“I couldn’t sleep.”
Her mouth comes together in the shape of a bow, like she doesn’t believe me. “I followed your footprints around the lake,” she confesses. The wolf lifts its head from the floor and sniffs the air, like he smells something unfamiliar, before resting his chin back on his paws. “Why did you go to the cemetery?”
I divert my eyes away from her for the first time, away from what she wants to know. I don’t know how to explain what I remember, what I felt. They are only shards of memory that slice and sting when I try to focus on them. “I think I was there that night,” I say—the only thing I can be sure of.
“And you stood over Willa Walker’s grave?”
A white-hot pain begins to pulse behind my eyes. “Yeah.”
“Why hers?”
“I don’t know.” The pulse turns into a thud, slamming betweenmy ears, an ocean spilling out from the cracks in my skull. “But I don’t think I was alone.”
“Were the others there, the boys who were at the bonfire tonight?” she asks.
I nod.
“And Max?” she asks, the question like the sharpened tip of a blade.
Max.
I feel myself wincing at the sound of his name.
“Do you remember him?” she prods.
I shake my head, and the heat from the fireplace is suddenly too hot, the air too thick, my lungs tightening in my chest. “No,” I say aloud. A lie.Quick and easy.
“He died, Oliver,” she says, shaking her head, and I want to tell her that I wasn’t there, that I had nothing to do with it. But I can’t because I don’t know for sure, and the cold look in her eyes hurts worse than anything else. It hurts because I might be the villain. Heartless stare and wicked laugh and secrets to hide—stuffed deep,deepdown inside.
She’s scared of me—of who I really am, of what I might’ve done.
And maybe she should be.
“I wish—” My voice feels like a razor in my throat, the line between truth and lie slicing me into halves. “I wish I could remember,” I say at last.
But Nora presses her palms to her temples, her ring shivering in the firelight—she doesn’t know what to believe.
I shouldn’t be here. In her house. She shouldn’t trust me.
I reach for the door and pull it open, letting the wind lashagainst the walls, the curtains, Nora’s long, whispery hair. I don’t say goodbye.
But from behind me, I hear her say, “Wait.”
When I look back, she’s moved across the room, only a couple of paces away. “Where are you going?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
She bites her lip and looks to the floor. I don’t want her to tell me to leave, but I know that she should. She should push me outside and lock the door and ask me to never come back.
Her eyes lift, hazel dark, and even though they give away a rim of uncertainty, she says, “You can stay here. You can stay as long as you want.”
I shake my head. But she cuts me off before I can protest.
“It’s my house.” She swallows. “And I want you to stay.”
The thud of my heart is too loud—loud enough to break my chest open, loud enough for her to hear.
And when I look at her, an ache forms inside me, a nagging itch I try to ignore. I should tell her the truth: that I remember just enough from that night to know that she’s right to be afraid. That nothing good happened that night, in the cemetery, beside the lake. That there are lost memories buried inside me that frighten me—that I never want to see.
