He must have found out that I spent the past year accusing his cousin of murder.
I blocked him and all his accounts. I knew he’d defend Thatcher and didn’t want to hear it. And he’d want to discuss the night we spent together, and I didn’t want to speak to him about that, either.
And now he wants to talk to me.
More than likely, he wants to yell at me.
But if I want to confront Thatcher, I need a reason to be at the Montgomery property.
“I’ll go see Seth,” I tell Davy. “Find out what’s going on. How long they’ll be here. And I’ll report back.”
Davy’s shoulders slump a little. The relief of having someone else decide. I miss that. “Tonight?”
I pull out my phone, unblock Seth’s Instagram, and DM him.
Clearing. 8:30. Meet me there.
3
I wait until my dad gets home so there’s someone to make sure Davy doesn’t try to follow me. I don’t tell him where I’m going, just that I need to go out for a run. Dad would not be okay with me being anywhere near the Montgomery mansion.
As I’m tying my shoes, Dad calls, “Stay on—”
“The main roads,” I finish. “I know.”
Bier’s End isn’t a dangerous town. At least, it wasn’t before last summer. But losing one daughter obviously means my dad’s a bit paranoid about the other and her habit of evening runs.
I poke my head into Davy’s room to tell him I’m leaving. He’s on his phone, probably staring at last summer’s selfies with Marion. He looks up when he hears me. “Please just ask her why she wouldn’t answer me.”
“I will if I see her,” I say.
It’s a warm night, the air hot, suspended. The fastest way to get to the Montgomerys’ is to cut through the woods to the back of the old Bier property and pass the ravine, where Fiona died. But I can’t go that way anymore. So I stick to the street.
I pass house after house at a slow jog, the windows like eyes following my every move. Like they know I’m not supposed to be heading this way.
I reach the corner, pause at the old sign hanging on a wooden post. I don’t know exactly how old it is, only that Bier’s End the street was here before Bier’s End the town.
There’s a buzzing in my ears, an insect, cicadas, or maybe something else, some species found only here. At first glance the street looks the same—wild and dark, the few houses so far apart and set so far back from the road all you can see of them are their gateways, wrought iron, brick, stone. Old money. The old money that survived.
The Montgomery mansion is the third one on the left.
Brick columns frame both ends of the circular drive, the number and family name on a plaque. There’s ivy everywhere. But it’s not overgrown. There are flowers planted along the drive. The grass has been recently mowed.
For a second I just stand there, staring at the house. I think of the long line of money that built those high gates, those walls that keep them in, keep them safe—keep Thatcher Montgomery safe. And the anger rises in me again, and all I want to do is throw myself at it, claw at those walls with my bare hands, or maybe burn them down until there’s nothing between Thatcher and me, nothing to protect him from what he’s done.
I take a deep breath.
Before I reach the first column, I turn off the sidewalk and onto the dirt path next to the honeysuckle that skirts the house. The windows on this side are dark except one on the second floor, but I don’t see anyone inside. I go past the porch, beyond the patio and the long expanse of manicured lawn. The pool, huge and elaborate, still covered up, even though it’s mid-July. The pool house, bigger than my actual house, made of brick and filled with white wicker furniture, musty cushions, old paperbacks, deflated pool toys. The detritus of our childhood. I thought it all meant something once. That we’d built something here together. That we and the Montgomerys were important to each other. And now look at us. On opposite sides.
Behind the pool house is a barely there trail through the shrubbery. The grass is overgrown, the stones hardly visible. But my feet know where to step, the memories so sharp it’s like it was only yesterday that I passed this way, instead of nearly a year ago. That curve in the path, that old pine tree, the blanket of needles that makes it smell like Christmas, bushes of forsythia, their flowers already gone—all leading to the clearing.
The place I was the night Fiona died.
I found the clearing one day when I was seven or so and decided it was my secret place. The summer grass was thick with wildflowers, buzzing with bees, and in the center of it all was a big blue-gray stone, like some kind of sacrificial altar.
In the days when our mom was still around, she’d go through phases of wanting us nearby, then telling us to go out and play and leaving us entirely to our own devices in a way I’ve since learned not a lot of parents do. The Montgomerys were under equally loose supervision, so it wasn’t unusual to encounter one or all of them out in the yard on their own. I’d never seen them in the woods, though, so when I came back to this clearing and saw Seth here, too, we fought about whose it was. It’s one of the earliest fights I can remember having with him, the precursor to hundreds more over the years. I told him it was mine because I was there first, and he countered it was his because it was on his property. He challenged me to a race, winner take all, which he promptly won. But then, in an oddly un-Seth-like moment, he told me I could use it when he wasn’t there.
From then on, we’d occasionally find each other here at the end of a summer day. Whatever was going on between us when our siblings and cousins were around, whatever fight we’d gotten into, when we came here, it was set aside in favor of sitting on the rock and looking up at the sky and talking about anything that was on our minds.
And when I hit fourteen, we’d sometimes do more than talk.
I push that out of my mind.
As far as I know, no one else comes here. It’s far back, almost to the state park, along the edge that runs up against the Bier property next door. The stone wall that separates the two is just twenty yards away, on the other side of the trees. You can climb the wall, follow a trail through the woods down to the ravine where they found Fiona’s body. I think about it constantly—how close I was to my sister when she died.
I step around a tree and see it: at the center of the clearing, the sloping blue-gray rock.
And on that rock, a boy.
Seth’s face is tilted toward the moon. His eyes are closed, one of his arms flung across his forehead like a shipwrecked sailor.
I don’t make any noise. But his eyes open. He lifts his chin, props himself up on his elbows, and looks straight at me.
I cross my arms. “You have fifteen minutes before I’m out of here. So say what you have to say.”
That twist of his mouth that is Seth Montgomery’s version of a smile. He sits up, rests his arms on his knees. I can see the breadth of his chest under his shirt. His hair is its usual mess of curls. My fingers twitch with the memory of running my hands through it, tugging on it—
“You gonna stand all the way over there this whole time?” His tone, that edge of sarcasm laced with defensiveness.
