…a sleek, black hardcover book. The dust jacket was minimal, bearing only a title in stark silver lettering: The Quarry.<\/p>\n
But it wasn’t the book that made the blood drain from my face. It was what lay nestled in the packing peanuts beneath it.<\/p>\n
It was a tarnished, soil-caked silver pocket watch. My pocket watch. The one with the broken clasp that had slipped from my coat pocket the night David disappeared five years ago. The one I had spent three frantic, rain-soaked hours looking for by the edge of the abandoned limestone pit before finally giving up, convincing myself it was buried too deep in the mud for anyone to ever find.<\/p>\n
My hands trembled as I picked up the book. The spine cracked sharply\u2014a brand-new, unread copy. I flipped past the title page to the dedication.<\/p>\n
“To my sibling, who taught me a valuable lesson: Fiction requires imagination. True crime only requires a shovel.”<\/p>\n
I turned to the prologue. It didn’t start with a whimsical description of a fictional town or a cast of made-up characters. It started with the exact coordinates of the limestone pit. It detailed the weather that night\u2014a heavy, unseasonal downpour\u2014and the precise make and model of my car.<\/p>\n
Page by page, she hadn’t written a story; she had compiled a dossier. She documented the argument, the struggle, the panic, and the clumsy, desperate cover-up. She described the way I paced my living room the next morning, the lies I told the police, and the fake tears I cried at David’s memorial service.<\/p>\n
She hadn’t been waiting tables for the last three years. She had been playing detective. She had been digging.<\/p>\n
A small, cream-colored envelope slipped from between the middle pages and fluttered to the floor. I dropped the book to pick it up. Inside was a single, handwritten note on her personalized stationery, alongside a flash drive.<\/p>\n
I took your advice, her elegant handwriting read. I stopped making things up. It turns out, I\u2019m much better at writing non-fiction. Advance copies went out to my publisher, The New York Times, and the local precinct this morning. Don’t bother running.<\/p>\n
I stared at the heavy pocket watch in my trembling hand, the ticking long dead, as the distant, undeniable wail of police sirens began to echo down my street.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
…a sleek, black hardcover book. The dust jacket was minimal, bearing only a title in stark silver lettering: The Quarry. But it wasn’t the book that made the blood drain … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42197,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42247,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42196\/revisions\/42247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/readupdatemystory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}