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“You don’t have to trick them into being your friends.”
“Can you promise me that? We haven’t spoken in months, Anthony.”
He looks away. “Trina would come.”
“If I asked? Maybe. But if you ask—if you tell them you’re worried about me, and you know I’m going to go alone, that I need support...”
“You want me to lie to them. Sara, you don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do. It’s the only way I can be sure they’ll come. And if Becca’s really still alive, we should all be there to try to find her. I’m right. About all of it. You know it.”
He’s silent for a long while. “Sara. Did you send the text?”
The other me doesn’t answer. She snaps a photo of the dark water, frowns at the screen.
Anthony sighs. “I don’t get why you assume that none of us care enough to go with you. All you have to do is ask.”
“Really?” the other me asks. She reaches for her phone. “Let’s see.”
Her voice fades. Lucy is tugging me along, and with every step toward the bridge, it grows more indistinct, until it’s only mist, and so is everything else—mist roiling around us, and nothing at our feet but tendrils of it, cold and damp, until the ribs of the gate rise from it, dark and brutally bent back until the top almost touches the ground. Lucy halts. She looks sidelong at me.
“That’s what you’re running from?” she asks.
“It’s my fault,” I say. I look back into the formless mist, my hands cold and limp at my sides, as if waiting for the illusion—the memory?—to reappear. “All of it is my fault.”
INTERVIEW
SARA DONOGHUE
May 9, 2017
BECCA: Is that really what happened?
Her voice is soft. Gentle, but wounded.
SARA: I don’t know. I remember seeing it on the road. And I didn’t remember that before. But I thought I remembered the way it happened, and that wasn’t it. I didn’t tell Anthony to get the others. I told him I didn’t need him to come. I told him I didn’t need any of them to come.
Ashford clears his throat.
ASHFORD: Sara, we got access to Jeremy Polk’s phone records. There are some text messages on there between him and Anthony.
SARA: And?
ASHFORD: It isn’t clear-cut, but... Here, I have a printout. I can show you.
He takes a moment to find the relevant page in his briefcase and hands it to Sara. Her brow furrows as she reads it.
EXHIBIT O
Text messages between Jeremy Polk and Anthony Beck
Jeremy | Anthony
4/18/17
How’d it go? Why did she want you to meet her at the bridge?
It’s complicated.
