Gretchen looked wan, her face pale and un-made-up, her eyes sunken and bloodshot. She gave me a weary hi and the kind of shrug that could have been an apology but could also have just been a comment on her lot in life. I offered her the front seat, but she shook her head. She wanted to be as alone as the car would let her. I couldn’t blame her for that.

His task complete—or half-complete—Simon’s mood improved considerably. And he flicked on the radio. By the time we were back on the coast road and speeding toward Rethymno, he was humming along to Pearl Jam and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Gretchen said nothing, just stared blankly out the window as the dusty scenery slid past. She looked numb and exhausted, and she clearly didn’t want to talk. Perhaps later, I thought, I could get her on her own.

I wanted to talk about Manos, to tell them what had happened to him, if only to explain his mother’s bizarre behavior at the restaurant, but I couldn’t. Partly it was the fear that, after a cursory sympathetic remark, Simon would shrug it off as irrelevant to him, to us, that it would make me like him less. But it was partly something else too, a lingering anxiety that Gretchen hadn’t been lying, that there was still something I didn’t understand that made the situation far worse than I could imagine.

Marcus had reacted to the word Manos. The name. Did he know about the dead boy? If so, why had he pretended not to? Why had he lied to me?

I shifted in my seat. I was missing something important, and though I had no good reason to think so, I couldn’t shake the sense that it was something bad. Something terrible.

The thought took hold, and for all Simon’s chipper observations on the weather and the view, I found myself getting more and more apprehensive with each mile we traveled, as if the villa was a kind of prison where terrible things might still happen. I could have escaped, I thought, I could have left the airport bathroom and tried to book myself on the next flight to anywhere or checked into a local hotel and sat out the trip there. I hadn’t because that would have been crazy, a ridiculous and defeatist overreaction to a little strangeness and tension, but I couldn’t shake the idea completely.

You could have gotten away, I said to myself. But you missed your chance. And now? Well, we’ll see soon enough, won’t we?

We rounded a bend in the road and a pair of large pink-faced vultures looked up at us from the carcass they were picking over. A dog, I thought. They had white furry collars, but their heads were bare. Simon pointed without taking his hands off the wheel.

“Cool,” he said.

I just nodded.

Chapter Thirty-One

I freeze in the stairwell, though I know he may be on his way back up, may only be seconds behind me, laboring along the tunnel in his scuba mask, blade at the ready. My legs just won’t move.

You killed your sister. All those years ago. You killed her and your mom, and you’ve been lying about it and everything else ever since.

No.

Yes. It’s true. You know it now. You remember.

I do. I see it. I have always remembered waking up in the darkness of the flipped car, Gabby still and silent in the seat next to me, my mother crumpled in the driver’s seat. A silence that sucked in the whole world, the darkness of a black hole from which nothing can escape. I remember the hell that was the wait for someone to see, strapped into my seat on my side, my face pressed to the window against the road. The Toyota’s frame had crumpled in the roll and my seat belt was jammed, though that was nothing compared with the damage on the left side, which had taken the full force of the impact. I remember the disorientation, not understanding which way was up, and then the slow, dragging horror as I made sense of it all but could do nothing but weep and wait.

Eventually there were lights and sirens and men with tools who cut the car apart and told me I was a very lucky girl. They gave me candy and hot chocolate and sympathy. Lots of that, though it would never be enough. They gave me what they could, and they asked me what I remembered.

And I lied.

That was when it started. I told them my mother was tuning the radio, got distracted, lost control.

Mommy.

I didn’t say I poked Gabby one too many times, a hard stick in her ribs with the forefinger of my left hand. I didn’t say that she screamed. That my mother turned round to tell us that if we couldn’t behave till we got home . . .

And that was all it took. A momentary glance away from the road, and then a curve she hadn’t seen properly, misjudged in the darkness, over compensated, and then off the road and down the steep embankment, rolling into trees.

That was the truth, and it began with me.

I stand barefoot on the stairs in the gloom, blinking back tears and then, somewhere in the bowels of whatever structure I am in, I hear the slam of another door, and I’m back in the present and moving, refocusing, trying to find what I need to do and hold it in front of me where I can see it.

Get out. Get out. Get out.

I’m up the stairs and faced with another door.

Don’t be locked.

I try it, and it opens, though I have to push through what feels like a heavy swag of carpet to get out. For a moment, I’m disoriented, but I know where I am. I’m in the foyer of the villa. There is a table lamp by the ancient rotary phone, though it’s on my left instead of my right, and I reach for it, snatching the receiver from the cradle.

Silence. No dial tone.

I slam it back down, but by the light of the lamp I see the door to the stairwell I have just climbed, and with a surge of triumphal resolution, I pull the carpet hanging aside and shut it quickly, dragging the heavy bolts into place afterward.

My hand is trembling as I do it, but I do it, and it’s done, and I’m safe.

I sag to the ground, suddenly light-headed, conscious now that I can feel the slight tremor of the generator running when my hands touch the floor. Everything is as it was. It seems impossible, but the generator means everyone is here, doesn’t it? Maybe they don’t even know I was gone.

I get woozily to my feet and walk round to the living room. There are lights on here too, but it is deserted. There is no body on the rug.

You imagined it. Or made it up.

No. I walk over to the spot where I remember standing, looking down, then get on my hands and knees and feel the rug. It’s wet, but with water, not blood.

Cleaned. Hurriedly and probably ineffectively, but cleaned.

I stand up again, conscious that I’m weaving drunkenly in place now and that my head is starting to throb. This doesn’t make sense. The room is beginning to swim. There was something I had to do, but I’m not sure what it was.

I turn back to the foyer.

There is a snake on the tower stairs.

It’s long and green and bright as spring leaves.

Wait.

No. It’s not a snake. It’s a hose. Like you’d use to water the lawn.

I’ve seen it before, but not here. Not in this room. My brain lurches and fumbles. My stomach turns, but now I remember. I saw it in the basement. It was coiled around some tools. It was next to the generator.

And now I understand.

Chapter Thirty-Two

It was late when we got back to the villa. Roadwork in one of the villages outside Rethymno had added almost an hour to the journey. At one point I pulled out my cell phone to see if we still had a signal. We didn’t, but the last thing I had been looking at—the Manos story—was still up on my screen. I whisked it away again as fast as I could, but I couldn’t be sure that Simon, unreadable in his sunglasses, had not seen.

There was a funereal mood back at the house. Everyone lined up to welcome Gretchen with hugs and pats and simpering smiles, as if she had just come home from war. All except Brad, who gave her an arch look and tipped his imaginary hat like a character out of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Gretchen looked hurriedly away and avoided his eyes for the rest of the afternoon.

But then, so did everyone else. At first I thought I was imagining it, but I kept an eye on him as the rest of us talked and ate and (of course) drank, and it was clear that if the group felt some unease about me and Gretchen, they felt more about Brad, and I found myself wondering what had been said in our absence. For his part, Brad thumbed through magazines, read or played on his tablet, and sat in the corner, moving only to refill his glass—a bottle of red he was not sharing—or go to the bathroom. I don’t think he said a word all afternoon, but at one point he started humming deliberately. It took me a moment to realize he was imitating the keyboard riff from Prince’s “1999.” He caught me looking at him and gave me a bleak, mocking smile.

Are we having fun yet? It seemed to say. Enjoying the millennial reunion? Who wouldn’t want another two thousand days of this?