I pushed myself to standing, and he reached a hand down to help me. “All right, I’ve got you.” Compassion, even from him, in this moment. “Listen, I’ve been looking for you. Hoping to talk to you. Can I follow you back? Or swing by sometime later? There are some things we need to clear up first, before Sadie’s dedication tomorrow.”

“Is it . . .” I started. Cleared my throat, made sure I sounded lucid, in control. “Is it about the investigation? Is it reopened?”

He frowned, but it was hard to see his face clearly in the dark. “No, it’s something we found on her phone. Just wondering who took some of the pictures. Whether it was Sadie or you.” He smiled tightly. “Nothing major, but it would help to know.”

I couldn’t tell, then, whether this was a trap. Whether he was luring me in under false pretenses, ready to strike. But I needed to hold him off. “I can’t tonight,” I said. Not yet. Not right now, with the car. Not until I had a direction to point him instead. His face hardened, and I said, “Tomorrow morning?”

He nodded slightly. “All right. Where are you staying?” And I knew, right then, he’d heard what had happened with the Lomans. That I wasn’t supposed to be living there. That I had been kicked out and abandoned. Every single thing happening right now was telling him to look closely at me.

“With a friend,” I said.

He pulled back slightly, like there was someone coming between us. “Does this friend have an address?”

“Can we meet for coffee in the morning? Harbor Bean?”

His mouth was a straight line, his face unreadable in the night. “I was hoping for a bit more privacy. You can come by the station, if you’d prefer . . . or I can pick you up, we can chat on the way to the dedication.”

I nodded. “I’ll send you the address tonight when I’m back.”

“Great,” he said. “You sure you’re okay to drive?”

“Yes,” I said, shutting the trunk as I spoke, swallowing dry air.

His headlights followed me all the way into downtown, until I circled the block and he continued on, up toward the station. I parked one block up from the Sea Rose, walking back. I couldn’t shake this feeling that nothing was safe here. Not Sadie and not me. Someone watching in the dark. Something waiting for me still.

That there was something toxic at the core here—a dark underbelly happening in the gap between us all, where no one else was looking.

* * *

BACK INSIDE THE SEAROSE, I took the list of arrival times from my purse. Added one final name: Sadie.

Had I been talking with Luce and Parker when she sneaked inside? Had she slipped through the front entrance, heading straight down the hall for the bedroom?

I tried to feel her there, place her in my memory. Find the moment when I could turn around and see her, call her name and intervene. Change the course of everything that followed.

Someone had brought her there. Anyone could’ve hurt her, but someone else knew she had been there, and had kept silent. A house full of faces, both strange and familiar. Luce had summed it up when she stumbled out of that room upstairs: I have never seen so many liars in one place.

* * *

A YEAR AND A half after my grandmother died, Grant Loman bought her house, helped with my finances. He took control when I was barely keeping afloat, and he made sure I stayed upright. But at some point, I remembered how to read a ledger, how to track my finances.

So I knew that by the time my grandmother died, any supposed large regular payment she had once received no longer existed. After her death, I had transferred the small amount left in her account to my own. That old account no longer existed. There was no easy way to find the deposit that Sadie had discovered.

But maybe it existed elsewhere, in another form—maybe evidence of it lived on.

Everything I had left of my grandmother was in the single box that I’d moved with me to the Lomans’ guesthouse—with a slanted K for Keep, which Sadie had labeled herself years ago. Now I pulled it out onto the kitchen counter, emptying the contents: the photo albums, the recipe book, the bound letters, the clipped articles about my parents’ accident, the personal folder with all the paperwork transferring assets.

I couldn’t find any receipts, anything extravagant.

The only large asset in her possession was her house.

After I sold that house, I kept all my real estate details, organized every one of them—a paper trail, as Grant had taught me.

It was the first file I had created, data I’d never looked at too closely, because why would I need to? But I had it, our payment history, stored in my computer files.

I scrolled through the mortgage history now on my laptop with a fresh eye. It seemed that in the years before her death, my grandmother had paid a low monthly sum on automatic withdrawal. But earlier, she used to pay more. There was a line in the timing, a before and after, when the mortgage payment had dropped significantly.

When she’d paid it down with one large lump sum.

Here. Here it was. Money going out. A piece of evidence left behind after all.

I traced the date, finger to the screen.

It was the month after my parents had died.

I sat back in the chair, the room turning cold and hollow. I’d thought we had gotten a life insurance payment—that’s what Grant had mentioned when he helped me organize the records. I was in good shape because of that.

But I looked again. An even one hundred thousand dollars. The same amount that Sadie had discovered, sent from the Lomans to my grandmother. Not a life insurance policy at all. Not an inheritance, either. Money, suddenly, where there had been none.

My stomach twisted, pieces connecting in my head.

I pulled up the images from Sadie’s phone—the photos she had taken. The picture of the winding, tree-lined mountain road. And I finally understood what Sadie had uncovered. The thing tying me to the Lomans. The cash payment she had found.

It was a payoff for the death of my parents.

CHAPTER 27

Here’s a new game: If I’d known the Lomans were responsible for my parents’ accident, what would I have done?

All night I played this game. In the dark of the house, with nothing but shadows and ghosts for company. What I would say, what I would do—how I would corner them into the truth. No: What I would take from them instead.

I felt it as I sat there—not the creeping vines of grief, pulling me down. But that other thing. The burning white-hot rage of a thing I could feel in the marrow of my bones. The surge gathering as I stepped forward and pushed.

I wanted to scream. Wanted to scream the truth to the world and watch them fall because of it. I wanted them to pay for what they had done.

But there was a flip side to that knowledge. Because here was what else that payment provided: a motive. My motive. All of the evidence fell back on me. The phone that I had found. Her body, with signs of a struggle, in my trunk. Me, wandering around the back of the Lomans’ house that night, looking for any piece of evidence left behind. And the note on the counter. It was my handwriting. My anger. My revenge. It was mine.

* * *

THERE WAS A KNOCK at the front door, and I peered out the gap between the front curtains, expecting that Grant or Parker had somehow found me. Or Bianca, come to tell me to leave again. But it was Connor. I saw his truck at the curb, so obvious on the half-empty street. “Avery? You in there?” he called.

Shit, shit. I unlocked the door and he strode inside as if I’d invited him.

“How did you know where I was?” I asked as he looked around the unfamiliar house. His eyes stopped on the stacks of family albums and letters on the counter.

He paused a moment, staring at the article on top of the pile, a black-and-white photo of the wreckage—Littleport couple killed in single-car wreck.

“Connor?”

“She told me what happened,” he said, dragging his eyes back to me. “Faith.” He was breathing heavy, wound tight with adrenaline.

“How did you know I was here?” I repeated. I thought I’d been so careful, but here he was, unannounced. I didn’t like the way his gaze lingered on my things. I didn’t like the way he was standing—on edge.