Alaina stared at the man outside her brother’s window, her mouth and eyes wide with shock.

“Lucas?”

He leaned forward, peering into the room. “What are you doing here?”

She ignored his question and raced to her brother’s dresser. She rummaged through his drawers, throwing shirts and socks to the floor.

“What are you doing?” Lucas asked.

When she didn’t answer, he asked again, more urgently this time. “Alaina. What’s going on? What are you looking for?”

Her hand closed around a slim metal object and she held it up triumphantly.

“Noah’s phone?”

She nodded, just barely. Adrenaline surged through her body. Her heart was threatening to burst out of her chest, and the roaring in her ears sounded like a train barreling through town.

She concentrated on the phone, even though it shook violently in her trembling hands.

“Alaina.” Lucas’s voice was sharp. “What the hell is going on?”

“He…he texted me.”

Lucas frowned. “Who texted you?”

She swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry, her throat tight. “Noah.”

Before she knew it, Lucas had somehow shimmied through the window. Suddenly he was standing next to her, his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at him.

“Tell me what’s going on.” His voice was no longer harsh. It was calm, soothing, and Alaina felt herself relax a fraction.

She looked at him. “I got a text this morning.” Slowly, she pulled her own phone out of her jeans pocket. Wordlessly, she handed it to Lucas.

A text bubble displayed on the lock screen as soon as he hit the Home button. The sender was Noah.

Stop looking…or you’ll regret it.

Her eyes were on Lucas. She watched his eyes widen and he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

He looked at her. “When did you get this?”

“This morning.” She felt the hysteria building. “My brother texted me. From the dead!”

“Hold on,” Lucas said, holding up a hand.

“It’s him,” she shrieked. She snatched the phone back from him and held it up so he could see. “That’s his name. Right there!” She looked at the phone in her other hand. “I need to see when he sent it.”

“He didn’t send it, Alaina,” Lucas said quietly.

She glared at him. “Yes he did! This is his name. Right here.” She stabbed a finger at the screen. “Are you blind?”

He just watched her, an unreadable expression on his face.

She turned her attention back to her brother’s phone. It was password-protected. She tried his birthday, but it remained locked. She tried her birthday. Nothing.

Tears rolled down her cheeks and she let out a strangled scream of frustration.

“Try your face,” Lucas said.

She glared at him. “What?”

“Facial recognition,” he said. “Try it. That’s the newest iPhone. It should have it enabled.

“That won’t work.”

He shrugged. “Maybe not. But if you keep punching in random codes, you’re gonna get locked out of that phone, and then you’ll truly have no way to get in it.”

She hesitated, then held the phone out and pressed the Home button.

And just like that, the lock screen disappeared.

“It worked!” Impulsively, and almost without thinking, she kissed him. Just on the cheek, a simple quick kiss, but he jerked back, startled.

She barely noticed. She tapped the text button icon, her nerves eating her alive.

And then she froze.

“What?” Lucas asked.

“There’s nothing there.” She couldn’t understand it. And not only was there no text to her, but there were no texts, period. “But…but I got a text. From him. From this number.”

“What you got was spoofed,” Lucas told her.

She frowned. She didn’t know what that meant. “Spoofed?”

He nodded. “Most people use it to hack personal info. They masquerade as someone the caller knows and then try to get sensitive info.”

“Is it hard to do?”

“Nope.” Lucas’s voice held a hint of disgust. “There’s literally an app that lets you do it.”

Alaina staggered to the bed and sat down. Her heart was still thumping, but the roaring in her ears had lessened. “I don’t understand.”

“Someone purposely sent that text,” Lucas said. “Someone who wanted you to think it was from Noah.”

She closed her eyes. She felt almost numb. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas admitted. “To mess with you. To scare you. I have no idea.”

She swallowed hard. When the text had come in that morning, she thought she was imagining things. But then she stared at the name and the corresponding message in the text bubble, too frozen to actually swipe her phone open, and panic had set in. She wasn’t one to believe in spirits or ghosts, but she couldn’t come up with a single explanation as to why she was getting a message from her brother.

Her dead brother.

She’d sprinted out of her house wearing nothing more than her pajamas and raced to her parents’. The front door was locked, which momentarily deterred her, but then she remembered the garage code and she’d let herself in that way.

She took a couple of deep breaths. Now that the hysteria had passed, she still felt a sense of unease. Because even though the message hadn’t been sent from the dead, there was still something to grapple with.

The fact that someone had purposely sent it to her.

The question was who?

And, more importantly, why?