I find my fingers knotted together as I sit in the counseling center's waiting room. Normally, there's at least one other person sitting beside me, but at six o'clock at night, it is empty. The air is quiet, not filled with the normal energy that swirls through the hallways as therapists and clients walk in and out of the waiting room. I'm lucky Amber works late hours on Wednesdays. Otherwise, I probably would've had to have waited a week to see her.

A week would've been too long, especially after what happened today.

Amber rounds the corner, her short frame peeking around the doorframe.

"Are you ready?" she asks. I slide off the chair and pad numbly into her office. She shuts the door, reclining on her sofa chair. "How have you been?"

"Not great," I choke out. It's crazy how much I can degrade in such a short period of time.

"Tell me what's going on."

The story pours out of me. I tell her about checking the messages in the app, which spiraled into me discovering all these messages on my phone that I don't remember sending. Even worse, whoever I was texting was going to meet me at the Arboretum at the same time as the group project. Now, I'm terrified that I really did kill him, Will Renner. I was right there when he died. I felt his life fade, passing from this world to the next.

I'm sobbing by the end. Amber looks on, her jaw slightly parted and her eyes intensely focused on me with the deepest sorrow I've ever seen. She'd been able to talk me down before from all my fears, but this time, there's no way around it. The messages on my phone are the nails in my coffin.

"Will they give me the death penalty?" I ask, shaking.

Amber shakes her hand. "No, of course not. They don't even give it out to many adult killers, let alone a child."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Will they send me to prison? Will I rot there for the rest of my life?"

"No, you're not going to prison." Amber thinks for a moment. Her gaze circles the room, the table, the lavender-diffusing lamp. "Can I see these messages for a moment?"

My brow creases slightly. But reluctantly, my shaking hand dips to my pocket. "S-sure."

I pull out my phone, resisting the urge to smash it into pieces on the floor. I unlock it and hand it to Amber. She glances over the messages in SoulDate.

"Do you know what you were doing at these various times?" she asks. "When these different messages were being sent?"

I consider her question. I hadn't really thought about that before.

"You mean... like creating an alibi for myself?"

"Exactly."

I stretch out my hand and she places it back in my hand. My eyes skim over the various times.

The first ones were sent at nine oh-five on Monday morning.

"Well, I would've been in my European History class during the first round." I lick my lips. Tears and snot dripping from my nose taste like salt on my tongue. "Then the next round came on Wednesday during lunch. I actually lost my phone that day, so all the messages sent in the afternoon probably weren't sent by me."

"When did you find your phone again?"

"Tuesday morning. I believe I was in Chemistry when I found it caught in one of my folders."

"Do you remember putting it there?"

I frown. "No. But then again, everything gets jumbled up in my bag." My eyes return to the messages. "The last ones came during lunch and then after school on Friday."

Amber nods slowly. "So, even if we're just talking about the class ones and the Wednesday ones, you couldn't have sent those messages."

"Then who did send them?"

Amber hesitates before shrugging. "Have you told the police about this yet?"

"Not yet. I'm too frightened. The evidence is too much against me."

Slowly, Amber nods. "I see. So what will you do?"

"I don't know." A long silence permeates the room while I try to get a hold of my thoughts. "Y-you're probably right that I didn't send those messages. But it's on my phone. I really don't see any other solution."

Amber's jaw tightens, shifting slightly to the side. "But logically, it couldn't have been you."

"Logically." I let out a humorless laugh. "Yet my brain won't accept it. What if I did send those messages? My phone was in my bag the whole time. Just because I don't remember doesn't mean I didn't do it."

Amber raises an eyebrow. "Well, why don't we sit with that? The thoughts that you did send those messages."

Tears well up inside me. Before I know it, I'm sobbing into my cupped palms. It's uncontrollable, irreconcilable.

"I have to tell the police," I wail. "They have to have all the information they need to investigate properly."

"Now hold on, Madelyn. They can't look at your phone without your permission. They would need a search warrant in order to force you to hand it over, which they can't get without probable cause."

"But they do have probable cause. I was right there."

"That is not probable cause."

"Well, I must go to them and not withhold information. The police probably have Will's phone. They'll find the messages. Since I was mixed up with the dating app last time, they may suspect that the same thing occurred again. I'm better off going forward now, rather than waiting."

Amber inhales a deep breath. "Do you really think it's necessary?"

"It's the only thing to do. I can't stop thinking about the messages, about Will, about..." I burst into tears again.

I can't stop thinking about the deaths I caused.

"This is the only way to quiet the voice in my head. It will never go away, never leave me alone for as long as I live. If I don't turn over the evidence against me, I could never live with myself, for what I've done."

Amber inhales a breath. She stares thoughtfully at me for a long moment. "Is that how you want to live?"

"Of course not! I don't want to be a killer. I just want these thoughts to leave me alone."

"You want to forget this ever happened," Amber says.

"Yes!" Tears stream down my cheeks. "I want to forget and never remember again."

Amber nods to herself. Another pause.

"Why don't you delete SoulDate?" she asks.

"I—" I don't know how to tell her that it may be important to my investigation, the one I never told her about.

"It might help," Amber says. "Get the app out of sight and mind."

"I can't. The evidence..."

"Isn't as incriminating as you might think. You thought you lost your phone, remember? Now isn't it a stretch to think you might've accidentally texted that boy? And surely your history teacher would remember you sneaking on your phone during class."

My head swims too much for me to process her words, so I just nod.

"Why don't you delete it?" Amber asks. "Right here and now. Cleanse your mind of that toxicity."

My mouth twists to the side. She has a point, but I also don't want to get rid of crucial evidence that can never be brought back. If nothing else, it could nail my fate as the killer. If I'm a killer, don't I deserve justice?

"I—" The words don't come. I have no argument against hers, other than that sickening feeling that something is wrong. It's so deep in my bones, I can barely identify it, barely articulate what's wrong.

"You have an account, correct? It can always be brought back. But for right now, I think deleting that app will be best for your mental health. Give yourself a few days to process what happened. The messages can always be retrieved at a later point. But right now, you need to clear your headspace and give yourself time to think."

I inhale a deep breath. "Okay." I pull out my phone, making sure that it is angled just right so she can't see what I'm doing, but also so that she isn't suspicious as to why I'm hiding the screen from her. Then, I open up the settings of SoulDate and enable all notifications from the app. What got me into the previous mess was disabling them. If anything more happens with this app, I want to be informed.

"There, all done." I press the power button and slip my phone back into my jean pocket.

"How do you feel?" Amber asks.

"A little lighter," I say. At least the app won't be doing anything weird behind my back.

"That's good. That's really good." Amber reaches out, taking my hand in hers. Her left hand lands on my shoulder, and she looks deeply into my eyes. "I hope you feel better soon."