Kate’s hands shook as she waited in the hallway outside the locker room. She could hear the practice wrapping up. She just had to stay strong about this for the next few minutes. They would cave fast.

The clatter of the team coming couldn’t be mistaken. She slipped further back in the doorway she waited in.

“Taylor, you need to get your shit together before the season starts,” one of them said. She recognized it as Kyle’s voice. “We’ll get our asses handed to us and lose our standing if you keep playing like that.”

“Hell no, he doesn’t.” That was Mike Davies. “Sawyer will be cleared and back in school before the season starts. The cops will have to admit he couldn’t have killed the girls. He has witnesses.”

There was grumbling and all of them talking over each other as half the team argued Sawyer would be back in no time and the other half said they thought his family would move away after the scandal.

It struck Kate that not a single one of them seemed to realize Sawyer had committed rape and would be standing trial for that, whether he was a murderer or not. Or, if any of them realized it, they didn’t speak up. No one in that building was speaking up for Carrie and Adrienne.

Kate closed her eyes. She was standing up for them.

She heard the boys file into the locker room and the door slam shut.

“What’s that smell?”

Kate jogged to the door and slid the metal chain she’d brought through the handles, wrapping the length around several times before bolting it in place.

“What the fuck? What is that?”

There were more voices, more questions, but Kate ignored them. She called in through the door.

“It’s lighter fluid and there’s a lot of it!” Her voice shook but she cleared her throat and shoved past the nerves. She was speaking for her friends now. Speaking for Sawyer’s victims. “I’m going to light it if you don’t all start telling the truth about what Sawyer did and where he was when my friends were killed.”

There was cursing and a lot of noise as she saw dark forms through the frosted glass panes of the door. They were rattling the door, trying to push through, but she knew they couldn’t break the chains. The glass was covered in metal mesh so that wouldn’t be an escape route for them either.

They didn’t know it, but she didn’t plan to hurt any of them. There was a small amount of lighter fluid sprinkled in the room, but it was well away from the door. She’d also sprinkled a lot of plain water around. She’d made sure that the trail of fluid they saw coming around the edges of the room and out the door—the ones she would supposedly light—were water only and that the lighter fluid was well away from sources of flame.

She just needed them to smell it, to think she would do it. To think they might be trapped in there with a fire if she did.

“Kate? What’s going on?”

Kate whirled to see Geoff Edwards, Adrienne’s uncle, coming toward her.

The guys in the locker room began to shout and the racing her heart had been doing a minute ago kicked into high gear. If she thought her heart might break right through her chest before, now she was sure of it.

She pressed her back against the doors and held the lighter in her hand up, flicking it to start the flame. “Stop! I’ll light the room if you come closer.”

Mr. Edwards put a hand out, but she backed away. “Kate, everyone’s looking for you. Your parents are worried about you.”

Kate lifted her chin. “Well, as you can see, I’m fine.”

He shook his head, his eye moving from her, to the door behind her, then back to her again. “I don’t think you’re fine, Kate. I think you’re upset, and you’ve every right to be. You’ve been through a lot.”

He stepped closer, hand outstretched like he could pacify her, but she didn’t like how close he was getting. She didn’t like the feeling that he was boxing her in.

She raised the lighter higher. “No! Don’t you want them to tell the truth, too? Don’t you want this for Adrienne?” Kate didn’t understand him. How could he not want them to be forced to tell the truth?

She thought, then, of the detectives’ questions about any adults hanging around Sawyer’s clubhouse. Mr. Edwards was never at the clubhouse, but he was at the school and in the hockey buildings a lot. More than any other board member. Kate couldn’t remember seeing any other board member hanging out on campus with the kids the way he was. Most of the members of the board were distant people you saw the names of around campus, but didn’t see much of as a student.

Why was he always there?

Kate began to shake again. She wanted so badly to close her eyes and have this whole thing over with. Not only this moment, but all of it. From the moment she got that first phone call from Carrie’s parents asking if they’d seen her. All the time as she watched one friend after another disappear and then...

She couldn’t think about what had happened after their disappearances. “Stop,” she said again, only this time it came out as a whisper and she couldn’t hear it over the shouting in the locker room behind her.

She shoved the lighter hand toward Mr. Edwards as if she could strike him with it somehow, but all it did was make the flame go out.

This was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. All she’d wanted was to get the hockey players to tell the truth, to stop covering for Sawyer.

Kate sank down to the ground, shaking so hard she couldn’t hold onto the lighter anymore, couldn’t keep her knees beneath her anymore. Then there were hands on her and someone was pulling her up and she felt like she was watching a movie. None of this could be happening.

None of it.