Seth nods shortly. “Let me guess. UnaOwen235711?”
I stare.
That’s my username.
I don’t confirm it, but the look on his face makes it clear he knows he’s right.
“Goddammit, Addie.” His voice is low, but I flinch as if he’d yelled. Because I know that tone. The yelling is about thirty seconds off. Once, when I was around ten, we got into a fight over who splashed who first in the pool. Thatcher, our self-appointed babysitter, sided with Seth, and I got so mad I took Seth’s fancy watch and threw it in the deep end. He yelled so loud it made me cry. “Why didn’t you just talk to me about this? Instead of posting all over the internet?”
I see red. “Maybe because you wouldn’t believe me, like you’re doing right now—”
“I believe you that it happened. Why would you lie about that?”
“ ‘To take suspicion off myself,’ ” I quote.
His eyes widen. “Who said that?”
“Detective Ramsay.” I feel that rage again. At not only being dismissed like some dumb kid, but at the insinuation—the first time I’d heard it, but not the last—that I might have killed my own sister.
Seth shakes his head. “No one with any brain cells thinks you killed Fiona. Those posts on Citizen Sleuths are just people being stupid.”
And my anger at Seth dissipates, just like that. It’s infuriating the way he does that—works me up, makes me want to hit him, then says something to cut my anger down, make me think he might be on my side after all.
But I can’t let him get to me. “Even if they don’t really think I did it, one thing is clear: They don’t give a shit.” Seth stares at me, not interrupting. “If it was one of you whose body turned up at the bottom of the ravine, they’d be calling in the FBI to solve it. But not for us. Not for her. To them, Fiona’s just another dead girl from a nobody family. They don’t care that someone out there killed her. Just like—” My voice breaks, and I hate it. “Just like they didn’t care about my mom.”
Seth doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then, quiet: “Your mom left, Addie.”
“You don’t know that.”
“She’d been telling your dad she wanted to leave, her stuff was gone—”
“They didn’t even look for her. They—”
I break off. It’s not like I have to tell Seth about my mom. The first summer without her, Fiona was ten and I was nine, both of us so fragile, a single misplaced word could break us. Davy, seven, was more bewildered than anything else. I pretended I was fine, for their sake, but the moment I was on my own, after a day of splashing around in the Montgomerys’ pool, I came here to this very rock and bawled my eyes out. Seth found me, but instead of teasing me, he just sat next to me and let me cry.
I try to focus. “Whatever. I didn’t come here to talk about my mom.” I pause. “Where is Thatcher?”
Seth’s mouth goes into a straight line. “I’m not letting you talk to him.”
“Why not? If you really think he’s innocent?”
His eyes dart in the direction of the mansion. “He’s…not doing well.”
I seize on that. “How so?”
“He’s withdrawn. Tired. He lost weight this past year. I thought it was because he was upset about Fiona. And then I thought it was because he kept getting questioned by the cops. I asked him about what I saw on the boards. About their ‘fight.’ But he told me that it was all bullshit. That it never happened.” His hands are on his hips, his body half-facing the house. The house where Thatcher is, right now. “He lied to me.”
“And it didn’t occur to you that it might be because he’s guilty?”
He spins around. “No. I know Thatcher. He’d never— He was in love with her.”
“Yeah, and she wasn’t in love with him. Maybe the rejection finally got to be too much. Maybe that’s what they were fighting about. Then maybe that night, at the parade, he tried to talk to her again. They went for a walk. She told him once and for all that it wasn’t going to happen, so he got upset, and just—snapped.”
Seth stares at me. There’s a little scar over his left eyebrow that didn’t used to be there. “That’s the story you’ve been telling yourself.”
I throw up my hands. “Because there is no other story! I looked into the other theories. Really, I did. I went to her ballet studio, talked to her teachers, her classmates. There were no ‘jealous ballerinas.’ No stalkers. No one at school had any issues with her. She wasn’t dating anyone. Fiona had no enemies. Nothing else weird happened last summer. Except Thatcher yelling at her, and her refusing to tell me why. It has to be him.”
He’s shaking his head before I’ve even finished talking. “You’re just looking for someone to blame. Someone other than yourself.”
I feel like all the air has been punched out of me and, at the same time, like I’m burning so hot that it’s a miracle I don’t set the forest on fire. “Where do you get off—”
“I get off defending my family, Addie. Just because you can’t think of anyone else doesn’t mean you get to go around accusing Thatcher without any proof.”
I close my eyes. Take a deep breath. This is pointless. I shouldn’t have said anything to Seth. I shouldn’t have even come here. I’m going to have to find a way to confront Thatcher without Seth’s help.
I turn to go.
Then Seth’s hand is on my arm. “Addie, wait.”
It’s the first time we’ve touched since that night.
I rip my arm away.
He holds up his hands. “I’m sorry. Just—can you wait a minute?”
I’m not sure why I listen, why I stand there as Seth runs another hand through his hair, paces back and forth in front of me. “Thatcher’s been acting weird,” he says.
“You already said that.”