Hope stood in the back. She didn't want to be here. No, scratch that. She didn't want anyone else to be here.

They all stood around Lizzie's casket quietly. Nobody dared speak.

There was no funeral service, but maybe it was better that way. The few people who had cared about Lizzie in life had nothing nice to say about her in death. A quiet burial was the proper way to go. Only Alaric cried. Josie, MG, and Landon had all been drained of their tears over the last few days. And Hope ... Hope was pretending that she was one of the stone statues around them. Unmoving. Unfeeling.

She looked down at her phone again. Still no answer to her messages.

I know you're not Lizzie.

You're not going to get away with pinning this on her.

She was my best friend motherfucker. She wouldn't do the things you did.

If you think I'm even gonna to see you as enough of a human to be capable of feeling anything remotely like love towards you, you're wrong. You've lost.

You're not dead. Answer me.

Hello? I know you're there.

I hope someone did kill you.

Fuck you.

Hope checked her phone every five minutes for over a week. Never an answer. Never so much as a Read notification. She was starting to feel insane.

Why would her secret admirer ghost her? She thought the whole point was to win her over. Did they realize that they had gone too far? Was that never their real goal at all? Was it all some sick game?

Was it ... really Lizzie?

No. Hope knew it wasn't. She remembered that day in the parking lot. She remembered how scared Lizzie was of being the next victim. How vulnerable. She wasn't that good of an actor.

But the evidence was admittedly really damning.

She waited, for weeks. She waited for a text or a note or a present or even a prickling feeling across the back of her neck like she was being watched.

But nothing.

Weeks slipped into months. Was she really free? Were they gone? Did they ... give up?

Hope fell back into what felt like a false sense of security. She went back to painting, albeit much darker, much more gruesome stuff. It felt good to get back to it.

Every night, she crawled in bed with Landon and things were ... fine. It felt normal, if she didn't think about everything that had happened and all the people who should have been there with her that weren't.

As much as she had wished that things would just go back to normal throughout the whole ordeal ... suddenly, she didn't want things to go back to normal. It seemed like everyone around her had no problem pretending like everything was fine.

She hated that everything was just like it was before, as if nothing had changed.

As if she hadn't changed.