I never knew how to say no to him, to any of them. How to navigate the nuances of their words and mannerisms.

But there was too much at stake here now. Too much I hadn’t seen clearly the first time.

“Let’s go back thirty seconds,” I said, stepping back, feigning levity. “Good night, Parker. See you in the morning.”

Even in the dark, I could see his wide smile. I felt him watching me as I walked away.

* * *

I LOCKED THE DOOR to the guesthouse behind me. When I flipped the light switch, nothing happened. I tried again, but there was only darkness.

Shit. I wasn’t about to go back out there to reset the breaker. Not with Parker standing nearby, watching. Not with whatever was happening at the rental properties.

I pictured the shape of the shadow inside Sunset Retreat and shivered. Using only my phone for light, I circled the apartment, pulling all the curtains closed. Then I collected the tea lights from the bathroom, the ones at the corners of the tub, and lit them around the bedroom. I locked that door, too. Pulled the journal from my bag. Felt the familiar grooves in the cover and opened the notebook.

The cliffs, it began.

The road.

The bottle in the medicine cabinet.

The blade.

The writing was so angry, the pen leaving deep indentations in the page; I could’ve felt the emotion in the words, running my fingers over the lines in the dark. I turned the page, my hand shaking. There were more lists, page after page of them, just like this. The times death was right there, within reach. The times death had come so close.

Walked to the edge, balanced there.

Top of the lighthouse, leaning forward.

Woke up on the beach gasping for air, dreamed the tide had risen.

Slip of the blade. The blood in my veins.

I tried to see this as the police would, reading these pages. Pictured Sadie doing these things, writing these things. Staring at her veins, like Parker had told me. Listing the ways she could die.

I hadn’t seen this journal in years. Not since that winter. When the spark of spring never caught, and summer rolled in just the same as winter, empty and endless. It was the story of grief, of disappointment, of a soul obliterated.

It was the story of who I had been until the moment I met Sadie Loman, and I chose her. My life in her hands, restructured, recast. No longer adrift or alone.

This was my journal from a time in my life I would have rather forgotten—but which had colored everything that followed. When I had sunk beneath the surface and all I wanted was to slide deeper into it, like there was something I was chasing, waiting at the bottom. You could tell where I had been by the destruction in my wake.

Within these pages, I could see exactly where I’d lost Connor, where I’d lost Faith, and where I’d lost myself.

When had Sadie found this? I couldn’t remember where I had kept it. It had maybe been in my closet, at my grandmother’s place. It had been forgotten after I’d met Sadie and a new world had opened up to me. The world, through her eyes.

I wondered if Sadie had found it when she and Grant were helping me move. Even so, I didn’t understand why she’d kept it.

But the police had found it in her room and decided a person like this, she would do it. It was very, very dark. That’s what the detective had told me. A person like this, they believed, didn’t want to live. She existed in the darkness and would step off the edge.

This journal, sad and angry, was just a moment in time. Looking back at these pages, I knew that I had been trying to find my way through it.

Only now that I was past it did I see how close I truly came. The darkness that I was ready to dive headfirst into.

I kept looking at all the places death might be lurking. In so many lists, I ended with the blade. I remembered, then, the feeling of my blood pulsing underneath my skin. The image of a car crash, bodies versus metal and wood. The pressure of the blood in my grandmother’s skull. Staring at my veins, at the frailty of them, so close to the surface.

The blade, the blade, I kept coming back to the blade.

The sharp glint of silver. The empty kitchen. The impulse and chaos of a single moment.

I hadn’t anticipated the amount of blood. The sound of footsteps. I couldn’t get it to stop.

I hid in the bathroom, pressing the toilet paper to the base of my hand.

Thinking, No No. Until Sadie slipped inside.

You’re lucky, she’d said. You just missed the vein.

* * *

I BARELY SLEPT. FEELING so close to the person I’d been at eighteen. Like my nerves were on fire.

At the first sign of light, I took my car down through town, at the hour when it was just the fishermen at the docks and the delivery trucks in the alleys. I drove up the hill, past the police station, up past the Point Bed-and-Breakfast, to where I could see the flash of the lighthouse beckoning, even in daylight. And then I turned down the fork in the road, heading for the homes on the overlook.

Most of the Loman rental properties were located along the coast. A view drove up the cost of rent nearly twofold—even more if you could walk to downtown. To compensate, the homes on the overlook were more spacious, typically renting out to larger families. And with school starting up soon, these were usually the first homes to go vacant.

I had all the keys with me, each labeled with a designated number that corresponded to a specific property. By this point, I knew them all by heart.

Someone had broken in to the home called Trail’s End last week at the edge of downtown, smashing a television. Someone had sneaked inside the Blue Robin up here, looking for something. And someone had lit the candles at the Sea Rose, down by Breaker Beach.

I was starting to see the pattern not as a threat to the Lomans but as a message.

Someone knew what had happened that night. Someone had been at that party and knew what had happened to Sadie Loman.

As I drove up the lane of the overlook, I saw a dark car parked in front of the Blue Robin, lingering at the curb.

A shadow sitting inside. Eyes peering in the rearview mirror.

I parked behind it, waiting, my own car idling in a dare. Until Detective Ben Collins emerged from the car. He walked in my direction, frowning.

“Funny seeing you here,” he said as I exited the car.

“I have to check the properties each weekend. Before the new families arrive,” I said.

“Someone staying here next week?” he asked, thumb jutting at the Blue Robin.

“Yes.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Move them. We’re gonna need to see inside.”

My heart plummeted, but I clung to his words. “Are you reopening the case?” I asked. Maybe he believed me after all.

Detective Collins stood back, assessing the house—quaint and unassuming, like a birdhouse hidden amid the trees. “I was trying to see how someone might leave without notice. There’s a path behind the house, right?” Not answering my question but not denying it, either. He believed it was possible, then, that something else had happened that night.

“Right. To the bed-and-breakfast.” You could walk it in five to ten minutes. You could run it much faster.

“Show me inside?”

I led him in the front door, watched as he peered around the vacant space. He hadn’t been one of the officers who’d come to get Parker that night. But he’d taken the call from the Donaldsons about the break-in earlier this week.

“Show me where you found the phone,” he said.

I opened the door to the master bedroom, pointed to the now closed chest at the foot of the bed. The pile of blankets sat beside it, untouched. “In there,” I said. “I found it in the corner. Seemed like it had been there a long time.”

“That so,” he said. The lid creaked open as he peered inside. He stared into empty darkness, then closed it again. “Here’s the thing, Avery,” he said, pivoting on his heel. “We got a good look at her phone, and it’s really nothing we didn’t know.”

“Other than how it ended up here?”

He paused, then nodded. “Exactly.” He paced the room, peering into the bathroom where I’d once cleaned the floor alongside Parker. “There was one thing I noticed, though. In all those pictures on her phone, you weren’t there.”

I froze. Sadie and Luce; Sadie and Parker; Connor; the scenic shots. Everything but me.

“I thought you were her best friend,” he said. “That’s what you told me, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not in her pictures. She didn’t respond to your text that night. And we got a lot of conflicting information during the interviews.”

I felt something surging in my veins, my fists tightening of their own accord. “She didn’t respond because something happened to her. And I’m not in the pictures because I was busy that summer. Working.” But I could feel my pulse down to the tips of my fingers as I wondered if there had been rumors—about the rift, about me, about her. I thought no one had known—I thought Grant had kept it quiet.