Cass yelped behind me. I spun in time to see her sprawl to the ground, swearing in a tight voice. I rushed back to her, but she’d already pushed herself up to a sitting position. She groaned.
“I am so out of practice at this,” she complained. “I caught my foot on a root or something.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, but she was gritting her teeth as she braced herself to get up. I grabbed her elbow and helped haul her upright. “See? All good.”
That lasted until she took her first step. Her face went white and she staggered, shifting her weight back to the other foot. “Broken?” I said, thinking rapidly. We weren’t too far from the car.
“Not broken. Maybe sprained,” she said, then hissed sharply as she tested the ankle again. “It’s not too bad.”
We were nearly at the pond trail. I glanced north, toward the pond, and then back toward the car. The pond was still a good distance away. “Let’s go back to the car,” I said.
“And what if Liv is up there and she’s spiraling? What if she needs our help?” Cass asked. She tried the ankle again, swore.
“You need to get that ankle elevated and iced before we have to cut you out of your boots,” I said. I hesitated. “You said it yourself. Liv does this. She runs off, and she comes back.”
“And what if we’re wrong?” Cass asked. She gripped my arm for support, her fingers digging in. “You go find Liv. I can drive myself home and get this taken care of before it gets worse, and then you call me and we’ll figure out next steps.”
“Can you make it?” I asked.
“It’s like five hundred feet,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I can hop on one foot if I need to.”
“You’re sure you’re going to be all right?” I asked her. I shouldn’t abandon her with an injured ankle in the woods. I shouldn’t even be considering it. Liv was probably fine, and I was being the worst friend in the world.
But Cass just gave me a wry smile. “It’s okay, Naomi. She’s always going to be your priority.”
I blanched. “That’s not it.”
Cass gave a one-shouldered shrug, like it didn’t matter. “I just wish she could be there for you as much as you are for her,” she said. She eased her weight slowly onto her bad ankle, nodded. “Call me as soon as you know anything.”
She limped off toward the south, moving at a slow, lurching pace. I stood frozen for a moment. I should follow her. Get her back to the car, at least. But with every second that slipped away, the frantic feeling in my chest grew stronger. Cass was right. Liv was always going to be my priority. Because Cass didn’t need me, and Liv did. I turned north and started walking.
The Pond Loop trail was indistinct in places, half covered in blackberry brambles. It must not be a very popular hike. I mostly kept my eyes on the ground ahead of me so I wouldn’t trip.
“Naomi?”
“Fuck!” I straightened with a jerk. Ethan Schreiber stood ten feet down the path, hands in his pockets.
“Whoa, sorry,” he said, taking his hands out so he could hold them up in surrender.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked him, my heart still racing.
“I saw your car at the trailhead,” he said.
“So that thing you said about not stalking me.” I crossed my arms and gave him what I hoped was an unimpressed and not at all rattled look. My heart was hammering in my chest.
He winced. “Okay, now I see where this seems pretty sketchy. I just thought that you and I got off on the wrong foot, and so I had the idea to come talk to you again.” He rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. “I thought I could catch up with you, but then I heard voices and I turned around, and that pretty much brings us to when I jumped out of the trees like a madman and startled you. All part of my plan to come across as more normal and approachable and friendly, see.”
I sighed. He looked about as scary as a Labrador realizing that no, in fact, you do not want the three-day-old dead bird it has just dropped at your feet. “I’m not going to give you an interview,” I said. I started down the trail again, stepping pointedly around him. I assumed he’d take the hint and leave.
Instead, he hurried to catch up with me. “I ambushed you before. It wasn’t fair. I thought I could startle you into giving me something, but I can see that wasn’t the right approach.”
“So you’re attempting your dubious charms instead?” I asked.
“They usually work just fine.”
“Not on me.”
“Apparently. But I’ll get there,” he said.
“You basically accused me of framing a man for attempted murder,” I said. “I don’t really see you coming back from that.”
“I don’t think you framed anyone,” Schreiber replied, ducking under a low-hanging branch. “Not intentionally, at least. Tell me—how did you identify Alan Stahl as your attacker? Was it a photo array?”
“I—” I stopped, genuinely unsure of the answer. “What does it matter?” I wasn’t going to answer his questions, I reminded myself.
“I’ve read everything that’s publicly available on the case. And some other things that aren’t,” Schreiber said. “There were massive gaps in your memory. Still are, I’m guessing.”
“Trauma does that,” I said.
“I’m well aware. I’m not blaming you for it. I just find it interesting that in your police interviews, you could barely even remember what you’d been doing in the woods. What day it was. What the weather was like. But you described Stahl in exacting detail. Down to the birthmark on his cheek. Every time you were interviewed the description got more detailed.” He paused, letting that simmer, then shrugged. “Things took a while to come back to you, I guess.”
“Must be.” My pulse raced. He didn’t know anything. There was nothing to know. Nothing that could be proved.
The trees opened up at the edge of the pond. Frogs creaked and croaked in the water, and insects danced along the surface. The scene had a bedraggled kind of charm to it, but the magic of that summer was long gone.
“Is it at all possible that you were mistaken?” Ethan asked, his voice keeping me brutishly anchored in the present. I wished he would leave—and I was glad he didn’t. Time here was slippery. I didn’t want to be alone with the past. “Can you see any possibility that the man who attacked you wasn’t Stahl, but someone else?”
“Will you just let it go? I’m not going to play along with your pet theory,” I said.
“Naomi.” He grabbed my arm. I snarled, wrenching away from him, and turned with my fingers tightening into fists. But he wasn’t looking at me. His gaze shot past me. I started to turn. He reached for me again, as if to stop me, but he couldn’t. Nothing could stop this, the moment when endless possibility collapsed into the cruel certainty of fact.
It was her hand I saw first, fingers bent. And then the oil slick of her hair seeping out across the surface of the water, obscuring all but a fractured sliver of her cheek. Then the dark blotch of her torso, loose shirt billowing around her, obscuring the shape of her until my mind refused to see that it was a person at all, was more than this collection of fragments. Shape and shadow jumbled on the surface of the water into something that couldn’t be Olivia.