What happened? she wanted to say. Come back.
Her hands shook. She decided to take a shower to clear her head, stripping off her clothes in a stiff puddle on the floor, but in the shower sat Kit’s mango-scented conditioner like a little statue and she was driven by some insane compulsion to open it and then the smell poured over and through her and she found she was shaking even harder.
Tears didn’t come, though.
It scared her, this lack of tears. She’d cried that first morning, or thought she had, but then it had all dried up—too fast. The sadness had evaporated and left her a husk.
She washed her hair and let the water run down her face until she learned how to breathe again.
She could hear the front door opening and closing. So they were home. More people would be arriving soon, too.
She looked at her hands, tried to concentrate. She was desperate to help Boyd. She knew it wasn’t him—it couldn’t have been him. He wouldn’t hurt Kit. He’d spent his whole life protecting her, protecting all of them, like he said. She’d known that he was innocent from the first moment Lilly accused him of doing it, had been shocked and outraged and confused by Lilly’s stricken, sincere conviction.
But Lilly wouldn’t lie, either. Well, sure, maybe about whether she’d finished her homework or eaten the last cookie, but not about something like this. She adored Boyd just as much as Tessa and Kit did. Tessa believed that Lilly must have really seen him out there on the road. She wouldn’t just make that up, and her story was way too specific to be false: she’d been staying over at Mel’s house, had snuck out that night and seen the truck parked with its lights still on, had forged her way up the road on foot to see what was going on, had witnessed Boyd and Kit arguing, had decided it was none of her business and fled, telling no one, until it was too late.
Maybe it was Boyd who had lied—about being out on the road in the middle of the night with Kit—to cover his ass, to seem less suspicious. Maybe he had been out there with her, but then he’d left, and then, that was when the terrible thing had occurred. After Boyd abandoned Kit out there, in the storm, alone.
Her heart raced. But why would he do that?
And that didn’t explain why his truck had been left there, too.
Also, his fingerprints had been everywhere.
And he had no alibi. Said he was home studying for a quiz when they both knew the quiz had been Thursday and this all happened on a Saturday.
But then, what about Patrick Donovan?
These contradictions toggled around in Tessa’s head, growing louder than ever, as if someone had actually reached inside her brain and yanked up the volume.
The water had gone cold. She shut off the faucet, reached for a towel. Kit’s bathrobe still hung on the back of the door. She grabbed that and, tenderly, slipped into it. It was so soft. It smelled so familiar, wrapped around her, like an embrace.
For a second, there it was: the grief, a little gremlin strangling her from the inside, screaming silently along her throat, making her head go hot.
She suddenly forgot everything.
What was she doing, standing here, dripping wet?
Oh yes, she’d just taken a shower.
What day was it?
Tuesday.
Why wasn’t she at school?
Because today was Kit’s funeral.
Kit’s funeral.
She had run away instead of giving her stupid speech.
She had found a ring in the woods.
Boyd had called, begging for help.
She wanted to believe him, had to believe him—when she’d heard his voice on the phone minutes ago, the old Boyd, the Boyd she’d known her whole life, had come back to her in an instant, and all the doubts had blown away like dandelion seeds.
But then, in the silence of her thoughts afterward, in the constellations of facts and details that had emerged, what was she supposed to believe . . . that it was all a wild coincidence? That he was maybe lying but only about some parts and not others?
Tessa was a logical person, and when all the evidence said one thing, you were supposed to believe it: the boy obsessed with all three of them. The boy who had the most access to them all. The boy whose truck her body had been found in. The boy whose father struggled with money and drinking, who had a chip on his shoulder, who nobody thought was going anywhere. The boy with no mother. The boy who’d never been loved right, never been taught right.
Then again.
Ever since freshman year, Tessa had planned to become a science major someday, and nearly all the great scientists she’d learned about in school had been widely disbelieved in their time. Sometimes, she knew, the truth was bizarre: that the earth was round and not flat, even though we experience it as flat. That we move around the sun, even though we can’t feel ourselves moving. That space is full of black holes that are not really holes at all, because instead of being empty, they are the densest form of matter. Science teems with seeming contradictions, full of theories that go against all instinct. The ancient, animal part of our brains only wants to believe what is right in front of us, what’s immediate, what we can touch. As a scientist, you have to learn to shut off the animal brain and listen to the abstract, the euphoric, the wildly imaginative only-human part, the part that dreamed up string theory and smartphones and wheels on suitcases and the idea that every person accused of a crime remains innocent until proven guilty.
You have to believe in what you can’t see.
Her breathing came back again and she turned the knob, hurrying out into the hall and ducking into her bedroom before anyone could catch her and drag her downstairs into the mourning festivities, the condolences and wilting condiments and half hugs. She began shakily getting dressed—old sweats, a thick sweater, her wet hair in a knot over her head.
What—were you supposed to dress up to honor death? Didn’t that seem backward, to show respect for something everyone agrees to hate?
She pulled the ring out of her jeans pocket and stared at it again. A modest sapphire cut into a little teardrop and surrounded by tiny diamonds. Definitely an engagement ring. Not the kind of thing someone just forgets about or tosses aside.
She slipped it onto her finger.
For the first time since early Saturday morning, she felt a tingle of her old, real self, waking up. She was no detective, but she was good at testing hypotheses. She would solve this.
She knew she couldn’t save Kit. It was the absoluteness that felt the worst, like a coil around her throat, growing tauter and tauter, unable to ever release.
But she wouldn’t focus on that part. Even looking that straight in the eye—accepting death—no. She wasn’t ready to look grief in the face. It would be like giving up, like walking into a grave and opening her mouth as dirt fell in.
For now, there was one thing she could do, though.
She could save Boyd.
She might be the only person who could. She might be the only one who would.
Still, it took some conniving for Tessa to get to the police station that evening. She thought about asking her mom point-blank to drive her over, but her mom had already decided in her mind that Boyd was guilty. Her eyes were ringed in red and she was barely holding it together. She’d already overboiled the pasta into a starchy swamp and they’d mostly just stared at the leftovers from earlier, unable to stomach much food anyway. All the distant relatives had gone as swiftly as they’d come, and her mom looked like she was ready to pass out face-first on the couch.