My suspicions about Krista helped me work through the pain. I hadn’t been able to find a single thing about a dead son in Krista’s online footprint (and nothing about what she put out there made her seem like some kind of broken woman with a chunk missing from her heart). To put it crudely, she looked just like any kind of piece of shit woman you might find hanging out in the bar in Missouri, Oklahoma or Kansas these days.

I wasn’t going to waste any more time on Krista. In less than 24 hours, she had gone from my celebrity crush/obsession to deepest, darkest fear and now back to an afterthought. So what if she was faking a murdered son? It didn’t really affect me and I’m sure she would get sick of it or get outed by someone else in the group sooner rather than later. It wasn’t my job to go after her.

I gnashed my teeth for the 12 minutes I had before the group meeting started, waiting to see Krista walk through that door. But she never came. The meeting started, we all told our stories, nibbled on our cheap cookies and sipped on our watery coffee then headed back on our separate ways.

My cell phone burned a hole in my pocket all the way back to Forsyth.

Why had Krista no-showed? Should I call her? Text her? Did she somehow find out that I was cyber stalking her? Had I “Liked” something of hers on Facebook?

My mind was a troubled ocean of doubt and fear.

I had finally settled on leaving the Krista situation alone unless it forced itself on me when I pulled into my driveway and finished chewing on the last of the fingernails I had left. The rest of my night was going to consist of checking the thick stack of mail I pulled out of my mailbox for the first time in two weeks, cueing up Netflix and hoping I could find a decent show to binge on until I fell asleep with Ranger by my side.

The stack of mail was mostly just junk and past due bills. I chucked all of it into the trash can except for a blank manila envelope about the size of a sheet of paper. I pulled the thing open and came face to face with a handwritten note scrawled in black ink.

It’s time again…

Well that’s comforting. Even in my moment of deepest terror, I couldn’t help but be cynical with myself. Getting the horrible morbid people who used to torment me for fun after Josh disappeared to get active again was just what I didn’t need in my life. I thought about the loaded pistol in the nightstand for the briefest of moments. No, this was just another horribly mean prank and that’s what these awful people wanted. For me to get so depressed from their torture that I decided to join Josh.

I wouldn’t give in. I tore it up and threw it away. Fuck those assholes.

The days went. The weeks went on. The meetings each Wednesday night went on with my stiff Orange Crush and vodkas, but Krista never showed up again or texted or called me.

The temptation to call or text Krista boiled for the first few weeks, but it slowly began to fade and my day-to-day life started to go back to about as normal as it could be.

Then I started to get the messages.