Tyler Galpin had been locked away in Willow Hill since the end of the last school year. For months, his name had been whispered like a curse in the halls of Nevermore and in every corner of Jericho. Tyler. The same Tyler who had once been the boy she thought she knew better than anyone else. The same Tyler she had loved for two years. The boy with the gentle smile, the kind eyes, and the way he made her feel like she was the only one in the world that mattered.

Before everything unraveled, he had been the sweetest soul she had ever known. She could still remember how his laugh warmed her chest, how his hand always found hers so naturally, how he seemed to carry sunlight with him wherever he went. But all of that changed when Marilyn Thornhill revealed the truth. When she woke the Hyde that had been lurking inside him, waiting to claw its way to the surface.

At first, she noticed small things. Tyler wasn’t the same. She told herself he was just tired, that things would be okay, because they always had been. Until the truth came crashing down on her and on everyone else. Until the killings. Until her Tyler was gone, ripped away by something monstrous, something she could never have imagined living inside him.

When he was taken away and locked inside Willow Hill, and she had forbidden to visit. But she never stopped wondering. Deep down, she never stopped hoping. Because no matter what anyone said, no matter what he had done under the Hyde’s control, she still felt that her Tyler was in there somewhere. If only Thornhill hadn’t woken that side of him, maybe things could have been different. Maybe she could have saved him.

It was late one night when she finally saw him again. She had been staring absently out her bedroom window when the shadow shifted in the yard below. At first, she thought she was imagining it, her tired mind playing tricks. But then he stepped into the pale wash of moonlight, and her heart stuttered. Tyler.

Her breath caught, her chest tightening as her eyes locked on him. He looked nothing like the boy she remembered. His clothes were torn and dirty, his face pale, his eyes sunken with exhaustion. His hair was longer, wild, and unkempt. He looked like someone who had crawled his way out of hell itself. Yet even through the sharp edges of his ruined appearance, she still saw him. Her Tyler.

Fear shot through her, not of him—never of him—but of what his presence meant. How had he gotten here? How had he escaped Willow Hill? The thought chilled her, because if he was here, standing outside her window, then something had gone terribly wrong.

When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse, broken, and trembling with a mixture of desperation and relief. He told her everything. He told her about the days and nights in Willow Hill, about the endless torment of being locked in a place where he was treated like nothing more than a beast. He told her about the Hyde, about the battle inside his own mind, and about how Wednesday Addams had played a part in setting him free.

She listened, her hands trembling at the windowsill, her heart torn between shock and sorrow. His words tumbled out in ragged bursts, the weight of them pressing down on her until she could barely breathe. He looked terrible, beaten down and broken, but the way his eyes found hers, pleading, searching, begging her to see him, made her chest ache.

Everyone else might have seen a monster standing in the dark that night. But she didn’t. She could never.