I wasn’t the only one out here. A twig cracking, a brittle leaf crunching, the rustle of fabric coming closer. “Hello?” I called. And then: “Sadie?”

She moved like that. Light on her feet. Sure of herself. Not likely to pause for the sake of anybody else.

But the woods fell silent after that, and when I pulled up the flashlight on my phone, I saw nothing but shadows crisscrossing the darkness.

SUMMER

?????2018

CHAPTER 6

I sat there on the edge of the bed as the seconds ticked by, staring at the phone in my hand.

Sadie’s phone, which the police never found. Sadie’s phone, presumably lost to the sea, torn from her hand when she jumped, or tossed into the abyss in the moments before.

If Sadie was alone that night, how did her phone end up here?

Now I pictured the dots lighting up the message window, imagined her final text:

Help me—

There was a creak from outside the bedroom, and I stood quickly, my heart pounding.

“Avery? You in here?”

I slid the phone into my back pocket as I walked out of the room, down the short hall. Connor was standing in the middle of the front foyer, looking up the staircase instead. “Oh,” he said.

“Hey, hi.” I couldn’t orient myself. Not with the phone in my back pocket and Connor before me, in the house where we’d all been when she died.

I was caught half a step behind, because Connor and I no longer had the type of relationship where we spoke to each other or sought each other out. And now that he was standing in the room with me, it seemed he didn’t know what he was doing here, either.

He was dressed for work, in jeans and a red polo with the Harlow family logo on the upper-left corner. Even so, Connor always reminded me of the ocean. His blue eyes had a sheen to them, like he’d been squinting at the sun for too long. The saltwater grit left behind on his palms. His skin twice as tan as anyone else’s, from out on the sea, where the sun gets you double: once from above and once from the reflection off the surface. And brown hair streaked through from the summer months, escaping out the bottom of his hat. He’d always been thin, more wiry than strong, but he’d grown into the sharper angles of his face by the time we were in high school.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

He didn’t speak at first, just stood between me and the front door, looking me over. I knew what he was seeing: the slacks, the dress shoes, the sleeveless blouse that transformed me into a different person with a different role. Or maybe it was just the way I was standing, frozen in place, unsure how to move—like I had something to hide. And for a moment, I could only hear the detective’s questions: What about Connor Harlow? Would you know his state of mind last night?

Connor frowned, like he could tell what I was thinking. “Sorry,” he said. “The door was open. I saw your car at the B&B when I was making my delivery. Mr. Sylva told me what happened. Everything okay here?” He looked around, taking in the downstairs.

“Nothing’s missing,” I said.

“Kids?”

I nodded slowly, but I wasn’t sure; I thought we were talking ourselves into something. If not for the presence of the phone I’d just found, it was the most logical explanation. Something we were all too familiar with here. In the off-season, we had a youth problem. We had a drug problem. We had a boredom problem. An inescapable, existential problem. We would do anything to pass the winter here. It was a bigger problem if it was bleeding over into the summer.

We had all peered inside the homes in the off-season. Curiosity, boredom, a tempting of fate. Seeing how far we could get and how much we could get away with.

Connor and I knew as well as anyone. He and Faith and I had stood at the base of the Lomans’ house one winter long ago, me on his shoulders, climbing onto a second-story balcony, shimmying through a window of the master bedroom that had been left open. We didn’t take anything. We were only curious. Faith had opened the freezer, the fridge, the bathroom cabinets, the desk drawers—all empty—her fingers trailing every surface as she moved. Connor had walked the rooms of the unoccupied home, not touching anything, as if committing them to memory.

But I had stopped in the living room, stood before the picture hanging on the wall behind the sofa. Staring back at the family there. The mother and daughter, blond and slight; father and son, darker hair, matching eyes. A hand on the shoulder of each child. Four pieces of a set, smiling, with the dunes of Breaker Beach behind them. The closest I’d been to Sadie Loman. I’d stepped closer, seen the finer details: the crooked eyetooth that had yet to be fixed. I pictured her mother holding the curling iron to her otherwise pin-straight hair. The photographer smoothing out any imperfections so that her freckles faded away, into her skin.

Eventually, Connor had circled back, found me standing in front of that family portrait in their living room. He’d nudged my shoulder, whispered into my ear, Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.

* * *

NOW HE STOOD ON the other side of the room, and I still didn’t know what he was doing here. Why he was so interested in a break-in at a rental where nothing had been taken.

“Whoever it is, they came in through that window,” I said, shaking off the chill. “The lock doesn’t latch.”

His eyes met mine for a brief moment, like he was remembering, too. “You need the number for a window repair?”

“No, I got it.” I stared out the glass, picturing Connor’s face as it appeared that night, fractured in my memory. “Do you remember how it broke, the night Sadie died?”

He flinched at her name, then rubbed the scruff of his jaw to hide it. “Not sure. Just saw that girl standing on the other side, checking it out. Parker Loman’s girlfriend.”

“Luce,” I said. Every move I made that summer, it seemed that she was watching.

He shrugged with one shoulder. “She seemed upset, so I figured she did it, honestly. Why?”

“No reason. Just thinking about it.” Because Sadie’s phone was in my pocket and nothing made sense anymore. I was holding my breath, willing him to leave before he noticed my hands. How I had to press them to the sides of my legs to keep them from shaking. But Connor paced the room slowly, eyes roaming over the windows, the furniture, the walls.

“I remember that picture,” he said, pointing at the painting that hung from the wall.

It was my mother’s print, taken from Connor’s dad’s boat one evening, in the autumn before the car crash. We were in middle school, thirteen, maybe. Outside the harbor, she’d taken photo after photo of the coastline as evening turned to dusk turned to dark. The homes along the coast were no longer lit up and welcoming but appeared monstrous, darker shadows standing guard in the night. She kept taking pictures every time the light shifted, until the dark had settled, complete, and I couldn’t make out the shadows anymore, couldn’t tell sea from land from sky, and I lost all sense of orientation and vomited over the edge of the boat.

“I think the kids have had enough, Lena,” Mr. Harlow said with a laugh.

She’d tried to capture it in this painting, after endless drafts in her studio. The final product existed in shades of blue and gray, something between dusk and night. The gray of the water fading into the dark of the cliffs, disappearing into the blue of the night. As if you could take the image in your hand and shake it back into focus.

Years later, I’d had it reprinted, and I’d hung it from the living room wall of every home I oversaw. A piece of her in all the Loman homes, and nobody knew it but me.

Staring at her painting, I was overcome with the impulse to do it—to reach out and grab it. I wanted to take this moment and shake it into focus. Stretch a hand through time and grasp on to Sadie’s arm.

Until Sadie’s note was found, Detective Collins’s questions kept circling back to Connor Harlow, even though his alibi panned out. He’d been at the party; no one ever saw him leave. Still. He had been spotted with Sadie earlier that week. Sadie had told no one about it. As far as I knew, neither had Connor.

“Did you see her that night, Connor?” I asked as he was still facing away.

He froze, his back stiffening. “No,” he said, knowing exactly what I was referring to. “I didn’t see her that night, and I wasn’t seeing her at all. Which I told the police. Over and over.”

When Connor was angry, his voice dropped. His breathing slowed. Like his body was going into some sort of primitive state, conserving energy before a strike.

“People saw you two.” I remembered what Greg Randolph had said about Sadie and Connor on his boat. “Don’t lie for my benefit.” As if there was something remaining, seven years later, that he needed to handle with care.