I didn't investigate anything. I just couldn't stop writing it down.

Nobody asked me to be the co-author. I sort of appointed myself, somewhere around the third week at Riverside, when I realized Evelyn was never going to tell this story the way it actually felt to live through. She'll give you the sequence of events, flawless, in order, defensible. She will not tell you what it felt like to stand in that hallway at two in the morning. Somebody had to.

I want to be clear that I'm not better at this than she is. I'm not better at any of it. I just do a different job. She finds out what happened. I try to explain why it mattered.

I've read her account of the same three months maybe a dozen times now, looking for the places where our versions disagree. There aren't many. That's either reassuring or the loneliest thing I know about her, and some days I can't decide which.

People ask this a lot, usually kindly, usually assuming there's a boring answer — a scheduling conflict, a change in direction, the ordinary reasons two people stop making something together. I used to give them the boring answer because it was easier than the true one.

The true one is that Evelyn and I don't speak anymore, and haven't since Olivia Hartwell's case closed — if "closed" is even the right word for what happened to it. I'm not going to lay out the whole thing here. Some of it isn't only mine to tell, and some of it I still don't have language for that doesn't sound like an accusation.

What I'll say is this: I believe a decision got made that shouldn't have been, and I believe Evelyn was the one positioned to make a different one. She has told me, in the handful of conversations we had afterward, that she went through the timeline more times than I'd want to count and keeps arriving at the same order of operations. I believe that she believes that. It hasn't been enough.

I still think Book One is good. I think it's good because we made it before any of this, back when we still trusted each other's instincts more than our own.

I didn't know Olivia Hartwell. That's the strange part of grieving someone this way — you inherit the shape of a loss that isn't quite your own, secondhand and still somehow heavy. I know her the way you know somebody through the people who loved them, which is to say: enough to understand exactly what was lost, and not enough to have done anything differently myself.

I don't write this to relitigate what happened. I write it because I think it's dishonest to run a blog about "the writer's side of things" and skip the one thing that actually changed how I write. I used to think Evelyn's distance from a case was a kind of strength. I still think that, most days. But I've also watched what it costs, up close, and I don't know how to hold both of those at once. So I'm not going to pretend I've resolved it. I haven't.

That I read her notes. All of them, whenever a new one goes up, same day it's posted. That I'm not doing this to check up on her — or I am, a little, but not the way that sounds.

That I don't think either of us was wrong about what we saw. I think we were wrong about what to do with it, in two completely different directions, and neither of us has figured out how to apologize for a decision we still believe we'd make again.

I'm not going to publish this one to her. I'm publishing it here instead, which is either cowardice or exactly the kind of thing a co-author is supposed to do — put the true version somewhere, even if the person it's about never reads it.

I'm Miles Reed. I co-wrote The Haunting of Riverside Academy with Evelyn Cross, in the sense that she lived it and I stayed up most nights turning it into something readable. I was there for the Academy. I wasn't there for what came after, not in any way that mattered, and I've spent most of these entries trying to be honest about what that costs both of us.

I'm not credited on the books that came after. That's not an oversight.