“No, it was just instinct.” I hoped she didn’t ask why. It was the same question I’d been asking myself. Why there instead of my own home, where my phone had been left behind? Whether I thought there was still something out there; whether the thing I feared was myself.

“And what was he doing when you arrived?” she asked.

I couldn’t remember. There were parts that stood out in my mind: the phone, the body, the running, the bathroom, the gun. But there were already gaps forming, mundane details that I’d failed to hold on to.

Anyway, she was asking the wrong questions, focusing on the wrong element. I’d been prepared for questions about the sound I’d heard, the body I’d found. My own actions. Not about Rick.

I stopped talking, didn’t want to say something to incriminate him when he’d done so much to cover for me.

“Rick is a friend,” I said. “I went there because it’s where I felt safest.”

She continued staring, clicked her pen once. “Walk me through what he did after you arrived.”

I closed my eyes, trying to see. “He went to check outside. I don’t know. I was in the bathroom.”

“He checked before calling 911. Any reason why?”

Yes: for me. To make sure we knew what he was calling in.

“Neither of us thought to call 911. I wasn’t thinking at all. It’s not like we’ve dealt with dead bodies before.”

“That’s not entirely true,” she said, her calm face belying the subtle accusation.

“I work in hospital administration. I don’t deal with patients,” I snapped back.

I heard dishes in the sink, and her eyes cut to the side before sliding back my way. “You know about Mr. Aimes’s wife, right?”

“I know she died, that he lives all alone.” Had he seen her body back then, too? Had he needed to call it in himself? Had she taken her last breath at their home and not at the hospital?

“Do you know how his wife died?”

I shook my head, not wanting to say: I never asked. I didn’t want to pry. Neither of us dug too far in the other’s life, and it was there that I found comfort and safety.

She took a slow breath, dropped her voice. “I was just a kid. A senior in high school. Gunshot.” She punctuated the word with her hand, thumb and pointer finger in the shape of a gun. “One of those guns he keeps in his house. I’m sure you’ve seen them, just sitting there in a case in their hall. Officially ruled suicide, but I’ve heard things.”

“What sort of things?”

She shrugged. “Like I said, I knew his son, Jared. I was a couple of years younger, but my brother was friends with him, used to hang out up here a bunch. Mr. Aimes built this house for him, to keep him here. Expected his son to stay right here, can you imagine? My brother said it was oppressive. Mr. Aimes liked to control things, it seems.”

She kept talking, but I was picturing the gun under the sink. The cabinet down the hall full of shotguns. The one he tried to give me for protection. Maybe Elyse was wrong; maybe it was a gunshot and not a box cutter. Maybe that was the sound that drew me outside to begin with—

“His son took off soon after. I think, until then, it was his mother that kept him here. But after?” She shook her head. “I think it’s telling that he couldn’t look at his father after. That he couldn’t live here anymore. Mr. Aimes held on to this place for years, hoping he’d come back. Jared got married, has a kid. Tell me, Olivia, have you seen his son visit in all the time you’ve been here?” She let that sink in as she made herself more comfortable, settling back in the chair. She didn’t even need me to answer.

I used to believe most people were good, or at least had good intentions. They mobilized to save you. They rallied in a crisis. The people of Widow Hills demanded more action, and they got it.

I believed that firmly until the ten-year anniversary, when I realized that some of those same good people felt they were owed something. That there was a scorecard, always, being kept. And I had not reciprocated what had been owed. By then I was firmly in the negative.

“How long ago?” I asked, because I was living in his house. A house I’d once thought was a happy place, a place built with two hands and good intentions.

“Would be about a decade now,” she said. And the place had sat empty all this time. “No one wanted to live so close to a man who was a suspect in his wife’s death, unofficial or not.” She shook her head. “He shouldn’t be keeping all those guns there. Not at his age.”

I didn’t know what to say, because I agreed. But I also wondered if I’d run there last night because I knew he had them. Because there was safety in that illusion.

“Just be careful here,” she continued. “Be careful who you trust. You’re walking into something with history, and you don’t know the whole story.”

I thought of Rick in my backyard early this morning. Rick asking me about my conversation with the detective. Had he been concerned that she’d already told me and was there to do damage control?

But. He’d covered for me. He could’ve easily said: I found Liv asleep outside the night before. And as far as I knew, he hadn’t.

Detective Rigby pulled the folder from under her notebook. “Okay, I’ve got something to show you.” Like she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. A part one to guide the story, shake something loose in me. Change the framework of the context. “He’s not from here, the man you found.” I could feel Bennett standing just on the other side of the kitchen entrance. Detective Rigby’s story had worked its way inside, changing my perspective.

Maybe it was an intruder.

Maybe Rick had seen him first.

It would explain why he was awake when I showed up, why he didn’t take out the gun for protection—because he already knew what had happened.

The detective had a photo in her hand, and she laid it on the coffee table. I held my breath, thinking it would be a photo from the scene. Eyes closed, life drained from him.

But it wasn’t. In the photo, the man was alive. He had salt-andpepper close-cropped hair, deep-set eyes, and a completely neutral expression. The white of the background made me think license or passport.

“Oh,” I said. Those eyes. Under the ball cap. A tip of the head. The way his mouth moved when he said my name. Olivia, right?

“Do you know this man?” Detective Rigby asked, leaning closer, like she could read something in my expression.

“No,” I said. “Yes. I don’t know him, but I saw him once. I don’t know who it is.”

“Where did you see him?”

“Outside the G and M yesterday morning. He said my name like he knew me.” I’d thought he was a journalist, watching me, waiting for me. Maybe he was. But then this was about me. Still, maybe Rick saw him, watching me.

A little overprotective.

A little fast with the trigger.

“Was he following you?” the detective asked, her voice growing faster, tighter. Giving away her excitement. “What did he want?”

How desperately I wanted to keep the past where it belonged. I could feel the stirring of panic—if he was a journalist, they’d want to know why. The sinking of my stomach, the numbness in my limbs, the room too hot, muscles suddenly wound tight with the urge to move—my body fighting back.