That’s when it all falls into place. Noah wanted revenge for my betrayal. But he couldn’t do it alone. He needed a partner in crime. Somebody to sneak off during the night and kill the man in the cabin while he was pretending to be sound asleep beside me.
But how did Noah even know Warner?
Unless he set it all up at the beginning. He gave poor Lindsay the meet-cute he knew she’d been hoping for, allowing this handsome man to infiltrate our lives. He even knew what zodiac sign Warner needed to be. It was too easy.
“Let’s head back to the cabin,” Warner says calmly.
He points the rifle at me, and I have every reason to believe he will shoot me if I don’t comply. My ankle screams in pain but I push myself to march back to the cabin, where Noah is waiting inside.
I wonder what their plan is. It looks like everyone else was simply murdered, but they want something different for me. Torture. As horrible as it sounds, I can’t entirely blame him. I did something terrible to Noah. It made him crack, the way he did when his father died.
God, I wish I still had Noah’s Swiss Army knife. If only I had held onto it…
The door to the cabin is still sitting open. Warner marches me inside with my hands still up in the air. The first thing I see when I walk into the living room is Noah. I expected him to have a gun in his hand, pointed at me. But instead, he’s sitting on the couch, his head down, his hands raised into the air like mine.
Because somebody else is pointing a gun at his head.
Oh my God.
Chapter 39
ANONYMOUS
The first thing Claire Jennings did when I met her was hug me.
“It’s so good to finally meet you, Lindsay!” she cried.
I stood there stiffly, accepting her unprompted hug. “It’s good to meet you too.”
Claire was a hugger. It was one of the things I learned about her during our four years as roommates. She would hug you when she met you. She would hug you after a few days apart. Sometimes she would hug you just because.
She was open and warm and sweet in a way I’d never experienced before. She was my first true friend. She loved me in a way my parents never did. She thought that I was a good person. We laughed together every day. I had never been so happy as I was when I lived with Claire. I would have done anything for my best friend.
I never told her the true story about my childhood. I made up a happier version of the truth. There was no reason for her to think I was lying. She thought I was just like her. Or if she suspected differently, she didn’t let on.
During our sophomore year, Claire started dating a boy named Ted. I never liked him very much—I didn’t like the way he leered at me or his suggestive comments. My suspicions were later confirmed when she caught him cheating with another girl. Not just another girl, but a friend of hers. She was devastated. She spent hours crying, but I did what I could to cheer her up.
I didn’t plan what happened to Ted. Not exactly.
When we ran into each other during the summer, he didn’t even recognize me as Claire’s roommate. He was the counselor at some sort of camp, and he hit on me shamelessly, even though Claire had emailed me a week earlier saying she thought they might be getting back together.
I wasn’t surprised Ted was interested in me. I was very attractive. I wasn’t on the first day of school, but the freshman fifteen actually did me some favors. I started dressing in more stylish clothing than the tomboy outfits my parents bought me because they always wanted a boy. I also finally managed to grow my hair out. It was amazing having long, silky hair instead of the severely short cut my mother always gave me in the upstairs bathroom. For the first time in my life, I had boobs. Ted couldn’t keep his grimy paws off me.
I accepted his invitation to go out on the lake that evening in one of the rowboats he would “borrow” from the camp. It had to be a secret, because he could get in trouble with the camp for taking the boat. Nobody knew we were sneaking off together—I certainly never told Claire.
Ted never returned from the lake that night.
Claire was sad about Ted’s untimely death, but she moved on. She started dating Noah Matchett, the boy living next-door to us. You could tell just from talking to him that he was a nice guy. He would treat her right. And sure enough, he married her shortly after we graduated. And he was a very good husband.
I never met anyone like Noah. All the boys （and later men） that I dated were like my father. Too handsome, too charming, and unable to keep it in their pants. But I expected it—I never cried when my boyfriends ultimately did what I knew they would do all along.