“What is that?” he asked.
Mary’s voice dropped. “It looks like a storyboard. It has all our names on it. Words beneath them. Lines connecting us.”
“What do you think it means?” Zach asked, curiosity edging out his unease.
“I think she’s marking us,” Mary said.
Zach stared at the whiteboard. He saw Candy’s name with the word,flightybeside it, her name and the word circled in red. He saw his own name with the word,hiddenbeside it. He smiled.
“If she were really marking us, wouldn’t Candy and Lisa’s names be crossed out?” Mary hesitated. She hated that he had a point.
“I still don’t like it,” Mary said. “I don’t like being nothing more than characters on her wall.”
Harmony had always warned them that everything was material. Maybe this was just another way of keeping track—or maybe it was how she chose who to keep close.
“We’ve known that since we met her,” Zach reminded her. “She’s never pretended otherwise.”
“Why do we accept it?”
“Because I think we like being characters,” he admitted.
“Maybeyoudo,” she hissed.
“If you don’t trust her, why talk to her?” he asked.
She exhaled, then started walking away. He followed. “Because focusing on her means I don’t have to focus onme,” Mary said. “I guess I like focusing on something other than my pain. I do when she’s around,” Mary said.
“Then it’s not the worst thing in the world, being a part of her fictional universe,” Zach said gently.
They walked up the hill, putting distance between themselves and the tourists drifting between bars.
“Maybe there’s a part of me that wants to be that character she writes me as,” Mary admitted quietly. “Strong and fierce. Not stuck in my grief all the time.”
“You don’t need her to make you that,” Zach said. “You just have to believe you already are.”
Mary shook her head and looked up at the stars. The wind pulled at her hair.
“I still don’t like that she’s always watching,” Mary said. “What if that means she really is deciding our futures?”
“What do you think she gets to decide?” Zach asked.
Mary shook her head and looked at the stars. “Who makes it to the end?”
Zach shivered. “You sound more like her than you realize.”
Mary’s lips twitched into something like a smile. “Maybe we’re all more alike than we think. Maybe none of us are being watched. Maybe all of us are the watchers.”
Zach didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure he wanted to live in the version of the story Mary was describing. One thing, though, was clear . . . the killer was smiling somewhere. The group was doing exactly what they were supposed to—fracturing, suspecting, performing.
What none of them noticed was the patrol car sitting half a block away, engine off, lights dark, someone inside watching the cottage windows instead of the ocean.
A pen tapped against the steering wheel, keeping time.
The story was writing itself now.
And it didn’t seem to need an author.
Chapter Thirty-Two
