I feel really sorry for Savannah Holmes. But it’s a lesson to us all. If you put stuff about yourself online, you’re asking for trouble. Anyone following her Instagram would have known what kind of car she drives and where she lives—she was always putting up selfies at her front door and at her hallway mirror. You could see the front driveway in the reflection and her car reg.LarOToole
Kinda showing yourself there, Lar, aren’t you?With enough victim-blaming to keep me going for a lifetime, I scroll to the comments on the Cherrywood murders. There’s a bit of chatter about Rory Quinlan in particular—popular guy, it seems, with lots of friends and contacts through a gym he owned. Aimee seems to have been less well known. There are a few posts about the night of the murders—someone knows the neighbor, the woman who raised the alarm, and apparently she’d heard a door slam on Tuesday night. There’d been a car outside, but nobody knew what color. And there’d been a car outside Savannah’s house on Wednesday morning. So…some caller who’d killed her, they speculated, and maybe the same car had been outside Aimee and Rory’s? Did anyone know what kind of car? Blue, black, dark gray came the answers. I scroll back up to the Savannah comments.
“Imagine opening your door, not knowing the person is going to kill you,”someone had typed in the last few minutes.
My throat tightens with guilt and sadness. I look around. It’s quiet and growing dark and, suddenly, I don’t want to be alone. The app shows me Jon is almost here. I’ve discovered nothing about who he’s seeing, but then again, he hasn’t been gone long enough to meet with anyone. So maybe itreally was just a walk. I watch on the app as he comes up the driveway and into the house. Except there’s no sound of the front door. No attempt to open it, no turn of the key. Online, he’s in the house; in real life, he’s not. Is the app glitching? I zoom in, confused. Then I realize what’s going on. He’s not here. But I do know exactly whose house he’s in.
44
Maeve
Monday
Maeve is lying on her bed, scrolling. From downstairs, she can hear her mother talking to Aoife. The best thing about summer nights is that her mother is not on her case to get her stuff organized for school. Nothing to get up for tomorrow morning, nothing to go to bed for tonight. She’s just thinking about putting a film on her laptop when a Snapchat notification from an unfamiliar account pops up. The account is called AWGoss. She clicks in and sees a photo that’s confusing because it’s familiar, but from long ago, and it takes a moment to work it all out, to realize that it’s her diary. At least, it looks like her diary. It must be just the same cover as hers—the white background and the pink flamingos; hers disappeared years ago. But then why is she being tagged in the post? A video appears now. A video that begins with the same diary. Then an unseen hand opens the cover and the camera zooms in on the writing on the first page. She knows this writing. She knows this inscription:
Property of Maeve Khoury
Address: 42 Rowanpark Drive, Blackrock, Co. Dublin
Age: Almost 13
And in block capitals:AOIFE IF YOU’RE READING THIS YOU’RE DEAD
No, no, no.
She sits bolt upright, cold and sick, staring in horror.How…?The unseen hand turns the page. There it is: her writing, her diary entries.No…She closes her eyes, trying to make it stop, to make it disappear. The audio—Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”—is still playing. The video is still playing. She forces herself to open her eyes. The pages are flipping forward. She knows why. This is the boring stuff, the what-I-did-in-school-today stuff. The other stuff is further along. And she knows what it is. She remembers writing it. Her face grows hot, her stomach cold. How can she stop this? Panic surges up inside. Who can see it? Everyone. Everyone can see it. Whoever is behind the account AWGoss has tagged everyone in their year. The pages keep flipping. She knows what’s coming. The distant memory is now clear, burned on to her brain. And there it is, on her screen:
…So here goes, I’m in crush with Ariana…
Maeve makes it to the bathroom just in time to throw up.
45
Susan
Monday
I’m staring at my phone, at the AirTag location, trying to make sense of it. Why is Jon in Greta’s house? Then again, why not? They’ve always got on well. They’re both practical, long-term-goal-focused people. Both career-oriented and a bit less into the fun side of life than Leesa and Samir. We all balance each other out, I suppose. Jon tends to gravitate toward Greta when we all get together—two like-minded people who’ll happily discuss politics and mortgage interest rates while Leesa and Samir will tell you about the new season ofThe Boysor how to make a strawberry daiquiri in a nutribullet. I’m somewhere in the middle, happy in both camps. I know Jon and Greta message each other occasionally and have done for years. But I can’t think of a time when he called into her socially, without me.
I know how it looks. That it’s right there in giant neon letters. That I’m literally here tracking him on my phone to find out who he’s seeing, and he’s in her house.
But that’s not what this is. I appreciate that it sounds like I’m deluded,but you couldn’t imagine a more platonic friendship if you tried for a hundred years.
Maybe I’m wrong about where Jon is; maybe the AirTag is glitching. One time Leesa told me she checked Find My Phone to see where Maeve was and it looked like she was in the sea. Leesa had a moment of panic, before the little arrow jumped back on to dry land. Maybe that’s what this is. But nothing has changed: it still looks like he’s there.
I type a message to Greta.
Did Jon call into you?
Greta is typing. Then nothing. Then Greta is typing again, this time for what seems like an age. Stopping and starting.
I check the AirTag. No change.
Then finally, a reply:
No, he’s not here.
Only I’m absolutely certain he is.
