Big Summer(75)

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know. But…” He paused, then got to his feet and started pacing again. “I want to make sure you’re safe.”

“I’ve known Darshi since high school!”

“You knew Drue, too.”

I looked at him, his worried eyes, his wind-burned cheeks, and wondered how much he wanted to protect me, and how much he just wanted to make sure the crime really had been solved, to ensure that Drue got the justice his own mother hadn’t. I knew better than to go off alone with a guy I’d just met—even one I’d also just slept with—but was there a world where Darshi really had done something to Drue Cavanaugh?

I shook my head and went back down to my room. Five minutes later, I was towing my suitcase over the shells, thinking it through. Nick suspected Darshi. Darshi had suspicions about Nick. For all I knew, both of them might be secretly thinking that I’d had something to do with Drue’s death, that I’d been overcome with envy or sublimated attraction, or something. This is going to be the most awkward car trip ever, I thought, and as soon as we’d made it out of the driveway, my suppositions were confirmed.

“Tell me about how you met Drue,” Nick said. Darshi was driving, clutching the wheel with her back hunched and her eyes intent on the road. I was sitting next to her—I’d offered Nick the passenger’s seat, but he’d politely declined.

“Yes, Daphne,” Darshi said, her voice soft in a way that only someone who knew her very well would recognize as dangerous. “Tell him all about it.”

“There isn’t much to tell.” I could still remember standing in front of the class, holding my breath, hoping the kids who were staring would decide that I was okay, that they liked me, that they’d be my friends. “We met in sixth grade, when I started at the Lathrop School. We were friends all through high school. And then we weren’t.”

“Why not?”

A cold finger pressed against my heart.

“It was stupid,” I mumbled. “Teenage-girl drama.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“Yes, Daphne.” Darshi’s voice was poisonously sweet. “Tell him.”

I sighed, remembering how I’d already told him about starring in a slightly viral video. Time to come clean and tell him the whole sad tale.

“When I was home from college my sophomore year, for spring break, I went out to a bar with Drue,” I began. I sketched the contours of the story as briefly as I could—a guy I hadn’t realized I’d been set up with, how I’d overheard his objections, our eventual face-off on the dance floor. “Drue was angry. She thought that I should have been grateful.”

“Seriously?” Nick’s voice was incredulous.

“Seriously,” said Darshi, before I could speak. “Believing that other people should be grateful for her largesse was Drue’s default mode.”

I opened my mouth to object, to say that maybe Drue had been trying to help, in her clumsy, condescending way, but before the words could come, I heard an echo of what she’d shouted at me that night: We all just felt sorry for you!

“It was a long time ago,” I finally said. My voice was raspy and my head throbbed with pain. “And I thought, by the time Drue showed up in my life again, that we’d both grown up.” Trying to smile, I said, “I think Drue could appreciate my many fine qualities. And I could see her for what she was.”

Darshi’s voice was cool. “Which was what?”

I thought for a minute before I answered. “Someone who wasn’t invincible,” I said. “Someone who had flaws, and things she wanted. In high school, I couldn’t even imagine Drue wanting anything, or being jealous of what I had.” I thought of the party, of the way her father had shouted at her, how her mother had been more concerned with appearances than with her daughter, how her fiancé hadn’t come to comfort her.

“And now?” Nick asked.

“Now,” I repeated. “Now I’m not so sure.”





Chapter Fifteen


Rabbi Medloff was waiting for me in a conference room on the third floor of the hospital, just down the hall from Lily Lathrop Cavanaugh’s room. “Thank you for making the time,” he said, pouring me a plastic cup of water from the plastic pitcher at the center of the table.

“Of course.” The rabbi was young, in his thirties, with short, dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He had a pale, earnest-looking face and blue-gray eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. A gold band gleamed on his left hand, and he wore a pressed blue suit with a shiny light-blue silk tie. The suit he’d brought up here, I guessed, to marry Drue and Stuart.

“Thank you for coming. This is such an unbelievable tragedy, for a young woman to lose her life on her wedding day. I want to make sure she is remembered, and celebrated, appropriately.” He had a legal pad and a pen, and he flipped to a blank page. “What can you tell me about Drue?”

That she didn’t deserve to die, I thought. Whatever she’d done, whomever she’d done it to, whatever she’d deserved, it wasn’t this. I felt my throat get tight as the rabbi looked at me, waiting.

“She was funny,” I said. “Lively. She had a great sense of adventure. She could turn any day into an occasion. If that makes sense.”