We don’t speak on the drive back to Twin Lakes. Owen’s knuckles stand out on the steering wheel, as if he’s afraid it might spin out from his grip. Brynn sits, head back, staring at nothing.
Once, when I was five or six, my mom drove an hour and a half to Burlington to take me to a local production of The Nutcracker. I was wearing my best dress—green velvet, with a crinoline skirt and lace at the collar—thick wool stockings, shiny leather boots that laced to my ankle. On the way there, it started to snow, light flakes that winked on the way down and melted side by side against the window.
When we arrived, there were no women in long silk dresses, no ushers in flat caps passing out brochures, no crush of perfume and conversation. Just some teens out of uniform sweeping up crumbs from the aisles, and the stage naked and bare under the lights. My mom had gotten the start time wrong. The show was a matinee. The worst part of the whole thing wasn’t even the disappointment but how angry I was at my mom. We went across the street to a little diner and she bought me a tuna melt and a chocolate sundae and I refused to eat them. Driving home while the headlights sucked snow into the grille, I imagined setting out into the woods all alone until the silence took me.
That’s just how I feel now: we came too late. It’s been too long.
Summer should have spoken to us sooner. She should have led us.
I’m furious at her all over again.
Owen has to wheel up on the lawn to avoid hitting the Dumpster in my driveway. Even before he’s fully stopped, Brynn rockets out of the car without saying thank you.
“Construction?” Owen asks.
“What?” Suddenly, Owen and I are alone. Except I can no longer remember why I thought, even for a second, that we might repair something, stitch it back together. Owen, too, was probably fiction.
“The Dumpster. You guys doing construction?” He leans forward, squinting up at the house.
“Yes,” I lie quickly. I let myself imagine it’s true: that we’re building instead of taking things apart.
“I’m sorry, Mia,” Owen says. “I know you thought—I mean, I know it was important to you—”
“We were wrong about Mr. Haggard, okay?” I say before he can finish. “That doesn’t mean we were wrong about everything.” I seize onto this idea, haul myself forward word by word. “Someone was helping Summer write Lovelorn. Someone left clues behind. Maybe he was hoping to get caught. . . .”
Owen rubs his eyes. For a second he looks much older. “Mia . . .”
“Nothing else makes sense.” I keep going because I can’t stand to hear him contradict me. In my chest, a bubble swells and swells, threatening to burst. “Whoever killed her knew all about the sacrifice. He knew about the woods and the shed and all of it.”
“Mia . . .”
But I can’t let him finish. “We can talk to Mr. Ball again. Or we look at Heath Moore. We know his alibi’s bullshit now.” I’m babbling, desperate. “You heard Brynn. She took his phone. I bet there’s a ton of creepy stuff on it. There’s something wrong with him. And Summer was with him, right, before she—well, before you.” I still can’t say it. “She might have told him about Lovelorn, she probably did, she could never keep her mouth shut—”
“No. Mia, no.” Owen twists around in his seat to face me, and the swollen thing in my chest explodes, flooding me with cold. “The clues don’t lead anywhere. It’s all make-believe—don’t you get it? It’s still make-believe.” He looks like someone I barely know—new hard planes of his face, new mouth stretched thinly in a line, not my Owen, the brilliant wild boy, a boy meant to leap and spin alone in a spotlight, not a scrap of him left. “I’m sorry.”
Hot pinpricks behind my eyes mean I’m going to cry. I look down at my lap, at my hands squeezed into fists. “You’re sorry,” I repeat, and Owen flinches, as if he thought the conversation was over and he’s surprised to find me still sitting there. “You’re sorry.” I press down the tears under the weight of an anger that comes tingling through my whole body, waking me up. “You left. You got out. You’re going to NYU next year, for God’s sake. NYU. That was my school.”
“Seriously?” Owen frowns. “We always talked about going to NYU.”
“I always talked about it. I did.” My voice sounds foreign to me—cold and hard and ringing. “And you come back here with your cute little car and your fake British accent—”
“Hey.” Owen looks hurt, and when he looks hurt he looks, momentarily, like the old him.
But it’s too late, I can’t stop now. “We’ve been buried here, don’t you understand? We’re suffocating. And you think you can make it better by saying you’re sorry? You don’t care about helping, you don’t care—” I break off before I can say about me. The tears are back now, elbowing me hard in the throat, making a break for it. I take a deep breath. “How dare you show up after all this time and pretend? You’re the one playing make-believe. You—you told me you loved me. But you don’t. You couldn’t.” I didn’t mean to say it, but there it is. Words are like a virus—there’s no telling what kind of damage they’ll do once they’re out.
Owen stares at me, and I’m so busy trying not to cry it takes me a minute to realize he’s looking at me with pity. “I did, Mia,” he says quietly.
Did. Past tense. As in, no longer.
I make it out of the car without crying. Without saying goodbye, either, even though that’s what I mean.