the mother of her dead friend!”

Just then, Lily’s mother appeared at the edge of the square, her hair a tangled mess, clutching a porcelain doll. She was muttering to it, rocking it gently. “It’s okay, Lily. Don’t be scared, Lily.”

The crowd’s anger reignited.

Sloane’s face was a mask of conflicting emotions, shifting from pale to flushed. She rushed forward and grabbed my shoulders, shaking me violently. Her eyes were wild and red. “Look, Wren! Look what you’ve done! This is the tragedy you caused by protecting him! You’re an orphan, you had no one, so Lily and I took pity on you since you were seven years old! We were good to you! And this is how you repay us?”

Her hand flew up and cracked across my face. The sound was like a gunshot in the tense silence.

“You still want to play the victim?” she shrieked, her chest heaving. Unbidden, tears began to fall from her eyes, tears of pure, shattered agony. “You want me to feel sorry for you after you let Lily die? You think these memories will soften me?”

“Lily is dead!” she screamed, her voice breaking. “And the person who killed her… is you! It’s you, Wren Bishop!”

She shook me again, the hatred in her eyes enough to incinerate me. For her, Lily’s death had been a tsunami that had leveled her world, leaving behind an endless, desolate wetland of grief.

Suddenly, Sloane straightened up, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. In an instant, her sorrow was replaced by a chilling resolve.

“I’m telling you, Wren, I won’t stop until I find him. And when I do, I will send you to hell right along with that monster.”

Her face was grim as she signaled to the technicians. “Increase the extraction range.”

She was done watching my performance.

The technician hurried over to the console. The red needle on the dial shot up, and the pins inside the helmet drove deeper into my brain.

“Aaargh!”

A scream of pure agony ripped from my throat.

A powerful electric current surged through my mind, and flashes of white light exploded behind my eyes. I convulsed violently, my limbs straining against the iron shackles. Blood began to trickle from my hairline, dripping onto the cold steel of the chair.

The images on the screen flickered erratically. A classroom. A creek bed. A mountain path. All of them memories of the three of us—me, Sloane, and Lily—happy and together.

But there was nothing from the night Lily was attacked.

The crowd grew restless. The live-stream chat was a scrolling frenzy.

“What’s happening? Where’s the memory of the rape?”

“I thought she saw the killer!”

Sloane’s brow tightened. She turned to the technician, her voice low and dangerous. “What is this? Why can’t we find the memory of the attack?”

The technician wiped sweat from his forehead, stammering, “Ms. Davenport… it seems… she’s fighting the system. She’s refusing to let that memory be extracted.”

4

“What? Refusing?”

Sloane’s face was a picture of disbelief, her gaze turning venomous as she looked at me. She slammed her hand on a nearby table. “Wren! Even now, you’re still resisting? Who is so important that you’d protect them with your life? He’s a rapist!”

She had asked me the same question ten years ago.

When Lily’s note was made public, I became the town pariah. Everyone demanded to know who the killer was. Sloane’s faith in me crumbled in less than a day, moving from disbelief to doubt, then to outright accusation. She was the only one who knew I was hiding in a cave up on the ridge. And when the mob found Buddy, she stood by and watched. As they beat my dog to death, I begged her to stop, but she just picked up a heavy branch and brought it down on my head.

Blood streamed into my eyes, blurring my vision.

Her face was contorted with rage. “Wren, we grew up together. We treated you like a sister. What did you treat us as? For a rapist, you’re throwing away your best friends?”

I was nearly beaten to death that night. It was Sloane’s mother who finally dragged her away, her eyes wild with a fury I’d never seen before. Two days later, their family moved out of state. They never came back.

Now, Sloane’s eyes were just as cold, staring at me as if I were something vile.

She waved a hand dismissively, her voice sharp and final. “Continue. Widen the extraction field. I don’t care what it takes.”

The technician hesitated. “But, Ms. Davenport, her physical condition is extremely fragile, and she’s resisting with everything she has. If we continue to expand the extraction…”

“She might not survive it,” Sloane finished for him, a cold sneer on her lips. “Survive? I’ve spent the better part of my life and my fortune perfecting this technology for one reason: to find the truth. I don’t give a damn if she lives or dies. The world would be better off without trash like her.”

At her command, the technician shakily adjusted the parameters. The hum of the machine intensified, and the needles in the helmet plunged deeper.

“Aaaah!”

My scream echoed across the square. Blood poured from my nose, ears, and the corners of my eyes. My chest felt like it was on fire, and my body thrashed wildly in the chair.

The technician’s face was slick with sweat. “Ms. Davenport… should we continue? She… she’s not going to make it!”

Sloane stared at the screen, her expression unreadable.

“Continue,” she said, her voice a whisper of ice.

The machine roared. The screen flickered violently. My consciousness was fighting a losing battle. My screams were a horrifying soundtrack to the spectacle.

Sloane’s eyes were blood-red, and she shrieked at me, half-mad with desperation, “Wren, who was it? Who is worth this?”

Suddenly, her rage broke. She collapsed against me, her shoulders shaking with sobs, tears streaming down her face and onto my shoulder. “We were your friends, Wren… We were supposed to be your friends…”

Her body shuddered, her grief uncontrollable. The warmth of her tears soaked through my thin gown. Hearing her cry, a jolt went through me.

A sharp pain lanced through my chest. My friend, my Sloane, is crying.

I subconsciously tried to raise my hand, to wipe away her tears.

In that single moment of lapsed concentration, the memory I had guarded with my life broke free.

It flashed onto the screen.

The crowd gasped.

Sloane looked up in shock, her eyes widening. When she saw the familiar face on the giant screen, all the color drained from hers.

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