“No, you’re right. I was just wondering. The main house, everything seems fine?”

“I guess so. Not like we left much behind. Come on,” he said, gesturing me out of the garage. “I want to lock up.” As if something worrisome had worked its way inside his head regardless of his words. His hand trembled faintly as he slid the garage door closed, engaging the lock. The Parker I once knew was unflappable, but loss can manifest in other ways. Signs of age, of illness, of pain. A tremor in the fingers, nervous system on overdrive. A wound slow to heal.

The summer after my parents died, a heavy ache would settle in my legs every night, even though, by all accounts, I was too old for growing pains. Still, every night, my grandmother would rub my calves, the backs of my heels, the bend of my knees, while I braced myself on the bed until the tension released. If I closed my eyes, I could still imagine the feel of her dry fingertips, her singular focus on this one thing she could fix. So that by the time it passed, months later, I believed I had earned my place in the world, in this body.

Maybe Sadie’s death would make Parker more than he had previously been. Give him some depth, some compassion. A perspective he’d always been lacking.

He walked toward the house, and I fell into stride beside him. He stopped on the porch steps, the key ring looped on his finger. “That all, Avery? I’m working remotely this week. Have a couple calls I need to jump on soon.”

“No, that’s not all.” I cleared my throat, wished we were back in the night before, sitting on the couch inside, when he was loose with liquor, more vulnerable and open. “I was wondering about the investigation. About the note.”

Parker rocked back on his heels, the wood creaking underneath us.

“I was wondering, who was it for?” I couldn’t help it, wanting to know. Sadie had left her text to me unfinished. Who had she left her last words for instead?

The frown lines around Parker’s face were deepening again. “I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. We found it in the trash.”

“You don’t think she meant to leave it for you?”

He rubbed a hand down his face, then put the keys back in his pocket and sat on the porch step. “I don’t know. I don’t know why Sadie did half the things she did, most of the time.”

In all the years I’d known them, Sadie and Parker had never seemed close. Even though they shared the same circle, both professionally and personally, neither seemed that interested in the other’s life beyond the surface of things.

I frowned, sitting beside him, choosing my words carefully, quietly, so as not to disturb the balance of the moment. “What did it say?”

“What does it matter now? I don’t know, she was making peace or whatever. I guess it was for Dad and Bee.”

“Making peace for what?” I was already losing him. He’d put his hands on the porch step, pushing himself upright, but I grabbed his wrist, surprising us both. “Please, Parker. What did she say, exactly? It’s important.”

He stared at my hand on his wrist, and I slowly uncurled my fingers. “No, Avery, it’s not important. It’s done with. I don’t remember.”

And that was how I knew he was lying. How could he not be? Her last words, the ones I’d been trying to conjure into being, picturing the dots on my phone, given to him. But maybe he really didn’t care. Didn’t see her as I did. Didn’t store her words every time she spoke them, keeping them all, filing them away to revisit later.

“Do you still have it?”

He shrugged and then sighed. “My guess, it’s still with the police.” We were so close, I could see the muscle in his jaw tensing.

“But if it was really that vague, making peace or whatever, that shouldn’t be enough, right? The police can’t know for sure she jumped. Not one hundred percent.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “She was obsessed with death, Avery. Come on, you knew that, too.”

I blinked slowly, remembering. It was true that she was quick to mention the things that might harm us, but I never took it seriously. It was how we met—a warning of tetanus, sepsis. And it continued on, poking through the surface at random times. A warning, a joke, the dark, dark humor. An elaborate play. But sometimes I wasn’t sure. Whether it was an act or not. Whether I was in on the game or an unsuspecting bystander.

I flashed to sleeping on the lounge chairs on her pool deck, the afternoon sun warming my skin. How I’d felt her hand resting on my neck, her fingers just under my jaw. My eyes had shot open at her touch.

I thought maybe you were dead, she’d said, not moving away.

I was sleeping.

It can happen, you know—the brain fails to send a message to your lungs, to breathe. Usually you wake up, gasping for air. But sometimes you don’t.

I’d pushed myself to sitting, and only then did her hand slip away. I placed my own hand there, on instinct, until I could feel the flutter of my pulse. You seem really broken up about it, I joked.

Well, I’m a little upset that I won’t be able to practice my recently acquired CPR skills and save your life and have you forever in my debt.

I smiled then, my face mirroring hers.

She never saw the threat of death in the things that could truly harm us: drinking to excess so close to the water, the cars we got into, the people we barely knew. The way we pushed each other to more and more until something had to give, and the thing that finally gave was the season, and she was gone, and the winter cool slowed everything: my heart rate, my breathing, time. Until it grew unbearable in the other extreme, and every day was waiting for the spark of spring, the promise of summer on the horizon once more.

Parker called it obsession, but it wasn’t.

I saw obsession in the stacks of paintings in my mother’s studio; in the boats setting out on the ocean before dawn, day after day. Obsession was the gravity that kept you in orbit, a force you were continually spiraling toward, even when you were looking away.

“Just because you talk about it doesn’t mean you want to do it,” I finally replied. The other possibility was too painful: that she had been crying out for help, and we had merely stood back and watched.

Parker took a deep breath. “She would stare at her veins sometimes . . .” He cringed, and I could feel my own blood pulsing there. “You didn’t know what was going on under the surface.” He shook his head. “When you take everything together, it’s the thing that makes the most sense.”

“But how are they sure the note was even hers?”

“They matched her handwriting.” He pushed himself off the porch step, pulling out his house keys.

I was wrong about the phone signifying something dangerous, then. The phone was not where it should’ve been, but there were other ways it could’ve gotten to the house in the last eleven months. Maybe Sadie had dropped it on her way to the edge or left it behind, beside her gold shoes. Maybe someone had gone back for her that night when I had not. Who found the phone and took it in an impulsive move. Something worth protecting inside, to keep hidden.

Knowing what I knew now about Connor’s photo, his name in her phone, I wondered if it had been him all along. If he’d somehow ended up with her phone and panicked, knowing what might lay inside. Losing or leaving it in the chaos of that night, when the police arrived. If that was why he had shown up at the Blue Robin after I was there today. If he’d heard about the break-in and been worried.

There were ways, after all, to capture someone without putting them in jail. A civil case for wrongful death. I’d heard about that on the news before—the people who pushed someone to suicide, convinced them to do it, or pressed them to see no other option, taken for all they were worth by the family left behind.

There were many forms to justice. Something more satisfying than an immobile brass bell with a melancholy phrase—everything about it so far from the person Sadie had been.

I pictured her hastily writing a note. Balling it up. Staring out the window. Her jaw hardening.

Sadie didn’t handwrite many things. She kept notes on her phone, sent texts and emails. Always had her laptop open on her desk.

“Parker,” I said as the key slid into the lock. “What did they match it to?”

His hand froze. “Her diary.”

But I shook my head again. Nothing made sense. “Sadie didn’t keep a diary.”

The door creaked open, and he stepped inside, turning around. “Obviously, she did. Obviously, there’s plenty you didn’t know. Is it such a surprise that she wouldn’t reveal the contents of her diary to you? She didn’t tell you everything, Avery. And if you think she did, you sure do have a high opinion of yourself.”

He shut the door, made a show of turning the lock after, so I could hear the thunk echo inside the wooden frame.

And to think I’d almost shown him Sadie’s phone.

* * *