“Yes, I did,” I said, and all the weight escaped my body.

I thought I might fall. I thought my heart might simply stop, or I might rise up in the air and fly, and this, this feeling, this was why there was such a thing as confession. This was why Roux’s game had worked at book club, why we all played, why we all said too much. To speak, to release, to let go, to let this truth be shared between our human bodies, breath and blood, in sunlight. I hated her, and I was almost in love with her, for making this moment. For knowing. For letting me say these words out loud, at last, at last, at last.

“Good,” Roux said. “Good. Now. How are you going to make it up to me?”

I blinked, disoriented still. “Make it up to you?”

“To me. Surely by now, you’ve guessed who I am?” Roux asked.

I shook my head, still puzzled.

“That night? It’s my first memory. I was in the back, strapped into my booster. I saw my mom die. I remember. I saw my babysitter staggering out of the car that killed her. Driver’s side. And it was you.”

I landed back in my body, hard, only to find that my bones had all gone rubbery and soft.

“You aren’t Lolly Shipley,” I told her. My hands came up to touch my head. When I thought of Lolly and baby Paul—and I tried not to ever, ever think of them—all I saw was clear blue water. No way to see past it.

“Tell me that you’re sorry.” Her eyes were so intense, boring into me, but I did not know them. They were the eyes of any blue-eyed stranger. “Tell me that you’re sorry that you killed my mom.”

I stepped back, gulping, sick and dizzy, my legs so weak I nearly lost my balance. She wasn’t Lolly. It was impossible. “You aren’t her.”

“How can you say that?” she asked. Her lower lip trembled. Unshed tears welled up, sparkling on her lashes. “How can you look right at me and deny me?”

My vision pinholed, the world tilted and spun, and Roux tipped sideways. No, I did. I was falling. I was under. Blue waves billowed around me, around Roux’s terrible, beautiful face, so close to mine, and I found Lolly after all. I saw her the way I used to see her when I lost control, early days, when the real worsts at my core would come unfolded, showing me everything I owed.

I saw Lolly in the water, holding Paul, struggling, kicking, trying to pull them both up. All the air leaving her, bubbles tumbling toward the surface and the sunlight, up to where she could not go.

But what had I done? What had I said?

Lolly sank into a blue so deep and velvet it was almost black. I saw bubbles rising, but Lolly, she went down. She went down fast, and I went with her, into a silent darkness.

6

I was lying on the floor. It was dry. No waves, no water. The blue I saw billowing around me was only the skirt of Roux’s long dress. My head was cradled in her lap. Had I fallen? Somewhere a baby was making noises. Not unhappy, but getting there. Readying to fuss.

Not Paul. Not Lolly. They were not here. They could not be. It was my baby. It was Oliver.

Roux peered down at me, saying, “Welcome back. You fainted,” but that could not be right. I wasn’t the kind to faint.

From a thousand miles away, I heard my front door bang open. Someone was calling for me. “Amy?”

“Shit!” Roux jerked, looking up. “Is that Kanga? Does she not knock?”

“Amy?” It was Charlotte, calling from the foyer, coming for our walk.

Roux pushed at me, rolling me away so she could stand. I flopped back and lay flat, sick and dizzy. She bent at the waist, leaning over so her eyes met mine, talking in an urgent near whisper. “Tell her— No, too complicated. Get rid of her, fast, and come see me. Today, or I swear to God . . . You owe me. You owe me, and you are going to pay.”

I knew what she was then. Too late, I understood her game.

Char’s footsteps were coming closer, down the hall, pausing by the stairs to call up, “Amy? Are you up there?” and Roux was running lightly to the back door. She slipped through it and was gone.

“Ahmamamama,” Oliver said to me, reaching for me, close to crying.

I sat up, groggy and sick, and I reached back. Of course I did.

But, God, what had I done?

Charlotte took one look at me, half lying on the floor, my back propped against the sofa, and drew up short, still safely in the kitchen.

“Oh, Lordy, is it flu?”

Ruby caught any stomach flu that came within a hundred yards of her.

“Just an awful headache,” I assured her, and Char, that saint, offered to watch Oliver so I could go to bed. She wouldn’t take no for an answer either.

“Do you know how many babysitting hours I owe you? I’m at least a million in the hole. And we like Obbiber, don’t we Ruby? Get a nap, but you have to pick him up by two, okay? Ruby has her checkup.”

I let her take him, closing my eyes while she gathered diapers and baby food and frozen breast milk. I was trying not to scream and scream and scream.

They finally went banging their awkward way out the front door, Char managing two strollers. Even before it closed behind them, I was scrambling to my feet. I went directly to the pantry, Roux’s voice an echo in my head.

You owe me. You owe me, and you are going to pay.

There, in a Tupperware container on the second shelf, were the stale remains of last week’s batch of blondies. Only four, thanks to Maddy and Luca. I pulled the lid off, let it drop, and ate them methodically, one after another, hardly tasting them. When they were gone, I tipped the Tupperware back and poured the crumbs into my mouth, then let it fall to the floor, too.

This was about money. She’d come at me, truth in her hands, wielded like a weapon. But she wasn’t Lolly, and she did not want justice. She wanted a check.

She’d seen the accident; she knew I was a Smith. We’re both one-percenters, she’d said, pretending she only meant scuba, when we were both from a neighborhood where the houses sold for multiple millions. As a child she’d seen Mrs. Shipley die, watching from a window. Too young for the police to question her hard, old enough to never lose the memory. Her expensive clothes and car and face, so at odds with the Sprite House, meant that something had gone bad wrong in what had begun as a very privileged life.

Now she needed money. She knew my family had it, so she’d come to find me, pretending to be someone I owed a debt that I could never pay. It was smart, and cold, and utterly amoral. What wouldn’t I give if Lolly Shipley asked?

I shook my head, sick and so dizzy. My past was loose, alive inside me, roiling in my head and in my guts like a thick, tangible howling.

I took down Maddy’s Saturday-only cereal, shoveled a handful into my mouth. It was like eating sugar-crusted Styrofoam, sterile and chemical. There was no pleasure in it, but I kept putting it away inside myself. It stopped me thinking. I ate it until my tongue burned from the sweetness, until my belly was a hard ball pressing at the band of my yoga pants. I thought that I might vomit. I leaned my head against the shelf, shaking.

I was not this girl. This was Amy Smith, and Roux had conjured her. Roux had pulled her out to play.

This was a game to her. When she first told me the rules, I’d been thinking small and personal. I worried about neighborhood politics, as if she were Tate trying to take over Charlotte’s book club. I’d worried what would happen if she gossiped. Then she’d come to me saying “justice” and caught me up in that moment. It had all felt so huge. The confession she’d peeled from me, incomplete as it was, had felt so freeing.

But this game was larger than a petty power play and smaller than real karma. You owe me, she had said. Twice. You are going to pay.

Sick from all the sugar, I looked at the almost empty box of cereal. I surely did not owe her this. I dropped the box on the floor, the last Froot Loops scattering out.

Thirty seconds later I was upstairs pulling on an old lime-green tankini, throwing a loose cotton dress on over it. I hurried to the guest-room closet, where I stowed all our dive equipment, and started packing up, gear checking as I went. I had two full tanks on hand. I knew they were nitrox, 32 percent, but I calibrated my analyzer and tested the gas content anyway.