“Why did she want you to lie?”
He sighs, long and hard, as if the truth is something heavy he’s been carrying. “When she heard about the pictures, she freaked. She was worried her mom would find out, so she wanted to just pay up and be done with it.” His eyes click to mine. “I was the one who talked her out of it,” he goes on. “I told her just to talk to her mom. To explain. We agreed her parents would take it easier if they thought I was responsible. Like we were hooking up, hanging out, getting drunk, and I did it for a joke to show her later. It sounds stupid now.” He looks away. “When it turned out the photos were from a party with all those people standing around, she just…couldn’t take it.”
I imagine a circle of kids, laughing, faces red from alcohol: in my head, it’s Kaycee’s paintings I see, the predatory grins, a girl in the fetal position on the ground.
“I didn’t think they’d actually send the photos around,” Condor says, and I feel sure it’s the first time he’s made the confession out loud. “I thought they were bluffing. There you have it. My dirty secret.”
“Not so dirty after all.”
“Dirty enough. She’s dead.”
“It’s not your fault,” I say, unconsciously parroting his own words back to him.
He gives me a narrow smile. “Thanks. Feels like it, though.” He finishes his drink. The bottle is empty. He stands up to get another.
“Fuck it, right?”
“Kaycee Mitchell is dead.” I can’t keep it in any longer. “I’m sure of it.”
For a long time, Condor says nothing. “Kaycee Mitchell ran away,” he says shortly.
“No. That’s why I can’t find her anywhere. She never left in the first place.”
“So everyone in town is lying?” Condor’s voice is curiously flat, as if he isn’t really asking the question. He pours another glass and slides it across the table to me.
“Only the people who matter. Everyone else just believes what they were told.” My head is already spinning. “She was murdered.”
There. I’ve said it.
But Condor doesn’t look shocked. Just tired. “Oh, yeah? Then who killed her?”
I can tell he doesn’t believe me, and I say so.
Condor sighs. He rubs his eyes hard with his fists. “Why would someone murder Kaycee?”
“I—I’m not sure yet,” I admit. “But I know it had something to do with Optimal. And with the Game, too.”
“You think Kaycee was killed for some high school hustle?”
“No. It was bigger than that. I think her father was selling the pictures Kaycee and her friends collected. I think he found a new market. And I think he killed her when she threatened to tell.”
“That’s insane,” Condor says.
“He used to hurt her.” Almost immediately, I’m ashamed. It feels like a betrayal of a secret Kaycee would have sworn me not to tell.
“I don’t doubt it,” Condor says, and his tone softens. “I’m telling you it’s impossible. There’s no way Frank Mitchell killed his daughter.”
“So you’re a mind reader, now.” I don’t even care how I sound. I’m sick of being doubted, disbelieved, and made to feel like I’m imagining things. “Did you have to get a special degree for that?”
The words hang sharply between us. Condor didn’t get a degree at all, and he knows that I know it.
“Look, I saw Frank every day for months after Kaycee disappeared. Every morning, he bought a six-pack and a pint of vodka. For a while, it was a twelve-pack and a pint. It was like watching someone commit suicide in slow motion. One day I couldn’t help myself, and I told him drinking wouldn’t help him forget Kaycee.”
He interlaces his fingers, squeezing so tight his knuckles stand out. “He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. You know what he said to me? ‘I’m not drinking to forget,’ he said. ‘I’m drinking to believe.’ I didn’t know what he meant at first. ‘Believe what?’ I asked him. ‘Until I believe she ran off, until I believe she’s somewhere doing just fine.’?” Condor is quiet for a second. “Don’t you get it? He said she ran because he wanted to believe it. He needed to. But he didn’t know. He was terrified of not knowing.”
I stand up quickly. My body feels like it belongs to someone else.
“Forget it.” I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know why I did. Everything is collapsing everywhere I turn. “Forget I said anything.”
Condor gets to his feet, too. “I’m trying to help you—”
I cut him off before he can finish. “I may be wrong about Frank Mitchell. But I’m not wrong about Kaycee. They wanted her out of the way, they knew she could expose them—”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Abby?” He looks at me like he’s afraid of me. “Optimal?” In his voice, I can hear how it sounds. In his eyes, I’m a shrunken reflection, desperate and small. “And Sheriff Kahn? And Misha? And all of Kaycee’s friends? And Brent?” He spits the name out like a curse.
“You don’t get it. You don’t know—Optimal owns everything in this town—it’s everywhere—”
“You don’t get it.” His voice cracks against a note of pain, and it touches a place deep inside me and suddenly I realize that the anger is just grief, just fear, just worry. “Fuck Kaycee Mitchell. Dead, alive, burning in hell, wherever she is. Fuck her. She ruined enough. Don’t let her ruin you, too. Don’t—”
I kiss him. Taking the words off his tongue with brute force. We knock a pile of books off the table, crash down to the chair and then onto the floor. We topple the lamp and it shatters on the ground, making the room go dark.
“You can’t fix yourself on me,” he says, undoing his belt. “You know that, right?”
“I’m not here to fix myself,” I say, pulling him closer.
Because maybe I can’t be fixed at all.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Knocking. Someone is at the door, knocking again and again.
I’m in my own bed, but the smell of Condor is everywhere and all over me.
More knocking.
My phone’s dead, and I have to find the microwave to read the time: 8:12. Only bad news comes this early.
I twitch open the blinds with two fingers and my heart stops. Sheriff Kahn is scowling at my door as if it’s been talking back. I can tell just from how he’s standing that he’s been there awhile.
The paintings are still sitting in my living room: each of them looks like something ripped from a body, like some horrible inner secret.
Kahn starts knocking again before I’ve shuffled one of them beneath the sofa.
“One minute.” Sweat sticks my hair to my forehead. I’m wearing the shirt I had on yesterday, but inside out. “One minute.” I shove the other two paintings under my bed.