Nadia was right; they should have known better than to try to lie to a mom. Moms had a bullshit meter that was hard to sneak anything past.

“I should have said that we were friends of Eris. I only met Mariel once,” Watt amended, and nudged Leda sharply in her side. She blinked, seeming jarred to life.

“We’re so sorry to bother you. Eris”—Leda faltered for only a fraction of an instant over the name—“had something of mine, something she borrowed, and I’ve been trying to track it down. It seems as if Eris might have lent it to Mariel. I wouldn’t ask, except it’s something important.”

“What is it?” Mrs. Valconsuelo asked.

Leda’s chin tipped imperceptibly higher; the face she made when she was about to lie. She was so tremulous, so fiercely vulnerable, Watt marveled that Mrs. Valconsuelo didn’t see it.

“A scarf,” Leda decided, and Watt felt a pang of sympathy for her, because he knew exactly which scarf she was thinking of. The one that Leda’s father had given Eris, which started the entire cascade of misunderstandings. “It has sentimental value, otherwise I wouldn’t ask.”

“I understand.” Mrs. Valconsuelo stepped aside to let them in.

An oppressive silence hovered in the apartment. Watt could tell that it wasn’t normally this quiet; this was the type of apartment that should be ringing with laughter. The silence was a stranger here, lurking around every corner with heavy footsteps, as uninvited and unwelcome a guest as he and Leda.

They followed Mariel’s mom down the hall to a door that was covered in loud, brightly colored stickers. Mrs. Valconsuelo kept her eyes deliberately averted from her daughter’s bedroom. “Feel free to look around. Everything is the way she left it, except for whatever the police might have moved when they came by.” With that, Mrs. Valconsuelo hurried back down the hall, as if she couldn’t get away from the painful memories fast enough.

So the police had already been here. Whatever they found, if they found anything at all, Watt and Leda could assume that the police had already seen it. At least this way, they would know what the police knew.

They exchanged a glance and stepped into the dead girl’s bedroom.

The overhead lights, sensing their movement, flicked on. Dust motes hung suspended in the air. The room was much as Watt had expected: a narrow bed with a multicolored quilt; a small desk with a cream-white top and embedded touch-controls, easily the most expensive thing in the room. A chair was tucked to one side, only slightly visible under the mountain of jackets flung casually over its back. It felt oddly as if Mariel had just walked out and might return again at any moment.

“Should we divide the room in half?” Watt suggested, passing off Nadia’s idea as his own.

“Good thinking. I’ll start with the closet.”

They moved quickly through the room, searching beneath the mattress, inside drawers, in the closet. Watt noticed that Leda wasn’t moving very fast. She kept running her hand over the quilted bedspread or picking up an item of clothing and setting it down again.

I wish we could figure out Mariel’s death, he thought to Nadia, in a burst of frustration. No matter how many times he reasoned through it, Watt couldn’t shake the sense that he had all the right pieces to the puzzle—that the answer to Mariel’s death was somehow right before him, and he just wasn’t seeing it. Was it really a murder? If so, who had done it and why? What evidence did the police have suggesting foul play?

You aren’t here to solve her murder, Nadia reminded him. Just to find out what she was doing before she died. Whether the police might have found the connection between her and you.

Nadia was right, of course. But part of Watt still wished he could solve it. Maybe if he found out who killed Mariel, he could give the answer to the police and make the whole investigation go away.

“This feels weird,” Leda said at last, holding up a framed instaphoto.

“I know.” Watt had been thinking of Mariel only as the girl who attacked Leda in Dubai. But standing in her bedroom, surrounded by all the accumulated clutter of her life, Mariel felt much less like a goddess of vengeance, and much more like a teenage girl. A misguided girl who was desperately hurt by the loss of the person she’d loved.

“No, you don’t know. It isn’t your fault,” Leda replied, her voice breaking. Watt glanced over in surprise. She was still holding the framed instaphoto, staring at it furiously, as if it might reveal some new secret. It was a photo, Watt realized, of Mariel and Eris.

“It’s all my fault,” she said again fiercely. “If I hadn’t pushed Eris, none of this would have happened! Mariel and Eris would still be together, and Mariel would never have followed us to Dubai—you and I would still be together—”

Leda crumpled a little, still holding tightly to the frame. Watt hurried forward and folded her in his arms. She didn’t lean in, but she didn’t push him away either. “It isn’t your fault that Mariel tried to enact some kind of Old Testament vengeance on us,” he told her. “Stop trying to carry all the guilt in the entire world by yourself. There’s enough blame to go around, I promise.”

A breath shuddered through Leda’s thin body. Watt fought back the urge to hug her tighter. “Why do you keep doing this?” she demanded.

“Doing what?”

“Being so nice, acting like you still care about me.”