Marlowe
I rode home again three days later, unable to wait any longer with the ceremony bearing down and a mystery still hanging unresolved between what I knew and what Dorian was still refusing to say.
He looked worse than I'd ever seen him — hollow-eyed, unsteady, the visible wreckage of whatever guilt had apparently been eating him alive since Marla talked him back from confessing it drunk in the middle of the night.
"I need the truth," I said, no preamble left in me. "All of it, Dorian. I'm done accepting half-answers and 'leave it alone.' Whatever you did, I need to hear it from you directly."
He stood there a long moment, visibly fighting something internal, and I watched twelve years of buried guilt finally, slowly crack open across his face.
"I could have warned him," he said,
