Ex in the Interrogation Room

When they brought me into the station, the wine stain on my dress still hadn’t dried.

The interrogation room lights were a hard, glaring white. Detective Quinn set a folder on the table and said we were waiting on the preliminary lab results. I thought I’d get at least five quiet minutes. Then the door opened again.

Ethan Cole walked in.

No suit jacket. Tie loosened. Eyes red like he hadn’t slept. The first look he gave me wasn’t the look you give someone who might’ve been a victim, too. It was the look you give a disaster once it finally has a shape.

“Was it you?” He stopped at the table, bracing both hands on the edge. “Clara—have you been waiting for this day?”

I stared at him, and for a half second my brain didn’t even catch up.

“Vivian is dead.” His voice shook. “Audrey, Nina, Belle—dead. You’re the only one who’s alive. What am I supposed to think?”

“You could start by asking like a normal person whether I was drugged,” I said.

His jaw tightened, like I’d hit a nerve, but then his face cooled over. “You always do this. Something happens, and you put yourself in the victim’s seat first.”

I almost laughed. He’d been like this in college, too. He’d been the one sneaking around with Vivian behind my back, and somehow it ended with him telling me I “had no class,” that I’d “made it ugly.”

The door opened again. Quinn came in, not bothering to pause our old breakup replay. She spread a few photos across the table.

“Preliminary results are back,” she said. “Glassware from the bar, the rim of the ice bucket, and part of the counter surface you wiped down last night—all tested positive for the same sedative-and-toxic compound mix found in the victims’ systems.”

My stomach dropped. “What do you mean, I wiped it down?”

Quinn slid a surveillance screenshot toward me. In it, I was inside the bar area, a towel in my hand, bent over while I cleaned up toppled glasses and spilled liquid.

“You did handle a key area,” she said.

“Because they egged me into cleaning it!” My voice jumped. “Audrey knocked the drinks over. Nina said since I was the only one standing steady, I should just wipe it up—how does that mean I poisoned anyone?”

“But you can’t prove you didn’t,” Quinn said.

Ethan snatched up the screenshot, looked once, then again. His breathing got heavier. “You touched the glasses. You touched the alcohol. And you’re alive.”

“I drank, too.”

“But you didn’t die.”

The room went quiet for a beat, like someone had deliberately placed that sentence in the center of the table and waited for me to run into it.

I stared at Ethan. “You really want to know why I was even there last night? Because Vivian invited me. Because she and her friends made me the entertainment all night. Old-photo games. Truth or dare. Forced shots. Dragging up every stupid thing from college again and again. You put me in that villa—wasn’t the whole point to see if I’d lose it?”

Ethan’s face looked awful, but he didn’t deny it. “You never let it go.”

“It’s you who never let it go,” I said. “I left. Vivian dragged me back.”

He looked at me, and whatever hesitation flickered there got shoved down by that familiar arrogance. “You think saying that makes anyone believe you didn’t hate her? Clara, in college you called her a thief in front of the whole club. You said she stole other people’s lives.”

“Because she did.”

“See?” He turned to Quinn, like he’d finally caught the exact expression he needed. “This is what she’s like. Everything that goes wrong is somebody else’s fault. Three years, four years—she’s still stuck in the same place. Vivian was about to get married. Career, connections, family—she had it all. And you?”

That hit harder than any photo. He wasn’t asking me. He was finishing the easiest conclusion for everyone: average girl, dumped ex, old resentment, finally snapped.

I gripped the edge of my chair so hard my fingers hurt, just to keep from throwing the cup of cold water in his face.

Quinn flipped open a fresh page of the report, her tone still level. “What we can confirm right now is that all four victims ingested the same type of compound mixture. Your fingerprints are on multiple key glasses. And you did, in fact, clean the bar area last night. Motive, access, opportunity—you have all three.”

I stared at the photos on the table, and for the first time I felt something close to suffocation—not because I couldn’t explain myself, but because the world had already picked a version that sold better than the truth.

Ethan lowered his voice, like a final blow. “Did you think that if Vivian was gone, everything could go back to how it was?”

I lifted my head and looked him straight in the eye. “From the day you chose her, nothing was ever going back.”

Quinn didn’t interrupt the way we held each other’s gaze. She only set her pen down softly and asked the question that cut deeper than the rest.

“Ms. Hayes,” she said, “if someone else did it… then why is it that four people died, and only you survived?”