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Her tone is scathing, fury radiating off her.
“And now I know, your sister and your father, all that from the past, that wasn’t all you’ve been capable of, was it?” Brooke continues, venom dripping from her voice. “I heard your conversation with Logan about the Xanax and his little indiscretion. And I found Lucy’s phone. That was really smart, Cass, keeping it under your bed. I mean, how dumb can you be?”
Her fury seems to dissipate as she says this, replaced with a smugness that’s somehow worse. I feel my forehead scrunch in confusion. It was the one part of her post I couldn’t piece together—why she claimed I had Lucy’s phone, why she lied—but she rushes on before I can question it.
“So was that it?” Brooke continues. “Is that why you pushed Jacinta from Khrum Yai? Because your boyfriend was cheating with her? And Lucy? All he did was talk to her, but you were too jealous to even stand that. Daniel—I bet you were just covering your trackswith him. Gotta give it to you, murdering him was ballsy. But how exactly did you do that? I mean, he was so much bigger than you. Did you surprise him from behind and slit his throat? I’ve noticed those scuba knives you keep in the dive shop. Is that what you used?” She leans toward me mockingly, her fist beneath her chin as if she’s begging for gossip. “Do tell. I would love to know.”
I shouldn’t be surprised by these questions. I know her suspicions. She made them quite clear in her post. But my mind halts on one thing she said.I heard your conversation with Logan.
I knew there was someone in our house last night. I don’t know where she could have been hiding, but shewasthere, watching and listening to all the things I didn’t want anyone to know. And it all makes sense.
“You’ve been following me.” This time, there’s a waver in my voice that I can’t attribute to anger. Despite everything—the post, the threatening notes she left on my doorstep—this realization seems like the worst thing she’s done to me. I’ve felt crazy these last few days, feeling eyes on me everywhere I’ve walked, the stifling paranoia that I could never verify. All that time, it was Brooke following me, the woman I thought was my friend.
“Wow, you really are slow. Welcome to the party, Cass.” Brooke’s lips are turned upward in a self-satisfied smile that makes the nausea return with full force.
“But why?” I force the words out, laced with frustrated confusion.
“Why? Really?” That harsh laugh comes again, but then Brooke’s tone changes, as hard and sharp as a knife. “He raped me, Cass. Eric Verrino, your friend. And you just sat there and let it happen.”
“N-no,” I stammer. That didn’t happen. I would have known. Sure, the game Eric and the other swim guys were playing was disgusting, horrifying even. But he wasn’t arapist.
“Y-yes,” Brooke stutters mockingly. But despite the sarcasm, I can sense something has changed in her. “You could have stopped him. Warned me from going up to his room, but that wasn’t even the worst part! Afterward, you lied about it. You covered for him.”
I stand there, stunned, not fully grasping what she’s implying.
“You know how hard it was for me to get a lawyer? How many people I had to call and tell my story to over and over and over, just to have them tell me it was my fault? How horrible that was? And then, when I finally found her, the one lawyer willing to go to bat for me, she came to you directly, Meghan.” She spits out my name—my real name—like a curse word. “She asked you point-blank if you knew what happened that night. And you lied. You fucking lied.” A sob rises in her throat, her anger bubbling into sorrow. She tries to overcompensate for it, her voice getting louder and louder. “You told her I was obsessed with him. That I came over there for sex. That I was only mad because I realized I had been a number in a stupid game.”
I remember now, a moment that was quickly replaced in my memory by the events that happened in that hotel room soon after. A stern-looking woman in a black trouser suit cornering me and my roommate outside our dorm. She asked us both rapid-fire questions about where we were the weekend before, how well we knew Eric. It was clear she was trying to pin something on him. And then she asked if he raped that girl from the swim house. That made me and my roommate stop walking.
My roommate turned to the woman, her voice steely. “Eric is agood guy. If that girl is saying that he raped her, then she’s probably just jealous.”
The words sounded wrong as they hit my ear, but my roommate looked over in my direction, silently urging me to back her up. So I did. “Yeah, that girl came over for one reason. She wanted to have sex with Eric. She was just mad because she realized that he didn’t really like her.”
The memory hits me like a slap in the face.
“You told her Iwantedit.” Brooke is yelling now, and I see my neighbor out of the corner of my eye. He’s given up all pretense of clearing his gutters and is staring at us, open mouthed. “What kind of woman are you? What kind ofpersonare you?”
I try to grasp her questions, but the answers slip through my fingers.
They’re the same questions I’ve been asking myself since my conversation with Logan last night. What kind of person am I? Why would my ring be next to Lucy’s body?
“Look,” I say, my voice shakier than I would like. “I’m sorry I did that, but we were in college. And I didn’t know what he did to you. How could I? And why me? Eric is out there living his best life.” I think of all the times I’ve wandered to Eric’s profile after posting an Instagram photo on the dive shop’s account. Scrolling through the endless shots of him and my roommate and their perfect life. “You talk about what kind of woman I am, but what kind of woman are you?” I’m gaining momentum now. Her story threw me, but my anger comes rushing back. “You target me and what? Dedicate years of your life to tracking me down and ruining me? You don’t think I already went through enough hell after college? You know what happened to me. You know what everyone said about me.But you don’t see me hunting down the people who said it, do you? God, you really are crazy.”
Brooke’s eyes flash, and I prepare for her to yell, to scream. But when she finally speaks, it’s steady, with an icy rage.
“Yeah, that’s what they said at the hospital.” She looks down at her wrists. “You asked me about my bracelets when we first met.”
The words aren’t what I expected, and I feel myself pull back. I watch as Brooke pushes the bracelets up her arm, raising her arms to expose her wrists.
I suck in a mouthful of air as I realize what she’s showing me. Ghostly white slices cut diagonally across both of her wrists, fragile, puckered skin stretched together like two ethereal bracelets.
“You,” she says. “You did this.”
29
BROOKE
I feel a sick pleasure in watching Cass’s face contort as she sees the scars.
