What Lies in the Woods(69)

Dougherty looked uncomfortable. Sawant shifted. He glanced down at the pad of paper he’d brought with him, jotted down a note I couldn’t read, and looked up again. “In Olivia’s suicide note, she said that she was tired of lying. What was she lying about?”

I hesitated. This part of the truth didn’t just belong to me. I’d promised Cass. “It could have been a number of things. Or nothing at all,” I said. “Reality and Liv didn’t always get along.” I regretted the words as soon as I’d said them. She deserved better than that from me.

“You’re saying what she wrote in that letter was, what—a hallucination?”

“Technically, that would be a delusion.” I looked him dead in the eye. “I don’t know what Liv was referring to in that letter. I know that she was struggling, and that she often hid the extent of that struggle from us.”

“So you didn’t know she was suicidal.”

“She wasn’t,” I said, sounding more stubborn than sure.

“She killed herself. That’s the definition of suicidal, isn’t it?” Sawant asked. “Unless you don’t think it was a suicide.”

“It’s easy to assume that because Liv was ill, she killed herself,” I said slowly. “It’s the obvious answer. But after last time, we all got really familiar with the warning signs. Liv didn’t feel hopeless. She was engaged. She was making plans. And—” I hesitated. “She promised.”

“She promised,” he repeated, skeptical.

“It was something we did. We would promise each other to still be here in the morning.”

“It wasn’t just her making the promise, then?” Sawant said.

I curled my hands in my lap. “It was something both of us needed. And it’s not a promise she would have broken.”

“She left a note.”

That was the part I couldn’t explain and couldn’t understand. “Maybe it wasn’t a suicide note. Maybe she meant…” I trailed off. I couldn’t think of a way to interpret those words as anything else. “She wouldn’t have done it.”

“I am, in fact, inclined to agree with you,” Sawant said. Relief ran like cold water over my skin. “I think it’s clear that someone murdered Olivia Barnes. And I think it’s because she was done covering up an old lie. A lie about what happened in those woods twenty-two years ago.”

He let that hang. Persephone’s name was lodged in my throat. I’d promised Cass. But we were long past promises.

“What is your relationship with Oscar Green?” Sawant asked, cutting me off before I could speak.

I frowned. That was not the direction I’d expected him to take. “I don’t have one,” I said.

“You were romantically involved, though.”

“Who the fuck told you that?” I asked, anger lancing through the words. Sawant sat back a little like he’d hit on something significant.

“You and Oscar Green have had a romantic relationship in the past, have you not?” he pressed.

“No, it’s not—we’re not—” Romantic had never factored into it. Relationship was laughable.

Sawant kept going. “Not back then, of course—you were only eleven. But your best friend’s big brother? Handsome guy, popular, cool as can be? It would be surprising if you didn’t have a little crush.”

I choked on a laugh. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. You and me—

“Oscar has quite the record. Nothing at all in his juvenile record and then he moves away from Chester for a few years and boom. Assault, disorderly conduct, assault.”

“That’s Oscar for you,” I said. The idiot should have realized he couldn’t get away with half the shit he did once he wasn’t in Chester with a mayor for a dad.

“I got to thinking. If it wasn’t Stahl who attacked you, why would you say that it was? Unless you were covering for someone. Like the mayor’s son.”

“Why would Oscar try to kill me?” I asked, shaking my head.

“Maybe you knew something that could derail his privileged little life,” Sawant suggested. “Something he’d done.”

Bones in the woods, I thought. She used to hang around with Oscar Green. “I can’t imagine what that would be. And to be clear: I wouldn’t cover up littering for Oscar Green. I sure as shit wouldn’t fail to mention he’d stabbed me.” But would Cass? I wondered, and hated myself immediately for thinking it.

“Interesting. Because I’ve heard some things about the two of you that might cast doubt on that,” Sawant said. “Lies have a way of rippling out. Sometimes the consequences arrive years later. Liv wanted to tell the truth. Did you want that, Naomi?”

The truth.

I could have told him everything. I could have made Agent Sawant my savior, my way out—hand over everything I knew, everything I’d done, and trust him to put the pieces together. It was the smart thing to do. The right thing to do.

And I couldn’t. I’d held on too long and too tightly. The truth belonged to me, and I would be the one to find it. To find her, I thought, and I wasn’t sure if I meant Liv or Persephone, or why it still felt like they were lost.

“I’m done having you call me a liar,” I said. I stood abruptly, powering through the burst of pain. “We’re finished.”