Lukas balanced his elbows on the table. “He was eight when he went missing. He’d be just shy of his mid-twenties. Old enough to join forces with his sister and cause trouble.”
“No.” That had to be the answer. No. Sweet Lord, no.
“We thought Aubrey was dead. Maybe the assumption that Noah is gone is also wrong. Does he look like Aubrey or her parents?” Lukas made an odd sound. “Who else is alive?”
Okay, no. He had to realize he was reaching. “We were there, Lukas.”
“But what did we really see?”
Blood. Aftermath of a bloodbath. Clothing... something... on the bedroom floor. Something I pretended not to see and never questioned. Something that was missing and not explained in the police reports about the state of the house. I know because I looked.
A chill passed through me when I remembered the piercing scream that bounced off the wall with a force that shook through my body. My scream. “I can’t do this today.”
Lukas looked like he wanted to keep pushing his point, but he just sat there. A full minute passed before he continued. “I’ll know more once I poke around.”
Lukas had dreamed up a new theory about Noah. A terrifying one. One that could blow everything apart.
Lukas broke the silence. “You’re forgetting one very important thing.”
Because my brain kept misfiring. “Clue me in.”
“The family excelled at lying. You couldn’t trust any of them.”
He wasn’t wrong. I knew because that list included me.
Chapter Fourteen
Aubrey
Round and roundthey go.
So much panic.
Did they trust each other? Did they run? Did they devolve into a rabid pack of animals? Hard to tell which way this could end.
One by one or in a group, they all had an important role to play. They had secrets. I needed those secrets. Did they disclose them or bury the nasty, untold information even deeper?
A good person would come clean but they weren’t good people. They deserved this. They asked for it.
Time for a test.
The timing couldn’t be better. Hanna would go first.
That was only fair since she started this.
Chapter Fifteen
Marni
We wandered around an attorney’s office days later. Stella’s mom and Lukas, Stella’s ex. Cam and Hanna. A group of fidgeting, skeptical people you would never invite to the same party, which might explain why the heavy mood felt more appropriate for a funeral.
Aubrey came in late, right as the attorney sat down in the conference room and motioned for us to join him. She stood alone at the far side of the room. Most of the others sat in chairs around the oval table. Not me. Too antsy. My nerves kept firing. I stayed in the doorway because the need to flee rang through my head like a shrieking car alarm that wouldn’t shut off.
The letter requesting my attendance at this thing came when I was walking out the door to school this morning. The letter had a careful, no-details writing style. Seeing Xavier’s name in the subject line and the attorney’s signature at the bottom sent my stomach into an epic tumble. Something big waited. Something that could crush us all.
The temptation to linger in my classroom long after the dismissal bell and skip this unexpected event hit me in waves all day. One minute I dreaded getting in my car and driving here. The next I itched to slam the gas pedal to the floor in a desperate attempt to arrive first.
As I watched the attorney shuffle the papers in front of him, I realized I was no longer alone at the wall. Stella slid in beside me. The meeting, or whatever this was, hadn’t started yet. Not officially. She looked as wary as I felt.
