I nodded. “Jessi’s death was an accident.”
“Yes,” he said, as if relieved I understood.
“But Liv’s wasn’t,” I said, ragged as a scream but so soft I could barely hear my own voice over the hiss of the rain. He pulled his hands from mine. He stepped back, his face settling into a hard kind of sorrow. His hand went to his back, lifting up the edge of his jacket. The jacket he’d never offered to me, as I shivered in the rain.
He took the gun from his waistband.
It looked like the one Mitch bought me. Nine-millimeter, I thought. Close enough to the Barneses’ gun that you couldn’t tell the difference just from the wounds they left. And they’d never recovered the bullet.
My fear was cold and still, the surface of a lake in winter. I could sink forever under it, all sound and sense distant. Shudders racked my body, and I couldn’t look anywhere but the perfectly round, perfectly black barrel of the gun. I tried to take a breath. All that came was a short, shallow gasp.
“It wasn’t me,” Cody said. “Stahl’s son—he must have found out that you lied.”
“It wasn’t Ethan. He wanted his father in prison,” I said. “And how exactly do you know he found out we lied? Who told you that? It was Liv. Wasn’t it?”
Cody looked down at the gun like he wasn’t sure what it was. “You think you know what happened, but you don’t,” he said.
“You didn’t mean for it to happen.” Echoing again and again and again. Because nothing was our faults; the universe conspired against us, weaving tight the threads of fate. I’d known the names of the Fates once: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. How could I remember that, when I’d forgotten so much?
“I only wanted to talk to her,” he said hoarsely. “But she wouldn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t—she attacked me. I was only defending myself.”
“Unarmed? Half your size?”
“She would have destroyed my whole life,” he said, voice strangled. “I was just trying to find a way out. That’s all I’ve been doing, all along.”
“Was it you in the woods?” I asked him.
“I thought you might lead me to Jessi. I wasn’t going to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, but he sounded like he was trying to convince himself of it as much as me.
“Then let me go,” I said, one last futile thrash of hope as the snare’s wire tightened. I want to live, I realized, even as survival became impossible. For the first time I wanted more than to outrun the pain, but it had come too late. Even if Cody didn’t realize it yet.
“I can’t,” he said. He half lifted the gun. Not pointing it at me yet. “Sit down, Naomi. We’re going to stay here. We’re going to wait.”
“Wait for what?” I spat out, but he only shook his head and gestured with the gun. I walked three steps to the base of a tree and sat on a protruding root, my back against the rough bark. He kept half an eye on me, half on the way we’d come.
We didn’t have to wait long before a figure appeared among the trees, walking toward us.
It was Cass.
What the hell are you doing, Cody?” Cass demanded.
I opened my mouth to warn her, to tell her he had a gun—but she could see that herself. He made no effort to conceal it. He didn’t point it at her, either.
He’d been expecting her. And she had been expecting this.
Cass was wearing a sensible windbreaker and hiking boots, her hair slicked back in a ponytail. She carried a black duffel bag. As she approached, she glared at Cody, eyes burning with anger.
“She was going to the police. She was going to tell them about Jessi,” Cody said.
Cass looked at me, and it was like she’d never seen me before in her life. There was nothing to connect to in her eyes. Nothing but calculation.
“Cass,” I whispered, and for one dizzying moment nothing made any sense. She couldn’t be here. And then I stilled.
I looked beneath the surface, and I saw what had been there all along.
Cass put her hand on Cody’s wrist, pushing the gun down gently. “Give us a minute, will you?” she said.
He nodded reluctantly and paced away a few steps, but he kept hold of the gun. Cass dropped the duffel bag on the ground and approached me, rubbing her palms on her jeans. She crouched down a couple feet away.
“Fuck. This is messed up,” she whispered, darting her eyes toward Cody. Making a conspiracy out of the two of us. “What did he tell you?”
I stared at her. She sounded so worried. Almost panicked, and desperately concerned for me. Two minutes ago, her face had been so devoid of emotion it could have been carved from stone, and now I could have believed she was on the edge of tears.
“I’m tired of lying,” I said.
“What?” she asked, a line appearing between her perfect eyebrows.
“That’s what Liv said after she tried to kill herself, eight years ago. Kimiko told me. It’s what she said in the letter, too.” The note that proved I was wrong, that Bishop’s suspicions and Sawant’s insinuations were misplaced. Liv had killed herself. Except she hadn’t, so who left the note?
The same person who had known where Marcus Barnes kept his gun. The person who had put the gate code in at 4:47 a.m.
I thought of Liv, glancing back toward the car before slinging herself easily over the gate. Liv at fifteen, skirting the living room because her father had the gun out to clean it.
Liv looking me in the eye. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Liv never used the gate code—she just climbed over. But Cass knew the code and she knew where the gun was kept.
There hadn’t been a note eight years ago. Not that we’d found, at least. That time, I’d known it was coming. We’d all known, hoping we were wrong and terrified we were right. The meds hadn’t been helping. They were part of the problem—the high dosage that made her hands shake until she couldn’t hold a pencil to draw a straight line. Her notebooks were full of abandoned, sloppy sketches.
Her handwriting had been huge and messy, slewing across the page. Nothing like the tiny, precise lettering she usually had. But exactly like the suicide note.
The note was from eight years ago. It seemed so unlikely—who would have such a thing? After eight years, carefully preserved?
Tucked away in a box of secrets.
Cass frowned at me, uncertainty disrupting her careful mask of concern. “Listen, Naomi. I can try to talk Cody down, but I’ve got to know what exactly is going on here,” she said.
“As if you don’t know.”
“All I know is that I got a panicked call from Cody saying that you knew something and he was going to take care of it, and I should come meet him,” she said.
“And you know about Jessi. You know what he did to her.”
“Sort of,” she hedged. I could almost see the shift behind her eyes, her lies rebalancing. It was a neat trick.
“He told me what happened to Liv.”
Her lips parted. Her head cocked slightly, curiously, as she tried to rebalance again. “What happened to Liv,” she repeated softly. Not sure how much I knew.
“He killed her so she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about Persephone. But, Cass, there’s no way he could have known that she was about to tell us. Unless … unless you already knew,” I said.