“About that. Your work,” he continued, and my stomach dropped. “Luciana Suarez provided us with some interesting details. This was her first summer in town, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. She’d started dating Parker the fall before.”

“Is it true that you took over Sadie’s job?” And there it was. Luce. I should have known.

“Luce said that?” I asked, but he didn’t respond. Just held eye contact, waiting for the answer. I brushed the comment away with a wave of my hand in the air, like Sadie might do. “They didn’t need two people to do it. She was reassigned.” Not fired.

“But, to be clear, you have her role.”

I pressed my lips together. “Technically.”

“You know what else Luciana said?” He paused, then continued like he didn’t expect me to answer. “She said she’d never heard of you before.” A twitch of his mouth. “Said that she didn’t know anything about you until she arrived. No one had seen fit to mention your existence. Not even Sadie.”

“Because Luce was Parker’s girlfriend,” I snapped. “There was no reason I would’ve come up.” I was being blindsided yet again. This was an interrogation, and I’d walked right into it.

“She told us she’d been a friend of the family first.”

“So what? That doesn’t mean she and Sadie were close.”

He looked at me closely, steadily. “Rumor has it you and Sadie were on the outs.”

“Rumors are shit here, and you know it.”

He smiled then, as if to say, There you are. That girl they all remembered. “I just think it’s odd, is all, that Sadie never would’ve mentioned you.”

Luce. She had complicated everything. Always with a quizzical look in my direction—something dangerous that kept me second-guessing myself. Luce became the unwitting wedge that summer, leaving everything off balance. If anyone understood what had happened in that house, it was her. Always there when I thought we were alone. I had no idea what she’d told the police during her interview. It hadn’t mattered then, because of the note.

Detective Collins paced the room again, the floorboards creaking under his feet. “If I had to make a professional assessment, I’d say the friendship was a little one-sided. If I’m being honest with you, it seems a little like you were obsessed with her.”

“No.” I said it louder than I meant to, and I lowered my voice before continuing. “We were growing up. We had other responsibilities.”

“You lived on their property, worked for their family, ran around with her crowd.” He held up his hand, even though I hadn’t said anything. “You considered them family, I know. But,” he continued, lowering his voice, “did they consider you the same?”

“Yes,” I said, because I had to. I trusted them because they chose me. Taking me in, welcoming me into their home, into their lives. What other choice was there? I had been adrift, and then I was grounded—

“I know who you used to be, Avery. What you’ve been through.” His voice dropping, his posture changing. “Shitty hand to draw, I get it. But are you saying you never thought, just once, that you wanted to be her instead?”

I shook my head but didn’t respond. Because I did, it was true. Back then, when I met her, I wanted to crawl inside someone else’s head. Stretch their limbs. Flex their fingers. Feel the blood pulsing through their veins. See if they could hear it, too, the rhythm of their own heartbeat. Or if something else surged in their bones.

I wanted to feel something besides grief and regret, and I did. I had.

“This phone does raise some questions, in more ways than one. Of course, your prints would have to be on it, since you were the one who found it. Right?”

I jerked back. Did he think I was lying?

I wanted to tell him: The note wasn’t hers, the journal wasn’t hers.

But I knew what they would have to ask next: “I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.” What were you apologizing for, exactly, Avery?

I knew better than to give any more of myself away.

“Well,” he said, “this has been enlightening. We’ll be in touch.” He tapped the bedroom door on the way out.

CHAPTER 15

I was shaking as I watched the detective drive away, looping his car too fast around the cul-de-sac, passing Sunset Retreat on the way down the street.

They would be back. That’s what he was implying. They would be back, and they were looking at how someone might’ve left the party that night.

I had been at the party the entire time—I’d proved it. But the phone meant something. It meant that being at the party did not absolve us. Chances were, if her phone had been left there the night of her death, she’d been murdered by someone at the party.

That list Detective Collins had handed me, the details I had given him in return—

Me—6:40 p.m.

Luce—8 p.m.

Connor—8:10 p.m.

Parker—8:30 p.m.

What had once been our alibis now became a cast of suspects.

* * *

IT DIDN’T LOOK GOOD that I was there for so long alone. It didn’t look good that I was the one who found the phone. Detective Collins was fixating on my role in the Lomans’ lives as if the rumors had reached him as well.

There had been no public fight. Nothing people could’ve witnessed and known for sure. Just a lingering chill. A feeling, if you knew what you were looking for. A brief shrug-off in public at her planned birthday lunch, when I’d tried to catch her after—I can’t talk to you right now—where she looked at my hand on her arm instead of me. And a humiliating moment the next night, though I’d thought we were alone.

I’d been heading toward the Fold—she hadn’t been answering my calls, my texts—when I saw her slip out the entrance with Luce. They were standing close together, Sadie a head shorter than Luce, who was relaying a story in a voice too low and fast to hear clearly, her hands moving to accentuate her points. But they parted at the corner, Luce heading for the overflow of cars, Sadie walking toward downtown.

I waited until Luce was out of sight to call her name, then again: “Sadie,” the word echoing down the empty street. She stopped walking just under a dim corner streetlight. Her skin looked waxy pale, her hair more yellow than blond in the halo of light. She ran her fingers through the ends of her hair as she turned around, eyes skimming the road and then skimming right over me—pretending she didn’t see me standing there, looking back. The casual cruelty she’d perfected with Parker. Like I was invisible. Inconsequential. Something she could both create and unmake at her whim.

She turned away again without a second thought.

I wondered now if Greg Randolph had whispered those words before—Sadie’s monster. If others had, too.

If it was blinding the detective to everything else.

I had to nail down my time line, and everyone else’s, before everything got twisted.

But first I needed to clear this house. I’d thought about moving the family who was supposed to stay at the Blue Robin into Sunset Retreat across the way—there was even more space, and I didn’t think they’d complain. But I needed to check it out first, especially since I was sure I’d seen a shadow watching me the day I found the phone.

The key for the property was in my car. As soon as I stepped across the threshold, I knew something was wrong. The air had a thickness to it, some unfocused quality I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until I drew in a slow breath.

My hand went to my mouth even as I was backing away on pure instinct. The scent of gas, so thick I could practically taste it.

The room was full of it. I shut the door behind me, running down the front path.

I dialed 911 from the front room of the Blue Robin across the street, safe behind a layer of wood and concrete.

* * *

I WAS WATCHING OUT the window when the fire truck arrived—expecting to see an explosion, everything reduced to rubble. But a stream of people in uniform entered the home, one by one. Eventually, another van arrived, delivering a crew of maintenance workers.

After they came back out, removing their gear, conferring with one another, I walked out front, meeting them in the street between the properties. “Everything okay in there?”

“You the person who called this in?” the closest firefighter asked. He still wore the bottom half of his uniform but had removed the rest and was wearing a T-shirt and ball cap. He looked a good decade older than the rest, and I assumed he was in charge.

“Yes, I’m Avery Greer. I manage the property.”

He nodded. “A connection at the back of the stove, come loose. Probably a slow leak. But must’ve been going on for a while, with nobody there to notice.”

“Oh,” I said. I felt nauseated, sick. The shadow inside the house—had they been waiting for me to walk inside next?

He shook his head. “Lucky nothing made a spark.” Then he motioned for the maintenance crew that it was safe to enter. “Still, I’d give it some time to air out,” he said. Then, as if he could see something simmering within me, some fear made clear, he put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, it’s all right. You did the right thing, and we caught it in time. Everything’s okay.”

* * *