Book Five: Save Yourself — 3.

Daphne Nighswander moves from supermax to a rundown Quality Inn in Morgantown, finding comfort in the motel’s chaos that mirrors prison life. Time blurs for Daphne, and she is intermittently visited by a vision of her daughter Jayne, burned and split, who sits watching her sleep.

Settled in, Daphne resumes an obsession nurtured in prison: researching the Goodbye Six, the privileged group she blames for Jayne and Ronnie’s murders and for turning Tana against her. She devours Donovan McBride’s Greenland air-disaster memoir, first as a gripping read and then as evidence of something unnatural shadowing the group.

Online deep-dives and conspiracy threads reinforce a theme: wherever the Goodbye Six go, catastrophic fires follow—BA 238 in 1995, Cherokee Island’s destruction on Easter, and Black Cricket’s collapse, which killed inmates like Francine Trout, linked to the Cady Lewis case dear to Donna McBride. Daphne decides these patterns are not coincidence but proof the group is contaminated, perhaps devil-touched.

Daphne reframes her own survival—outliving Black Cricket—as a dark compensation and concludes that the Goodbye Six are shielded yet vulnerable. She compiles a mental target list, noting that Arthur Oakes and Donovan McBride are already dead.

Before leaving Morgantown, Daphne acts: she buys a Sig Sauer P365 and hollow-point ammunition from local junkies, calculating she has enough rounds to shoot each remaining target twice and anyone who interferes. Armed and resolved, she sets out to finish what she believes justice demands.