The Last House Guest(24)

She sipped her lemonade once more, never breaking eye contact. Your life is so much more interesting than mine, Avery.

I really doubt that, I said. Later, Faith had said I was crazy, fucked up, in need of some serious help. When even your closest friends give up on you, you’re as good as done. But I loved Sadie’s reaction. So I kept sharing the stories of that winter—the recklessness, the wildness—owning all of it. Feeling the weightless quality that comes with turning over parts of your life to someone else. When we finally stood, she put a hand down on the table, catching herself. Head rush, she said. I think I’m high on your life.

I curtseyed. I feel it’s only fair to prepare you.

All these things that had pushed people away, they only pulled her in closer, and I wanted to find even more. To make her laugh and shake her head. To watch, while I kept sliding toward some undefinable edge. To become everything I had been trying to forget, until the season turned two months later and she was gone. A quick stop back home in Connecticut before returning to college in Boston.

We texted. We called.

The following May, when she finally returned, I was waiting for her on the bluffs, and she said, Do you trust me, and I did—there was no thought to it, no other choice. She drove us straight to the tattoo parlor two towns up the coast and said, Close your eyes.



* * *




CONNOR WAS MINE. HE was my story, my past. But over the years, Sadie’s and my lives started to blur. Her house became my house. Her clothes in my closet. Car keys on each other’s key rings. Shared memories. I admired Grant because she did; resented Bianca because she felt the same. We hated and loved in pairs. I watched the world through her eyes. I thought I was seeing something new.

But she hadn’t told me about Connor, and I hadn’t noticed. I’d been too distracted by the money that had gone missing at work and the resulting fallout. The way I’d been avoided and ignored after—a feeling I could not tolerate yet again.

Now I scrolled through her contacts in alphabetical order. Bee, Dad, Junior. I knew the last referred to Parker, had been a joke, a name she started to call him, to bother him, when he cast aside the expected rebellion of his youth.

He’ll take over the company one day, she’d explained when I questioned it. A little star protégé. A junior asshole.

What about you? I knew she was studying finance, interning with her father, learning the ropes of the company herself. It could’ve just as easily been rightfully hers.

Never me. I’m not tall enough.

I had scrolled through both the C’s and H’s without stumbling upon anything related to Connor, when, at the end of the list, there he was. Listed as *Connor, so his name fell to the bottom of the alphabet.

I never knew what Sadie’s suicide note said. I knew only that it existed, and that it closed the case in a way that made sense.

But before they found the note, there was a reason the police kept asking me about Connor Harlow, and it must’ve been this—the hint of a secret relationship, something worth hiding.

And now: his image in her phone, his name with an asterisk, as if she were guiding the way back to him.

Well, he always was a terrible liar.



* * *




I PLUGGED SADIE’S PHONE into my laptop, copying her photos.

The images were still transferring when a car pulled slowly up the drive. I peered through the window beside my front door in time to see Parker stepping out of his idling car to slide open the garage door. I folded the list of names and times I’d just copied down, slid it carefully into my purse.

I needed to talk to him. There had been two confirmed breakins at their rental properties. Noises in the night, footsteps in the sand.

And now I was thinking of someone else with Sadie after I had sent her that message. Someone out there on the bluffs with her. Arguing. Pushing her, maybe. The phone falling on the rocks in the process, shattering. The other person picking it up, coming to the party, hiding her phone when the police arrived. Someone who had been at the party after all. Someone who could’ve slipped out and come back with no one knowing.





CHAPTER 8


The garage door was open, but Parker stood with his back to me, rifling through the trunk of his black car.

“Do you have a minute?” I asked, making him jump.

He closed the trunk and turned around, hand to heart, then shook his head. “Now you’re the one giving me a heart attack.”

The garage here was as exclusive as the main house: a sliding door like that of a barn, with the same slanted-ceiling architecture. And it was immaculately organized inside—red containers of gasoline for the generator, in the corners; tools hung along the walls, probably touched only by the landscaping company; cans of paint on the shelves, left behind when the painters came through two years earlier.

But there was a layer of dust over everything here, and it smelled faintly of exhaust and chemicals. A forgotten extension of the Lomans’ property.

I shifted on my feet. “Have you noticed anything off since you’ve been back?”

He frowned, lines forming around his mouth where there’d been none, last I’d noticed. “What do you mean by off?”

“The power went out in the guesthouse last night. It’s happened a couple times. You saw the garbage can, right?” I shook my head, trying to show him that I didn’t think it was serious, either.