I had been warned plenty of times that I wouldn't get bail. That I was a flight risk and that they were unlikely to let someone who had been accused of two murders in as many months leave without supervision.

I was hopeful, though. Ludacris. That I was still hopeful.

Brianne Hotchky agreed to represent Rebecca as well as me, so they put our bail hearings together. It didn't mean we'd both get the same ruling, but it meant that they didn't have to go through the process for two women being charged with the same crime, twice.

My bail hearing before the first trial was a joke. I was a twenty-one-year-old with no prior record, an expensive lawyer, and a well-recognized last name. They didn't care if I waited for my trial date from home.

I wasn't so sure that this hearing was going to be quite so simple. I still had all of the things I had before, minus the spotless record. Now, I had the mistrial of murdering a man on my record. I hadn't been acquitted. The trial had just...ended.

Maybe you're wondering what's going on with Rebecca or thinking that I haven't mentioned her enough thus far. That's not unfair. But I promise, we'll get to Rebecca soon enough. It's not my fault that I don't want to write about her as much as she wrote about me on her stupid damning-evidence blog.

Not that I resent her at all. She wouldn't have had a blog to write if I hadn't killed a man.

But I digress.

><><><

"Ms. Hotchky, are you defending Miss Abrams today?"

"Yes, as well as Miss Eaves." Brianne stood while addressing the judge. Kennedy had forgotten how loud the little room with the bail hearing judge was. People bustling around, yelling at each other, public defenders trying to understand what their client had even done before they got called up to the judge.

It was chaos. Kennedy had found that she didn't do well with chaos.

"Hey, you're fine." Rebecca muttered as Kennedy began breathing a bit heavier. The two girls were sitting side-by-side on the bench in the first row, ready for the judge to hear their cases. Brianne was still standing, waiting for the judge to continue speaking. The plaque in front of his podium read, Judge Robert A. Bruntwick. A terrible name.

"You're fine." Kennedy told Rebecca, "We still don't know about me."

Rebecca sighed but didn't disagree.

This is probably the only time our clothes have ever matched, Kennedy thought. Brianne had brought them both black suit pants and white button-down shirts to wear to their hearing. The only difference was their shoes: Kennedy wore out-of-character black ballet flats that looked like they had crawled right out of 2014 while Rebecca had on five-inch maroon pumps. The girls were almost the same height.

"Very well," Judge Bruntwick said, nodding towards the two girls, "Miss Eaves, please approach the bench."

Kennedy watched Rebecca stand and join Brianne in front of the judge. She couldn't hear their words over everything going on in the room, but the judge kept looking back and forth between Brianne and Rebecca, not saying a word himself. After four and a half minutes, the judge cleared his throat and Kennedy could finally hear over the ruckus.

"Bail is set at $20,000. Miss Abrams, you're next."

Rebecca returned to her seat while Kennedy stood, gulping down her breaths as she went. The entire room so it's colder than it had just seconds ago, and a shiver ran down her spine. she stepped up beside Brianne, and faced the judge with what she hoped was a confident and innocent expression.

"Miss Abrams," Judge Bruntwick said, "do you agree to have Ms. Hotchky defend you in this bail hearing?"

Kennedy nodded.

"Yes, of course."

"Very well." He glanced down at his notes, "Ms. Hotchky, your client is facing her second murder charge of the month. What reasoning can you give for her to get out on bail? I would consider Miss Abrams to be quite the flight risk at this point."

Kennedy wanted to argue; she wanted to convince the judge that she wasn't going anywhere, that she would stay right in her apartment and never leave until the trial began. She wanted to explain to him that none of this was her fault, that she had been roped into this against her will, that this time, she hadn't done it. At this time, it was different. Everything was different. It all just looked the same.

"Your Honor, Miss Abrams is not a flight risk. Having been through a trial this very month, as you've mentioned, my client understands the importance of obeying the laws and taking her probation seriously. She knows the severe consequences that can come from disregarding the law with a probable upcoming trial." Brianne shot Kennedy a quick look—a look so quick that the judge didn't seem to notice a thing.

Kennedy understood the look. The look meant, 'you better make everything I say the truth.'

If she got out on bail, Kennedy planned on holding fast to everything her lawyer was saying.

Judge Bruntwick didn't say anything. His eyes bore into Kennedy's, as if he could predict whether she would try to flee based on her expression in that precise moment.

"Bail is denied. The defendant will await her trial from jail. Next!"

Kennedy was sure she had heard wrong. Either that, or she was dreaming. She was sound asleep in her bed at her apartment, and everything from the past week had been one long, awful dream. Lydia hadn't killed Jaxson. Kennedy hadn't been arrested.

She would wake up any second now. If only her arm would stop hurting.

"Kennedy. Move."

Kennedy flinched at Brianne nudging her in the side, away from the judge and back towards where two security officers were waiting to return her to her jail cell. Her left forearm stung, and she looked down to see that she had pinched herself so hard that she drew blood.

"No. No, this isn't happening." Kennedy muttered. Brianne led her towards the security officers. Her eyes darted between them and the side door. She knew that it led outside. She knew it led to possible freedom.

But before anything could come of that thought, one of the officers was cuffing her hands behind her back and Brianne was promising to come visit later in the day. Rebecca's voice was nowhere to be found.

><><><

Kennedy was eighteen. A senior at an objectively terrible high school in Rockville, Maryland. Jeremy had started high school that year. Anna was just a wide-eyed sixth grader who didn't yet know that junior high was an absolute nightmare.

Her parents had divorced two years earlier, right before her sixteenth birthday. Anna had only been nine years old. Too young to remember the fighting and affairs. Jeremy remembered a bit—he was thirteen at the time. But Kennedy remembered everything. She remembered every angry whisper when her parents thought she was asleep. She remembered every part of the browser history on the family computer: 'how to know if your husband's cheating' 'how to catch a cheater' 'signs of cheating' 'divorce lawyers Rockville Maryland.'

She remembered when her parents finally decided to get divorced, and the screaming match that led up to it. She remembered hearing a loud smack before silence. And then her mother's voice.

"And just for that, I'm getting primary custody."

Kennedy learned later that her mother had videoed the argument, until she goaded Kristopher into slapping her across the face. And she held that video over his very rich, very successful, very prideful head.

Manipulation was the Abrams family's weapon of choice.

Kennedy hated going back and forth between her parents' homes. She hated that her dad had moved to northern Virginia and married the first person stupid enough to hook up with him at a sketchy bar. She hated that her stepmother of four months kept her father even more removed from his children's lives than he had been before.

She especially hated that she still had to go through a year of high school before she could get out. Get out of Rockville, move far away, and start over. Not be the spoiled rich kid whose parent's divorce made local headlines. Not be the stepdaughter of Lydia Farrow-Abrams, former model and current trophy wife.

Kennedy dreamt of her potential college life during every free moment she had. She dreamt of the friends she'd make, the boys she'd date, the classes she would take. The apartment she would move into. The degree she would receive. She was determined to never return to the prison that was her mother's house.

><><><

Sometimes Kennedy wondered if everything she was going through was some sort of karmic punishment for consistently referring to her mother's house as a 'prison' for the majority of her high school career. As if the universe had said, 'you think that's a prison? I'll show you a prison' and then thrown her in actual prison.

She missed her siblings. Jeremy was eighteen and in his senior year of high school. Anna was fourteen and just a little freshman. Kennedy had missed so much of her life. And now she might never see her again.

Kennedy Abrams had never been one to deal in regrets. She made researched, calculated decisions and knew that those decisions would sometimes have unintended consequences. She didn't regret her decisions, even when their consequences involved jail.

The only decision Kennedy Abrams regretted was not making an effort to know her siblings. That she might spend the next chunk of her life, or the rest of it, in a jail cell, never knowing them. Never developing a relationship with Anna. Never caring to ask Jeremy about anything outside of gossip about their father. Now, it was too late. If your older sister never tried to reach out to you, why would you reach out to her when she's in jail for her second supposed murder of the month?

Kennedy stared at the wall of her cell, across from her cot. It was bare and grey. No character, no intrigue.

Will I be in here for so long that it'll eventually have decorations?

The door of her cell was all bars, so she could see straight out of it. She had heard one of the guards saying that if she was found guilty, they would put her in one of those rooms where the door is made of concrete, and it only has a tiny, barred window that the guards close at night. Cut off further from the world.

But for now, she could see. She could see across the hall from her, where another twenty-something woman was sitting on the ground, leaning up against her cot. Eyes closed; arms crossed. Kennedy wondered what she was in for. She wondered if the woman had already gone through her trial and knew how much longer she would be locked inside this prism of metal bars and concrete walls.

Her bail hearing had ended hours ago. Since the security officers had led her back to her cell, she had been sitting in the same position on her cot—crisscrossed legs, hands resting palms-down on her knees, gaze shifting every few minutes from the woman across the hall to a specific spot on the wall in front of her. And then back again.

"Abrams."

Kennedy jumped at her name. a guard she didn't recognize was looming over her, already inside her cell. She hadn't heard a thing.

"You have visitors."

Kennedy walked silently out of her cell and followed the guard to a room where she had met with Brianne a few times before. Her hands were chained to the table she was placed at.

"They'll be in soon."

Kennedy nodded, silent. She hoped it was someone from her family. Jeremy, Anna, even her mother. Anyone who could hug her and tell her it would be alright. Anyone who she would believe if they said that.

"Hey, Ken."

The one voice she wouldn't let call her that name.

A/N: Anyone guess who the voice belongs to?