The police said my father didn’t even hit the brakes until he was off the road, had probably drifted off, as my grandmother had in the backseat. I thought of that often at night, how we were all sleeping when it happened. How you can hurtle through darkness by momentum alone, without a single conscious thought, with no one to see you go.

Four years later, I’d been brought to the station after the fight with Faith. By then the only person left to call was my grandmother’s neighbor, Evelyn.

“Avery?” Detective Collins waited at the entrance to the hall behind me. He nodded as I stood. “Nice to see you again. Come on back.” He led me to a small office halfway down the hall and took a seat behind his desk, gesturing for me to take the chair across from him. His office was sparse, with nothing on the surface of the desk, and glass windows to the hall behind me. There was nowhere to look but right at him. “Is this about the dedication ceremony?” he asked, leaning back in his chair until the springs creaked in protest.

I swallowed nothing. “Yes and no.” I clenched my hands to keep them from shaking. “I wanted to ask you about Sadie’s note.”

He stopped rocking in his chair then.

“The note she left behind,” I clarified.

“I remember,” he said. He didn’t say anything more, waiting for me to continue.

“What did it say?” I asked.

After a pause, he sat upright and pulled himself closer to his desk. “I’m afraid that’s the family’s business, Avery. You might do better asking one of them.” As if he knew I’d already tried to find out and failed.

I looked at the walls, at his desk, anywhere but at his face. “I’ve been thinking about that night again. Is everyone sure the note was hers? I mean completely, totally sure?”

The room was so quiet I could hear his breathing, the faint ticking of his watch. Finally, he drew in a breath. “It’s hers, Avery. We matched it.”

I waved my hand between us. “To a diary, I heard. But, Detective, she didn’t have one.”

His eyes were focused on mine—green, though I’d never noticed before. His expression was not unkind, something bordering on sympathy. “Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought.”

“Or,” I said, my voice louder than I anticipated, “maybe the note was something else. Luciana Suarez was staying in the house, too. Or it could’ve been the cleaning company. Someone else could’ve left it.” They could’ve matched her handwriting in a rush because they wanted to. Making the pieces fit instead of the other way around.

I’d been too caught off guard by the news last year to ask questions. I’d been blindsided by the fact that I had misunderstood things so deeply. That there was something momentous I had failed to see coming once again.

He folded his hands slowly on the top of the desk, finger by finger. His nails were cut down to the quick. “Listen. It’s not just that the writing’s a match.” He shook his head. “It’s more like a journal—the inner workings of her mind. And it’s very, very dark.”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t mean it.” The same thing I had said to Parker. But wasn’t that the truth? The way she’d tallied the dangers off to me the day we met, as if she could see them, close to the surface, always ready to consume us. The casualness of death; something she was courting. Don’t hurt yourself, she’d said when I stood too close to the edge in the dark. As if, even then, she had imagined it.

He shook his head sadly. “Avery, you’re not the only one who missed something, okay? No one saw it coming. Sometimes you can only see the signs in hindsight.”

My throat felt tight. He reached across the table, his thick hand hovering near mine before pulling back. “It’s been a year. I get that. How things come back. But we’ve been through all of this. The case is closed, we gave Parker her old personal items today.” That must’ve been what Parker was looking at in his car when I surprised him in the garage—the items returned from the police station. “Everything fits. Write the article, come celebrate her life at the dedication, and move on.”

“Everything doesn’t fit,” I said. “She was supposed to meet us there. Something happened.” I reached my hand into my bag, placed her phone before him.

He didn’t touch it, just stared at it. A piece he had not anticipated. “What’s this?”

“Sadie’s phone. I found it today at the rental. The Blue Robin, where we all were the night she died.”

His eyes didn’t move from the phone. “You just found it.”

“Yes.”

“One year later.” Incredulous, eyes narrowed, like I was playing a joke on him. How quickly his demeanor had changed. Or maybe it was me changing before him.

“It was at the bottom of a chest in the master bedroom. I found it when I was taking out the blankets to freshen up. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but she didn’t lose it when she died.” I swallowed, willing him to make the leap: that if they were wrong about this, they could be wrong about all of it.

He shook his head, still not touching the phone.

Once, several summers ago, Sadie had tried to get herself arrested. At least it seemed that way to me at the time. I’d taken her down to the docks at night, wanting to show her something. A world she never had access to herself, a way to prove my own worth. I knew how to get inside the dock office from when Connor used to do it—lifting the handle, giving the door a well-angled nudge at the same time—and then taking his father’s key from the back office inside, untying the boat and pushing it adrift before turning on the engine.

But someone must’ve seen us sneaking inside. I’d gotten as far as the front room when the flashlight shone in the window, and I darted in the other direction, toward the rarely used back door. Sadie had frozen, staring at the light in the window. I pulled her by the arm, but by then the officer was inside—I knew him, though not by name. Didn’t matter, because he knew mine.

He led us outside, back to his car. He didn’t ask me the question I’d grown to expect, about whom to call; he must’ve known the answer by then.

“What’s your name?” he asked Sadie, but she didn’t respond. Her eyes were wide, and she pressed her lips together, shaking her head. The man asked for her purse, which she had looped over her shoulder. He pulled out her wallet, shone the flashlight on her driver’s license. “Sadie . . .” and then he trailed off. Cleared his throat. Slipped the license back inside, returning her purse. “Listen, girls. This is a warning. This is trespassing, and the next time we catch you, you’ll be processed, booked, am I clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. The relief like that first sip of alcohol, warming my bloodstream.

He returned to his car, and Sadie stood there in the middle of the parking lot, watching him go. “What does a girl have to do to get arrested around here?” she asked.

“Change your name,” I said.

Her name carried weight. But she didn’t throw it around. She didn’t have to.

It occurred to me that as long as I was with her, I might be afforded that same protection.

* * *

HER NAME STILL CARRIED that weight, with her phone on the detective’s desk, that he still wouldn’t touch. Dead or not, there were things you had to be careful with around here. He picked up his office phone but hesitated first.

“I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way,” Detective Collins finally said before waving me out of the room.

“What? What way?”

He shook his head. “Her note. That’s what it said.”

CHAPTER 10

I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.

I slammed on my brakes in the middle of Harbor Drive just as a woman stepped out into the crosswalk without looking. She stood in front of my car, staring back through the windshield. My hands were shaking on the wheel. There were mere inches separating us.

In the rearview mirror, I could still see the police station perched at the top of the hill. The woman in front of me raised her hand like a barrier between her and my car, mouthed Watch it, before moving on. As if I hadn’t noticed how close I’d come. As if she hadn’t yet processed how close she had come.

I saw Sadie then, standing at the edge of the cliffs. The blue dress blowing behind her in the wind, a strap sliding down her shoulder, the mascara running under her eyes, her hands shaking. Saw her turn around and look at me this time, her eyes wide—

Stop.

* * *

I HAD TO CALL someone.

Not the detective, who had just stared at her phone with such disbelief. Not Parker, who hadn’t told me he’d just retrieved Sadie’s personal items from the police. Not Connor, who had kept things from all of us with his silence—

My phone rang just as I was working it through. Another number not in my contacts. I wondered if it was Detective Collins already, telling me to come back. That they’d discovered something else in her phone, or they needed my help to tell them what something meant. I placed the call on speaker.

“Is this Avery?” It was a girl. A woman. Something in between.

“Yes, who’s speaking?”

“Erica Hopkins. From lunch.”

“Right, hi.”