“Fuck.” I lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I should have been angry. I just felt wrung out—and oddly relieved. I hadn’t really understood why Ethan was helping me. Now I was starting to. “Are you going to turn this into a podcast?”
He sat down next to me, his weight making the bed sink. “This is all a bit beyond the scope of the project I pitched,” he admitted. I snorted. “I told you. I won’t use anything without your permission.”
“But you’d like to.”
“I’d be an idiot not to,” he said.
“You are kind of an idiot, though,” I said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you expect something more than what my daddy says I am,” I told him. I wrapped the edge of Ethan’s shirt around my fist, the shape of my knuckles distinct under the thin fabric. I pulled him toward me and he leaned forward, bracing himself with a hand beside my head as he looked down at me.
“What your dad said—” he began.
“It’s true. More or less. I’m a disaster. And a liar. And apparently, I sent the wrong man to prison.”
He didn’t tell me it wasn’t true. He didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. “Someone killed Jessi. Someone killed Liv.”
“Or Jessi fell and hit her head, and Liv killed herself,” I said. And I was the only villain in the story after all. The girl who lied.
He splayed his hand over my chest, as if to feel my heartbeat, and his fingertip grazed the edge of the ridged scar beside my sternum. The one that had come the closest to killing me.
“Someone did this to you,” he said. “Maybe we were wrong about it being Stahl, but right about the reason. The man who killed Jessi saw you. He tried to kill you. Silence you. And when Liv put the pieces together, he silenced her, too. You caught the wrong monster twenty years ago. That means there’s another one still out there. And you’re going to find him.”
“I like the girl you think I am,” I said. I rubbed the cuff of his T-shirt sleeve idly between my fingers. “If you were smart, you’d get far, far away from me.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. He kissed me, softly, and I shut my eyes and told myself that my father was right and none of it meant anything at all.
Ethan passed out sometime around two p.m. I got dressed quietly so I wouldn’t wake him up. There was no chance of me getting any sleep. My thoughts were caught in an endless loop, cycling between Jessi and Liv and that summer twenty-two years ago. I was ready to accept that Stahl hadn’t been the one who attacked me. He wasn’t the thread connecting the three of us.
Except that Liv and Cass had seen him.
Unless they hadn’t.
There was only one person left who could tell me exactly what they’d seen.
At two o’clock on a Friday, Cass would be at the lodge. The sensible thing would be to call or to go by her house later, but instead I drove out of town, along the winding road that led farther into the moss-draped trees. You came upon the lodge suddenly—rounding a thickly wooded turn to discover it right in front of you, nestled against a backdrop of a hundred shades of green and brown. When we were kids it was a single building, sagging and waterlogged, with scratchy sheets and stained carpeting. It had closed completely the year before Cass bought it.
Two years after that, she’d transformed it. Huge, rough wooden beams supported the roof, artfully primitive, while the all-glass front entrance added an elegant modern touch. Inside, works by local Native artists decorated the lobby, and the front desk sold tiny packets of salted caramel popcorn for four bucks a pop.
“Can I help you?” chirped a tiny brunette from behind the counter, her cheeks rounding with her perfect customer-service smile.
“I’m looking for—” I started, but I didn’t get any further.
“Naomi! What are you doing here? Is something wrong?” Cass asked, striding across the lobby. Belatedly, I realized that I hadn’t changed or brushed my hair, and I probably looked terrible.
“I just need to talk to you,” I said. Cass’s eyes darted past me. Her expression was tight with discomfort. This was her space, and I was intruding on it. Causing chaos. But she only waved a beckoning hand and marched down the hall. I trailed behind as she made her way to one of the conference rooms on the ground floor and opened it with a keycard. As soon as we were both inside, she shut it and turned to me, spots of pink high on her cheeks.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.
I winced. I couldn’t say anything in my defense, because she was right. “I’m sorry.” It was utterly inadequate. One of her friends had died, and the other disappeared on her.
Her lips thinned. “It’s fine. What do you need?” she asked, her voice strained.
I tensed. Maybe coming here had been a bad idea. But it was too late now. “I need to know exactly what you saw the day I was attacked,” I said.
She let out a groan, covering her face with one hand. “Naomi. You have to let this go.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I told her pleadingly. “I just need to hear it—from you, I mean. I don’t remember. I need you to do it for me.” Tell me I didn’t do anything wrong.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she reached out and took my hand, drawing me gently over to one of the long tables and ushering me into a chair. We sat across the corner of the table from one another, and Cass kept her hand over mine.
“I’m going to tell you this once,” she said. “And then you are going to stop torturing yourself, okay?” At my nod, she took a deep breath. “Liv and I were down in the Grotto. We heard you scream, and we started to climb out to see what was wrong. That was when I saw the man. He was standing over you. He had a knife in his hand. You were on your stomach, and you were kind of … flopping around.”
She swallowed, looking queasy. My heart beat fast in my chest. I hadn’t actually heard Cass testify; my testimony had been last, and I hadn’t been allowed to listen to the others. Hearing it now, my heart ached for the little girls we’d been.
“You managed to roll over. He dropped down on one knee and the knife came down again, and it—I think that was the one that got your face.”
I touched a finger to the scar automatically. That blow had been one of the hardest, but it was at an angle, laying open the flesh from the hinge of my jaw almost to the corner of my mouth.
“Liv tried to climb out. She shouted for you, but I grabbed her and put my hand over her mouth. He was so focused he didn’t hear—and you were screaming, too. I had to wrap my whole body around her to keep her there. His hand kept coming up and going down again. Over and over.” She looked to the side, taking short, sharp breaths. “Then he just … stopped. He said something, I think, but I couldn’t tell what. He walked away.”
I pictured the scene. The spot where I’d sat. The Grotto. I frowned. “I was pretty far from the boulder,” I said.
Cass’s head tilted. “I guess.”
“And he had his back to you.”
Her brow furrowed. “Not completely. I could see the side of his face.”