“So what would you do at Stanford?” he asks a moment later.
Then we go on to have an actual conversation about something other than murder for a good half hour.
But of course that can’t last.
Somewhere along the way, we hit traffic. There’s nothing, and suddenly it’s bumper-to-bumper.
Seth beeps at someone who tries to cut us off, mutters a curse under his breath. Then he looks at me. “I saw Ramsay at the movie last night,” he says out of the blue.
A shiver goes down my spine. “Gross.”
“Do you really think he doesn’t like you?”
“Does he talk to you the same way he talks to me?” I demand. “Half the time like you’re a kid wasting his energy, the other half like you’re a suspect?”
Seth shakes his head. “He’s always been polite to me.”
“Of course he has.”
“Addie, why would he have a reason to hate you specifically?”
“Because his niece hates me? I don’t know.”
“He’s a cop,” Seth points out. “You think he’s going to be concerned about girl drama?”
I exhale. “Way to trivialize me losing my best friend.”
“I’m sorry,” he says after a beat. “What exactly happened there?”
I put my head back against the headrest. Ahead of us, traffic is still crawling. I don’t necessarily want to get into all of this, but Seth is glancing at me curiously and it’s not like we have anything better to do right now. So I tell him.
“When Jeremy and I started dating, Gen saw it as, like, a betrayal of our friendship. I mean, I understand that she was upset. I suspected that she might like him, too. And I know she was worried about what it would do to our dynamic—the three of us were best friends, and if two of us got together, things would inevitably change. But—”
I don’t want to get into all my reasons for saying yes to Jeremy with Seth. I can’t exactly say, He’s the opposite of you, so I decided to give it a shot.
Instead I say, “He liked me. I liked him. What were we supposed to do?”
“You can’t put your own happiness on hold for other people,” Seth says. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I’m surprised. He sees my face and snorts. “I mean, I can criticize your taste. You could always do better than Jeremy fucking Reagan.” His fingers tighten on the steering wheel. Jeremy and Gen used to tag along sometimes when we went to the Montgomerys’, before football and cheerleading preseason got in the way. Seth and Jeremy never especially liked each other—they were both super competitive in whatever game we were playing, but so was I. I didn’t think Seth actively hated him or anything.
“Jeremy’s a good guy,” I say. “You knew him, too.”
“Like you said, people change.” Before I can ask what he means by that, he says, “So Gen got pissed you were dating and you guys stopped talking and that was it?”
“That wasn’t all. We got into this big fight and she said…She said, ‘I knew you were like this. No different from your mom.’ ”
I can still feel the pain of those words. Like a slap in the face. By then, I’d heard the rumors about my mom that missed me when I was nine. That she’d been sleeping with half the unmarried men in town, and some of the married men, too. That she’d run off with one of them. I just didn’t know Gen was one of the people repeating those stories.
“Damn,” Seth says.
“Yeah.”
I missed Gen. Especially after everything else I’d lost. It was hard walking through school and seeing her face impassive, her blank eyes staring through me. And I can’t help but think about the way she talked to me, actually said something to me, in the park the other night. That text she sent me right after Fiona died. But no. She was just fishing for gossip. Both times, probably. If she couldn’t forgive me for going out with Jeremy, I definitely can’t forgive her for what she said about my mom.
Seth looks over at me. “So, did you ever think…that Gen might have something to do with all this?”
I blink. “What?”
“You said she hates you.”
“So, what, she killed my sister to get back at me for dating Jeremy?” I shake my head. “That doesn’t make sense. And anyway, she’d never do something like that.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” He pauses. “I’m not saying this to freak you out or anything, it’s just a theory—”
“Just say it.”
Another pause. In the distance, someone leans on their horn. “What if it wasn’t supposed to be Fiona that night?” Seth asks finally.
I stare. “What?”
“You and Fiona used to look a lot alike. Before you dyed your hair. What if—what if someone saw her in the woods that night and thought it was you?”
I shake my head. “Fiona’s shorter than me—”
“By, like, two inches.”
“And our faces are shaped differently—”