Lips, breath, fingers trailing along collarbone. Something like a caught-back laugh, half hilarious, half delirious.
And then, they heard the sound of the shower turning off across the hall . . . and Boyd was sitting, then standing, closing the AP Bio book and tucking it under his arm. “I gotta go,” he said, and left before Tessa could respond. He didn’t explain why he’d brought up Olivia. He didn’t explain why he’d kissed her. He was just . . . gone.
Tessa had flopped back onto her carpeted floor, staring at the speckled ceiling. Her whole body tingled—every spot where Boyd’s body had touched hers. Her lips felt swollen. Her head felt stuffed with cotton. Her stomach tightened like it did when she was at the very top of a roller coaster—a tangle of excitement and dread. For some reason, she started giggling uncontrollably, rolling onto her side, until her eyes were full of tears.
“What’s so funny?” Lilly asked, opening her door.
Tessa grinned into the carpet, catching her breath. “Nothing.”
“Oh.” Lilly paused for a second, clearly suspecting a secret. “Well, Mom says it’s dinner.”
She hovered in the doorway, waiting.
Tessa nodded, at a loss for words. Everything was changing too fast, the earth was spinning off orbit, and it felt like her whole life would never be the same again.
She hadn’t known then that her life really wouldn’t be the same after that night.
That early Sunday morning, only three days later, Kit’s body would be found, bruised and frozen, in the back of Boyd’s truck.
Now, her boots skidded across the shore of Devil’s Lake and onto its surface—frozen over since last week. She slipped, landing hard on her knee and wrists. She panted, out of breath, exhausted and yet eerily not. She could hardly feel her body. How far had she just run?
Out here, all thoughts of Boyd—his lips and his hands in her hair—flew away into the cold. All thoughts of what Lilly had said when she’d pointed the finger at Boyd: that he and Kit had apparently been seeing each other in secret, right under all their noses, for months. That he’d been kissing Kit that night, had threatened her too. That they’d been fighting out on the side of the road, late, just hours before her body was found.
Not far from this very spot.
Tessa looked around. In the summer, this place was lush and green, but now the skeletal trees surrounding the lake pricked at the sky, a giant crown of thorns. Veinlike reeds laced the ice, which was murky and marbled with frost—and, in some places, beginning to thaw. She wondered, briefly, what it would be like if the lake simply cracked and gave beneath her, sucked her under. Her chest hurt. The back of her throat burned.
When she looked down again, her own freakish, discolored eyes—one green, one blue—stared back up at her between her bare palms, her face and body distorted just slightly: a shorter, more petite version of Kit.
She gasped.
Or was it Kit gazing back at her through the ice?
Now Tessa’s pale hair grew longer in reflection, more golden, one blue eye cooling into green. She could feel herself disappearing as she looked into her sister’s face. She could sense Kit’s presence, thought maybe Kit really was lying there, just beneath a thin layer of ice, waiting for it to melt and free her.
He hurt me, Kit said with her mind, inside Tessa’s mind.
Or maybe it was the part of Kit that lived on in Tessa, that remaining DNA trapped in her own cells, haunting her from within her own head.
Or maybe she’d simply snapped from the shock and chaos of what had happened, her final tethers to reality fraying, and she’d drifted off into pure hallucination.
Real or not real, a chill raced through her, causing her arms to shake.
He hurt me, ice-Kit said again.
And then, He lied.
Tessa felt sick, dizzy. She stumbled back to her feet. Her phone buzzed. A text from Lilly.
Where’d you go? We need you.
She went to turn her phone off but another text followed.
Please don’t hate me. It’s not my fault. I’m so sorry.
She sighed, shaking her head. Leave it to Lilly to make any of this about her.
She was about to type a response when a sound rang out, the blast of a rifle from far off. Her phone leaped out of her hand, crashing to the forest floor, its pale white-blue light ricocheting off branches and roots, illuminating a glint of silver in the dirt.
Another rifle shot, and a burst of wood thrushes taking to the sky.
She hated hunters. Lilly’s best friend Mel’s family, the Knoxes, were big into game hunting. Her dad had something like a thirty-gun collection.
Tessa bent to pick up her phone. Saw again the gleaming sliver of metal in the dirt, and bent down to pick it up, not caring as icy mud got under her fingernails.
It was a ring.
A mix of dread and curiosity moved through her as she stared at it.
Not silver, probably. Something more expensive, like white gold or platinum. In the setting gleamed a teardrop-shaped sapphire surrounded by tiny diamonds.
Tessa knew instantly what it was: an engagement ring.
VERIZON SERVICE RECORD
FEBRUARY 7, 2:34 PM
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [gasp] I—Boyd?
County Jail: Are you there? I didn’t think anyone would answer.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [pause] Yeah, it’s me. I’m here.
County Jail: [muffled sound, possibly a cough or sob] Sorry, I just. For a second I wasn’t sure who answered. I’ve been trying all morning and they only give you so many calls here.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: It was today. The funeral.
County Jail: [silence] Jesus. I’m sorry. I should have realized.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [muffled sound]
County Jail: Are you still there?
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Yeah. I just . . . I don’t know what to say. This is . . . hard.
County Jail: [crying now] I know. I miss her so bad.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [voice cracking] Yeah.
[pause] You know, the funny thing is, I keep thinking, Kit would know what to do now. Right? Like, she would know the right thing to say. But I’m just useless here. I’m just so numb. I can’t even think, Boyd. I can’t do anything.
County Jail: [pause] Yes, you can. [pause] You can help me.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [swallows] How?
County Jail: I shouldn’t be in here. It’s terrible here. Just gray walls and this feeling of guilt and suspicion and—I could really go crazy in here. The kinds of questions I’ve been asked. The kinds of things they think I’ve done . . . [voice cracks again]
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [breathing]
County Jail: Are you still there?
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: Yeah. I’m just . . . I’m trying to think.
County Jail: This whole thing is just so wild, what they’re saying. Like, manslaughter. Voluntary, involuntary—all these terms I didn’t even know about before. You have to help me. I don’t know how it got to this. Everyone’s just assuming this horrible stuff about me, and no one even cares what I have to say.
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: What do you have to say?
County Jail: I mean, that I didn’t do it, obviously! That this is nuts! [sound like something hitting a wall, possibly the palm of a hand]
Tessa Malloy’s iPhone: [silence]
County Jail: [pause] You know I didn’t do it, right? You believe me, right? You know this is all just insane and unfair and . . . [pause] [whispered] You know me.