The Last House Guest(79)

“Wait.” My eyes were closed, my hand out. I couldn’t follow both conversations at once. “People told you they’d seen me around?” I’d noticed it recently, hadn’t I? The way people looked at me, the way they watched. How they seemed to recognize something about me. I thought it was because of the investigation, new rumors that might be swirling. But maybe it had always been there. And like the Lomans, I’d become desensitized, unaware of the gazes. “Right,” I said, hands gripping the counter in front of me, spanning the distance between me and Connor. “The girl fucking around with the Lomans up there. Is that the talk?”

His throat moved as he swallowed, but he didn’t deny it. “The girl doing something up there.”

I looked to the side, to the covered windows and the dark night beyond. I didn’t understand why he was here, what he wanted. How many people knew I was hiding out here? Hadn’t I learned better than to think I was invisible by now?

“It wasn’t Faith,” he repeated.

“Yes, I know it wasn’t Faith. I know what that money was for now.” My hands tightened into fists. My entire adult life built on a lie. On a horrific secret. Molded by people I thought had given me so much but instead had taken everything.

Connor stopped moving, watching me carefully. Maybe this was my downfall—always too trusting in the end; choosing someone else over the solitude. Yet again thinking people had anything but their own interests at heart. We were alone in this house, with no one else around. He had kept things from me already, and we both knew it. But Connor was here. And he’d come for me that night, a year ago, when Sadie had texted him from my phone. With him, there was always a push and pull. Logic versus instinct. I didn’t know which motive had brought him to my door in the middle of the night, but I’d learned long ago it counted only when you knew someone’s flaws and chose them anyway.

“The Lomans, they paid off my grandmother after my parents died.”

He blinked, and I watched as his entire demeanor shifted. “What?”

I sucked in air, thought I was going to cry. Then I stopped trying to fight it, because what was the goddamn point? “They killed my parents. They were responsible somehow.”

Connor looked over his shoulder at the closed door, and I wondered if someone was walking past. “Who? How?”

I saw it then, back to the start, every moment with them—until it slipped, slowly and horribly, into focus:

The picture of Parker in the living room—his face youthful and unmarked. The way Sadie was teasing him about the scar last summer, not letting it go. The dark look he would give her that Luce had noticed. Shaking and shaking until something broke free.

The double take when Parker saw me sitting in Sadie’s room the day we met—he knew who I was. Of course he did. Avery Greer, survivor.

“Parker,” I said quietly into the night. “It was Parker.”

The scar through his eyebrow, his own reminder. Not a fight but an accident—Sadie had just figured it out for herself. An accident that he had caused. But Parker Loman was untouchable. Somehow he had gotten away with it. One hundred thousand dollars—the price of my parents’ lives. Given for our continued silence. One of two payments that Sadie had uncovered. I wasn’t sure whether the other payment was related—someone else who knew the truth—or whether the Lomans had covered up more than one horrible action.

Parker can get away with literally everything.

They will sacrifice anything for the king.

That was what we were worth to them. Two lives. Everything lost. The entire future of who I was supposed to be—just gone.

I was wrong. This place, it wasn’t the thing taking from me. It wasn’t the mountain road, the lack of streetlights, the brutal extremes. It was the people up on the bluffs, looking out over everything. Covering up for their own. How old must he have been—fourteen? Fifteen? Too young to be driving. Something he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of, no matter what the excuse. Some laws could not be bent or skirted.

His question that night, as he stood over me at the party in the bathroom—did I think he was a good person. Needing me to absolve him in his own mind. No. No, there was nothing good about him. Nothing at his core but the belief that he was worth every little thing he had been given.

Instead of the simple truth, the only thing that mattered: Parker Loman had killed my parents.

“I’m supposed to meet up with Detective Collins tomorrow,” I said. “If I tell him, I can’t control where the investigation goes from there.” I said it like a warning. I said it to see what Connor would do or say. I wouldn’t be able to stop the police from looking at Connor or me.

Connor looked at the front door again, and I started to wonder whether there was someone else here with him. Or maybe I was just seeing the danger inside everyone suddenly—all the things we were capable of. “Parker hurt Sadie?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I thought back to what Luce had said about the darkness between Sadie and Parker. Sadie had believed I was a secret, and I was. The reason they took me in, the reason it was the right thing to do—the reason Parker did the double take the first time he saw me. He knew exactly who I was. And she finally saw him for the truth.

I didn’t know who had hurt Sadie or why. Only that she had uncovered the secret at the heart of both of our families, and now she was dead. Taken from the party back to her home in my car.