Lie. Again.

He left me standing in the entrance to the bar. And somewhere along the way, as I felt myself losing a grip on everything I’d fought to hold together—my family—and as the panic surged up and over, I lost all semblance of pride. I followed him in. Raised my voice in the dim quiet. “Does anyone know where I can find Tyler Ellison?”

The man with the whiskey coughed into his fist. I walked over to him, stood too close. “Do you know?” I asked, leaning so close that the liquor on his breath stung my eyes.

He held the glass between us like a shield, smiled as he raised it to his lips. “Nah, I’m just curious what he did to make a girl barge into a bar looking for him.” He laughed to himself.

The man with the beer ignored him. He frowned and tipped his glass toward me. “Patrick Farrell’s daughter, right?”

The other man went silent. I nodded.

“Ellison Construction’s got a project going at the railway. New station. Funded by the goddamn township.” He took a gulp of his beer, dropped it to the counter. “For the goddamn tourists.” The other man mumbled something about money and funding and streets and the schools. “My guess, you’ll find him there. How’s your dad?”

“Not good,” I said. “Worse. He’s getting worse.”

“You selling the house? That what I hear?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Everything was fluid again. Dad hadn’t signed the papers. But the house was just the tip of the thing now.

I turned to leave, and Jackson grabbed my arm. “Be smart,” he said.

And, like an echo, I heard Tyler whispering to Jackson down by the river. Be smart, he said, and then I stepped on a twig, and they both turned around, pretended they were talking about something else.

Jackson told the police he didn’t see her after the fair, Nic, Tyler had told me later. He claims he never saw her at all that night.

But that was a lie.

I saw Jackson and Corinne. After the fair. But if I said that . . . you had to understand the way things were. The stories people could weave from the few facts they had, the truths they pulled together from that box.

They needed someone to blame. Someone to vilify and put in a cell so they could feel safe again. Someone to play the part, be the monster.

I couldn’t tell that. It would be enough to close the box forever. I’d be sentencing him.

Jackson wasn’t some pushover who let Corinne wrong him time and time again. He wasn’t some angry kid who felt betrayed, like the investigation would have you believe. It had nothing to do with any baby, any fight. When Corinne turned on him, cut him down and made him push back, enough to push her away—he liked it.

I know this because we all did.

He liked it because of what came next—the phone call begging him to return. That phone message they played for all of us: Please. Please come back. The way she’d love him, surely, when he did. Nobody would ever love you so fiercely, so meanly, so thoroughly. And the parts of you that you wanted to keep hidden—she loved those most of all.

“Nic,” she’d said when my mom died, pulling me to her chest, crying herself. “I love you. I’d trade you one if I could. You know that, right?”

I clung to her, not speaking. Corinne would talk like that, like people were things to trade, pieces on a chessboard that we could move around, that we could control.

“Want to watch something burn?” she’d asked.

That night we went to the Randalls’ abandoned barn. She had a red container of gasoline that she shook out, tracing the perimeter.

She let me strike the match, and she held my hand as we watched it burn to the ground. We stood too close to it, so close we could feel each time a piece of wood caught, sparked, ignited.

She called Tyler to come pick me up, and told us to say we’d been together the whole night. “Go,” she said, right before she called 911. She took the fall for the barn all on her own. “I told them I was practicing how to make a fire. Like in the Girl Scouts. In case of emergency. It got out of hand.” Her smile, huge. The whole thing just a tiny favor. Six months of community service and the wrath of her father, a small gift to help me through my mother’s death.

How could I not love Corinne Prescott back then? How could anyone not? I liked to believe it was for things like this and not because I was drawn to the mean in her, or how she could destroy things without flinching—a dying bird, an abandoned barn. I liked to believe she did these things because she loved me, too.

I can see it all a little clearer now with the filter of time. How, if you tilt the frame and change the perspective, maybe she wasn’t taking the fall only for me. That maybe it was just one more link in a chain of IOUs, emotional blackmail that would one day be called up and cashed in.

I think Corinne believed that life could break even somehow. That there was an underlying fairness to it all. That the years on earth were all a game. A risk for a payoff, a test for an answer, a tally of allies and enemies, and a score at the end. I know now that everything we did or said, and everything we didn’t, was kept in a ledger in her mind—and always in the back of ours, too.

* * *

I CALLED DANIEL FROM the car on my way to find Tyler. He picked up on the first ring. “Hello?” he said, typing in the background.

“Tell me you were not messing around with Annaleise Carter.”

The typing stopped. “Jesus Christ, Nic.”

“Damnit, Daniel, are you kidding me? What the hell were you thinking? What the hell were you doing? And Laura—”

“I know you’re not lecturing me on fidelity, Nic. But no,” he said. “No.” More emphatically. But I didn’t believe him. This is what you say when you’re being questioned. This is what you cling to against all else, against all evidence. This is what you say, and you pray that someone will back you up.

I’d done it for him once before.

Ten years earlier, I’d heard Hannah Pardot asking my brother in the living room, “Were you and Corinne ever in any sort of relationship?” I pressed my ear to the grate in the bathroom floor and heard him swear: “Never. Never.”

When my turn came around, I repeated his words. Never, I said. Never.

“Nic? Are you listening to me?” Daniel’s voice tightened through the phone.

“Jackson said—”

“Jackson doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on. So do you need anything else, or were you just calling for the interrogation?”

“Okay. Okay.” I hung up, feeling sick to my stomach. Once again, I saw a missing girl in the center of a web. Jackson’s words twisting into a warning. Annaleise had been worming her way into the lives of anyone connected to Corinne Prescott. As if she’d been looking for something.