But on this night, at the Plus-One party, when I’d just learned he’d been seen with Sadie earlier in the week, it was harder to feel nothing when his hand dropped on my shoulder. Suddenly, his interest in Sadie felt like a personal slight meant to hurt me.

And maybe it was. But it worked both ways; Sadie knew exactly who Connor was. We’d crossed paths a few times over the years. I’d glanced in his direction, then looked away, and she’d done the same; when I’d fallen silent, so had she, in a show of understanding. Though maybe I had understated his importance. She should’ve read it on my face, seen me then as I had seen her. I felt my teeth grinding, because she must have. She must have known. And she’d done it anyway. Taking everything, even this—owning it all.

Connor looked around the party and shook his head to himself. “I should go. I don’t belong here,” he said, but I had to lean in to hear him. Could feel the blade press against my ribs the closer I got.

Then leave, I wanted to say. Before Sadie gets here. Before I have to see it, too.

“I’m sorry,” I said. What I should’ve said the first time but never did.

Connor frowned but didn’t respond.

I heard voices from the second floor, the sound of something dropping. “I have to . . .” I gestured toward the staircase, turning away. “Just—” But the word was lost in the chaos, and when I turned around to try again, he was already gone.

Upstairs, there were three doors set back from the open loft. The door to the bedroom on the left was open but the light was off. Inside, a heap of jackets and bags were piled on top of the bed. The second bedroom door was closed, though a strip of light escaped from the gap between the door and the floorboard. In between the two rooms, the door to the bathroom was slightly ajar, and I heard a whispered “Shit.”

I pushed the door open farther, and a young woman inside jumped back from the mirror. “Oh,” she said.

“Sorry. You okay?”

She had her hand over her eye, and she leaned over the sink again, undisturbed by my presence. It took me a second to realize she was trying to remove a contact lens. “It’s stuck, I can feel it.” She talked to me like I was someone she knew. Maybe she was expecting someone.

“Okay, okay,” I said, taking her wrists in my own. “Let me see.” I had done this once before, for Faith. When she got contacts our freshman year of high school. Back when we trusted each other with the most fragile parts of ourselves. You poked my eye. No, you moved. Try again. And again, and again.

This girl held perfectly still until it was over, then blinked rapidly, giving me the type of sudden hug that simultaneously revealed her blood alcohol content.

“Thanks, Avery,” she said, but I still had no idea who she was. I blinked, and she was Faith again, falling away from me. But then she came into focus—dark brown hair, wide brown eyes, somewhere in her twenties, probably, though I wouldn’t bet money on it. I didn’t know whether she was a resident or a visitor. In which context she had heard my name. I couldn’t orient myself here. Not tonight, not when we were all playing at people who didn’t exist.

Maybe it was seeing Connor. My past and present blurring. The old me and the new me, both fighting for the surface.

“Are you—” I began, just as something banged against the wall, hard enough to rattle the mirror.

Her head darted to the side. “That’s the second time that happened,” she said. We held perfectly still, listening. Low voices, growing louder.

I realized that was what I’d heard from downstairs—not the sound of an object hitting the floor but something else. A door slamming shut; a fist making contact with the wall.

I stepped out into the loft, listening, and the girl continued on, down the stairs. Light on her feet, like a ghost. Not interested in the secrets hidden behind closed doors.

Something scratched against the loft window, and I jumped, peering out into the darkness. But it was just a branch brushing against the siding.

I headed to the closed bedroom door, trying to work up my nerve to knock. I didn’t know what I’d be walking into.

As I approached, the door swung open, and a woman barreled straight out of the room.

It took me a moment to realize it was Luce, wild and unlike herself. Up close, her eyes looked dark and imperfect, the makeup running; her lipstick smeared, and the strap of her top slipped halfway down her shoulder.

She slammed the door shut behind her as she readjusted her top, backpedaling when she saw me there. Then her face split, and she laughed as she leaned in close. “What is it about this place?” she said, and I was so sure I’d smell something foreign on her, something strange and unfamiliar that had taken her over. Something that had stripped the facade and made her one of us. Her eyes locked on mine.

Right then I thought she could see everything: me and Parker in the bathroom; me and Connor by the stairs; every thought I’d had, all summer long. I didn’t know whether she meant the party or all of Littleport, but at that moment, it felt like there wasn’t any difference between the two.

“Are you okay?” I asked, and she laughed, deep and sharp. She took a step back, and it was like the last minute hadn’t happened at all. She was Luciana Suarez, unshakable.

“You would know better than me, Avery.”

I closed my eyes, could feel Parker standing over me in the bathroom, watching. “Let me explain—”

Her eyes sharpened, as if something new had just shaken loose and become visible. “You, too?” she asked. “My God.” She leaned in closer, her lips pulling back into a grin or a grimace. “I have never seen so many liars in one place.”

SUMMER

?????2018

CHAPTER 16

In the end, I backed out of the driveway of One Landing Lane with nothing more than I’d arrived with six years earlier: a laptop on the seat beside me; the box of the lost and my luggage tossed into the backseat; the remaining items from the kitchen, bathroom, and desk hastily thrown into a few plastic garbage bags that fit on the floorboard. I didn’t even have to open my trunk.

* * *

SADIE’S SERVICE THE YEAR earlier had been in Connecticut, an unseasonably warm day with a traitorous bright blue sky.

I’d picked my outfit because it had been hers first, because I could feel her beside me as I slipped my arms into the short bell sleeves of the dress, could imagine the dark gray fabric brushing against her legs. I thought it would help me blend in. But I felt too large in her clothes, the zipper cinching at my waist, the hemline more festive on me than serious, as it had been on her. I felt the sideways glance from the couple beside me, and the fabric prickled my skin.

I heard once that you can’t dream a face until you’ve seen it in real life. That the figures in dreams are either real people or, blurry and unformed, things you can’t recall when you wake.

But that day it felt like I must’ve dreamed up the whole town. Row after row of flat, stiff expressions. Everywhere I looked, a sense of déjà vu. Names on the tip of my tongue. Faces I must’ve conjured from Sadie’s stories of home.

When everyone reconvened at the Lomans’ stately brick-front home after the service, there was an odd familiarity to it, like something I almost knew. Maybe it was the way Bianca had decorated, a similar footprint to the homes. Or a familiar scent. The background of photos throughout the years that had pieced together subconsciously in my mind. So that I could open a door and know what would be there in the second before it was revealed. On my right, the coat closet. The third door on the left down the hall would be the bathroom, and it would be a shade of almost blue.

I believe that a person can become possessed by someone else—at least in part. That one life can slip inside another, giving it shape. In this way, I could judge Sadie’s reaction before it occurred, picture an expression in the second before she shared it. It was how I could anticipate what she would do before she did it, because I believed I understood how she thought, and the push and pull that would lead her to any given moment—except her final ones.

As I moved through the house, the only person I suspected could see that possession in me was Luce, standing beside Parker on the other side of the living room, glass in hand, watching me closely. Ever since Parker had introduced us when they pulled up in the drive that summer, she’d been watching me. At first, I thought, because she didn’t understand my history with the Lomans and therefore Parker. But lately, I felt it was something else: that she could sense things from a remove. As if there was something I had believed invisible that only she could see clearly.