But that was a lie.
I saw Jackson and Corinne. After the fair. But if I said that . . . you had to understand the way things were. The stories people could weave from the few facts they had, the truths they pulled together from that box.
They needed someone to blame. Someone to vilify and put in a cell so they could feel safe again. Someone to play the part, be the monster.
I couldn’t tell that. It would be enough to close the box forever. I’d be sentencing him.
Jackson wasn’t some pushover who let Corinne wrong him time and time again. He wasn’t some angry kid who felt betrayed, like the investigation would have you believe. It had nothing to do with any baby, any fight. When Corinne turned on him, cut him down and made him push back, enough to push her away—he liked it.
I know this because we all did.
He liked it because of what came next—the phone call begging him to return. That phone message they played for all of us: Please. Please come back. The way she’d love him, surely, when he did. Nobody would ever love you so fiercely, so meanly, so thoroughly. And the parts of you that you wanted to keep hidden—she loved those most of all.
“Nic,” she’d said when my mom died, pulling me to her chest, crying herself. “I love you. I’d trade you one if I could. You know that, right?”
I clung to her, not speaking. Corinne would talk like that, like people were things to trade, pieces on a chessboard that we could move around, that we could control.
“Want to watch something burn?” she’d asked.
That night we went to the Randalls’ abandoned barn. She had a red container of gasoline that she shook out, tracing the perimeter.
She let me strike the match, and she held my hand as we watched it burn to the ground. We stood too close to it, so close we could feel each time a piece of wood caught, sparked, ignited.
She called Tyler to come pick me up, and told us to say we’d been together the whole night. “Go,” she said, right before she called 911. She took the fall for the barn all on her own. “I told them I was practicing how to make a fire. Like in the Girl Scouts. In case of emergency. It got out of hand.” Her smile, huge. The whole thing just a tiny favor. Six months of community service and the wrath of her father, a small gift to help me through my mother’s death.
How could I not love Corinne Prescott back then? How could anyone not? I liked to believe it was for things like this and not because I was drawn to the mean in her, or how she could destroy things without flinching—a dying bird, an abandoned barn. I liked to believe she did these things because she loved me, too.
I can see it all a little clearer now with the filter of time. How, if you tilt the frame and change the perspective, maybe she wasn’t taking the fall only for me. That maybe it was just one more link in a chain of IOUs, emotional blackmail that would one day be called up and cashed in.
I think Corinne believed that life could break even somehow. That there was an underlying fairness to it all. That the years on earth were all a game. A risk for a payoff, a test for an answer, a tally of allies and enemies, and a score at the end. I know now that everything we did or said, and everything we didn’t, was kept in a ledger in her mind—and always in the back of ours, too.
* * *
I CALLED DANIEL FROM the car on my way to find Tyler. He picked up on the first ring. “Hello?” he said, typing in the background.
“Tell me you were not messing around with Annaleise Carter.”
The typing stopped. “Jesus Christ, Nic.”
“Damnit, Daniel, are you kidding me? What the hell were you thinking? What the hell were you doing? And Laura—”
“I know you’re not lecturing me on fidelity, Nic. But no,” he said. “No.” More emphatically. But I didn’t believe him. This is what you say when you’re being questioned. This is what you cling to against all else, against all evidence. This is what you say, and you pray that someone will back you up.
I’d done it for him once before.
Ten years earlier, I’d heard Hannah Pardot asking my brother in the living room, “Were you and Corinne ever in any sort of relationship?” I pressed my ear to the grate in the bathroom floor and heard him swear: “Never. Never.”
When my turn came around, I repeated his words. Never, I said. Never.
“Nic? Are you listening to me?” Daniel’s voice tightened through the phone.
“Jackson said—”
“Jackson doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on. So do you need anything else, or were you just calling for the interrogation?”
“Okay. Okay.” I hung up, feeling sick to my stomach. Once again, I saw a missing girl in the center of a web. Jackson’s words twisting into a warning. Annaleise had been worming her way into the lives of anyone connected to Corinne Prescott. As if she’d been looking for something.
A missing poster lingered in my peripheral vision at the stoplight, her eyes wide and searching. A shudder ran through me, the tremor in my hands coming back.
I was looking for something, too.
I wondered if maybe she’d found it.
* * *
TYLER WASN’T AT THE railway station. He was about a hundred yards past it, where they were extending the track, a wide frame and cement base already in place. Across the street, even surrounded by men all dressed the same—worn jeans, tan work boots, and a T-shirt, the same uniform he’d adopted eleven years ago—I could pick him out right away. Whereas the rest of the crew had on yellow hard hats, he wore a black baseball cap with ECC in block letters across the front.
A skinny man looked over Tyler’s shoulder, gestured with his chin. “I think you got some company.”
Tyler turned in slow motion. His face remained passive as he took me in, which was the most un-Tyler-like thing of all. Normally, I’d show up and he’d turn and smile. Hey, Nic, like I’d been gone only a day. Not six months, a year, more.
But now his face didn’t change. “Hi,” he said. The twitch of his thumb, the only indication that I was anything other than a stranger. His eyes shifted quickly to the side, to where the skinny man was watching us. “Can I help you with something?”
“I need to speak to you. It’s urgent.” I mentally berated myself. Urgent, like Everett would say in a business meeting.
“Sure.” He gestured to a small trailer, and I worried I’d have to talk in front of his father, but when I got inside, I realized the office was his. Single desk, his truck keys sprawled on top of some papers. A few straight-back chairs throughout. Plans and permits tacked to the corkboard walls. When he’d worked for his dad during school and then after, I’d always thought it was temporary. That he’d want something more, like I did. But he didn’t go to college when he graduated, and I should’ve known it then. Not just assumed he was working for his dad because he was waiting for me.
Ten years later and he was running the company. Ten years later, two fewer degrees than I had, and he was twice as accomplished.
He followed me in, closed the door, and leaned back against it. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you.” He glanced out the window. “This really isn’t the best time.”
“I’m sorry. But something happened.” I tried to get a good look at his face, but the brim of his hat was pulled down low, and I couldn’t see his eyes. Just his mouth, a set line.
“What happened?” he asked, his back still pressed up against the door. The distance between us felt tangible, forced and awkward.
“Last night. After midnight. Someone was in Annaleise’s place.” A muscle at the side of his jaw twitched. I wanted to rip the hat off his head. I needed to see his eyes.
“And you know this because?”
“Because I saw them.”
“Nic, you’ve got to stay out of the fucking woods. You’ve got to let this go.”
“Tyler . . .”
“What?” he asked.
“I have to ask you.” I paused, wishing he wouldn’t make me.