“Neither do I. I owe ‘the universe.’ Isn’t that what you said? Why is Tate going to loan the universe her pool?”

“Touché!” Roux said, almost admiringly, and that weird head tilt was back. Birdlike, or maybe reptilian. She smiled, and it was genuine. She actually did like me, I thought, in her odd, carnivorous way. If we’d met in California, I would have liked her back. Now she leaned in, confiding. “I’ll say this—it’s not karma with Tate. It’s just psychology. Tate thinks she has a nicer house than me, what with the pool and that brand-new IKEA dining set.” Her voice dripped disdain, but it was wholly aimed at Tate—and possibly most of the other women in our neighborhood. I had the sense that I was outside it. She was speaking to me almost as a peer. “She’s competitive, especially with other women, so she’ll like it that I have to ask for a favor. I’ll make it sound as if I’m coming, too. She wants me to see her house, her things, and compare them with this shit here. She wants a win with me, and so far she’s zero for try-hard.”

That sounded like the Tate I knew. It didn’t let Phillip off the hook, though. Roux might be covering for Tate exactly because Tate was a client, which left me still on the fence about what, if anything, I should say to Charlotte. It also sounded as if Roux would not come with Luca for lessons. I didn’t ask, though. It might be bait, like when she’d asked me how long it would take to liquidate the money. I wasn’t going to snap fast at any opening she dangled. I was learning.

“Fine,” I said, flip as I could. Maybe I could make it work for me—get Luca talking about his mother. He might let something useful slip. “He can start the book work today. Can you line up Tate’s pool for tomorrow and Friday? Then Saturday and Sunday, we’ll drive over to the jetties for his open-water dives.” Maddy was going to be ecstatic about scuba all weekend with Luca, so that was a teeny upside.

Roux was shaking her head, though. “No jetties. Book us on a boat. You have some prime wrecks around here. I love a wreck dive.”

She grinned at the face I made. Not what I wanted, to spend the last of my precious days out on the ocean with her, but I had no better option at this moment.

“Fine,” I said again.

“After this, when our paths cross, we won’t discuss our arrangement. Even when we’re alone. We’ll chat about casserole recipes that use those yummy cans of soup, or whatever passes for banter around here. Then Monday meet me here at noon. You’ll transfer the funds to an account I give you, and I’ll be gone. Really gone. Won’t that be nice?” Roux asked, stretching, lithe and pleased in her body at the thought of all my money. She straightened, leaned in again, and captured my gaze. “Or you screw with me. And I blow your life and this town, easy as I blew your lawyer.”

“Fine,” I said. It was starting to feel like the only word I knew.

“I’ll go tell Luca to get ready. You can take him with you.”

I shook my head. I had plans.

“I need to go to Divers Down. I have to borrow some equipment,” I told her. It was even true. Like most scuba junkies, I had a walk-in closet’s worth of backup dive gear, but I needed to pick up full tanks and a new open-water book with blank quizzes. Plus, every wet suit and BCD I had at home was cut for women.

She sized me up, and then she came to a decision. “Okay. I’ll send him your way in an hour or so.”

I stood, keeping my shoulders tense so I didn’t telegraph relief. I couldn’t let her see how much I wanted this stolen hour. She was taking me seriously now; twice today she’d even come close to confiding in me. She’d dropped her provocateur’s mask, as if I were her peer. I threw a final glance over my shoulder, trying to look nervous and resigned. I needed her to underestimate me. I hoped she was. If she was estimating me exactly right, then I was screwed.

I went home, got my Subaru, and headed out of the neighborhood. If I was really going to do this thing she called playing and I called fighting for my life, I had to go to Waverly Place. I pointed my car north, away from Divers Down, away from the ocean, driving myself directly toward my own long-buried past.

9

Time felt audible, tangible, counted in the pound and pulse of my own heart. Five days to learn how to play Roux’s game. Five days to find a way to win.

It felt surreal to see this neighborhood again. I’d been back in town for close to seven years now without once going near it. It was a carefully curated blank spot on the map, present but unexamined. Only twenty minutes from my current neighborhood, yet I felt I was driving toward some dark and distant made-up place, dystopian and bleak.

The sign was the same, scrolling metal words hung on a wrought-iron gate, purely decorative, permanently open. When I was a teenager, Waverly Place was the “it” neighborhood, but it had aged. The houses were large and probably still overpriced, but the wealthiest people in town now were building on prime lots overlooking the bluffs.

I crossed into the neighborhood itself, and though years had passed, it all felt so familiar. I recognized houses where other Brighton kids had lived or I had babysat, and the carpool pickup spot on Maple Drive.

Maple intersected with my own old street, Clearwater. I kept my gaze deliberately forward as I crossed over. My parents’ former house was on this block, and two blocks farther on would be the Shipley home. I had no desire to see what trees were still standing or if the paint colors had changed. I didn’t want to be here at all.

I drove directly back to Rainway Street, though I almost went right past it. I was looking for the back of the neighborhood, but the woods were gone. Rainway had houses on both sides now. The newer ones were smaller and more homogeneous, brick-fronted with an array of coordinating pastel colors on the HardiePlank sides.

I turned onto Rainway, and there was my old classmate Shelley Gast’s house. That put me two blocks down from where the dirt road had once run. I could feel myself getting close. It was like driving into a vortex, being pulled toward a dark center. The air became sharper, more electrical, as if the place itself had sentience and judgment. All the little blond hairs on my forearms rose, and my hands prickled on the wheel, as if they had gone to sleep. I stopped exactly on the spot, in front of what had been Mr. Pratt’s house, a white Colonial perched up high on a hill.

When Tig and I came roaring out of the woods in the Ambassador, Mrs. Shipley’s little car had skidded all the way across the street and partway up the slope, tearing gashes in Mr. Pratt’s manicured grass. The crash had awakened both the Pratts. Mr. Pratt was the one who’d called the police.

I got out of my Subaru, my legs shaking so hard I wasn’t sure they’d hold me. I realized I was hungry. So hungry. I hadn’t eaten yet today, and I had mostly pushed last night’s dinner around my plate. Once I noticed the feeling, it became huge, almost omnipresent. To be this savagely hungry felt almost righteous, a dark sensation close to pleasure. It made me remember I deserved to be this empty.

I closed my eyes, made myself breathe slowly. I was not that girl, and I was here on business.

I looked around. On the old side of Rainway, the lots were much larger. To the right of the Pratt house, the hill subsided. I could see the windows of just three more houses, which meant only these four had a clear view of this spot.

The Pratts had already been quite elderly at the time. Even their grandkids had been grown then, so Roux was not a Pratt. The house next door to them had been for sale, I remembered. Empty.

Could Roux have been a squatter? Not a child of privilege at all but a runaway, ten or twelve years old, camped out in the empty house?

It didn’t ring true. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. Waverly Place houses had alarm systems, plus a private security company drove around checking for interlopers.

The next house was Jesse Cannon’s old place; he’d been a Brighton kid, the youngest of three boys. No sisters. That left one house, sand-colored brick with a roofline that rose into three peaks.

I had no idea who had lived there back in 1991. I stared at the windows, and they stared back like empty eyes. It was the last house on the block. After it, Rainway curved.

I walked close enough to read the numbers on the stone mailbox: 226. I’d have to call my local lawyer, the one who’d long ago worked with Boyce to set up the bogus foundation that had paid off Tig Simms. He could dig through the records at the courthouse and find out who’d owned the place in 1991. I had to get to Divers Down and then pick up my baby. I didn’t want to keep Luca waiting so long that it became suspicious.

Still, I lingered by the mailbox. Why not simply ask? My stomach growled audibly inside me, like an animal. There was no harm in asking.