Camille winced. "Please don't say that."
I swallowed and steeled myself. "I found a strange rock in Mia's room, on her windowsill. Someone put it there when we were out of the house. A rock with blood on it. And a few black hairs. Leah's. It's the murder weapon, I'm certain of it. Whoever used it to crack Leah's skull open put it there to frame Mia."
"What did you just say?" Camille turned her head and gaped at me. Her eyes were bright with disbelief. The car drifted onto the shoulder. Camille jerked the wheel and corrected. "Where the hell is it?"
"I hid it. It's at the playground behind the community clubhouse. There's a hollow oak by the swings. That's where I put it."
Camille's brows rose. "Are you serious right now?"
"I had to." I swallowed, fear tight in my chest, my breath coming fast and shallow. "They already suspect her. If they found the murder weapon in my daughter's room, they’d lock her away for decades. Who would believe that it was planted? That we're being framed? No one. I panicked."
For an eternal moment, Camille didn't speak as she nosed the car onto a side street by a darkened strip mall and put the car in park beneath the weak halo of a streetlight. The engine hummed. Rain ticked on the windshield.
She turned to me, her spine straight, her body stiff with barely controlled fury. "That is obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence. If the state finds out you moved that rock, they will charge you. And they will leverage that to crush Mia."
"I used gloves and a plastic bag," I said lamely. "Mia and I didn't touch it. Could it have the killer's fingerprints on it?"
"It's unlikely the oils could be picked up even after 24 hours on a rough, irregular object, but that's not the relevant point here." Her nostrils flared. Her voice dropped, becoming quieter and more precise, each word deliberate and clipped. "Do you understand what you did? Not just to your daughter's case, but to me? To Zara? My license is at risk, my reputation, my career. I'm committing professional suicide right now."
I understood her anger, I did. I hated the position I'd put her in, but I was too desperate to flinch now. "It was one of the girls, I know it. We must stop them, Camille. No one else will. Please."
For a long moment, Camille didn't say anything. Abruptly, the anger seemed to drain out of her. With a sigh, she leaned back against the headrest and closed her eyes, deflated. "Don't think I don't understand, Dahlia. Because I do. I understand more than you know. I get what this place can do, how it gets inside of you. How the people embrace you, make you think you're safe, then they tear you to shreds."
I looked at her in the shadowed darkness. I'd never heard Camille sound so uncertain or admit to anything resembling weakness, a chink in her impenetrable armor. Out of all of us, she was the confident, unshakable one. The one who always knew what to do.
"I worry about Zara, too," she said in a near whisper, as if confessing her deepest secrets. Or her deepest fears. "I worry every single day. She thinks she's invincible because society tells girls like her that they're untouchable as long as they're beautiful, as long asthey smile pretty. If they fit in, say and do the right things, wear the right clothes, and believe the right things. But as soon as you don't, as soon as you fall out of line…"
Camille touched one of her gold hoop earrings. "They could've turned on Zara as easily as they did Leah or Taylor before her. And Mia. Those girls, they ruin lives for entertainment, out of boredom. They're the ultimate mean girls. And the thing is, so are their mothers. They're still mean girls, just older. They don't change. They learn to hide it better behind their charm, their beauty, their polished manners."
For the first time since this nightmare began, I didn't feel so completely alone. Camille understood what I struggled to articulate—the suffocating pressure of this place, the disquieting way it smiled while it sharpened its knives. She knew what it meant to be an outsider here, to never quite know who to trust, forced to watch your daughter navigate waters teeming with sharks in ponytails and designer clothes.
We were mothers trying to keep our girls safe in a place that ate its young.
We sat in the hum of the car for a beat. I placed my hand on Camille's arm. "They think they can get away with murder. We can't let them. They'll just do it again."
Eventually, she nodded. "Whatever you think of me, Dahlia, I do know that."
Camille's phone buzzed hard on the console. She seized the phone. "It's Zara. She’s still trying to recover the corrupted files." She typed out a text:Keep working on it.
Camille shifted the car back into drive. We rolled out of the parking lot. Her expression had closed, all business again. "We need to build a timeline with an alternate suspect. We need to instill doubt. The person had to know Leah was down there, and they had to get back down to Leah in the dark without being seen. They had to have a reason to risk it."
Whitney's face flashed in my mind. The precise hair, the practiced empathy, the money that opened every door and disappearedevery problem. And Peyton—beautiful, feral, a predator in a school uniform.
"Peyton Alistair," I said. "She broke into my house and slashed Leah's painting. She dumped the spray paint in your trash can to cover her ass. Zara saw red paint on her fingers. She also saw Peyton bury the camera. Chloe could have told Peyton what had happened with Leah when they went back inside."
I thought back to Monday after school, when I saw Peyton leaning toward Mia at the drinking fountain, her hand on Mia's arm, the way Mia's face had gone carefully blank. Not an act of comfort as I first thought, but a threat.
I'd mistaken manipulation for kindness. And so, apparently, had my daughter.
I'd been so wrong about so many things.
"What's her motive?" Camille asked.
"Leah suspected either Alexis, Chloe, or Peyton was behind the LakeshoreTea cyberbullying account. Zara said Leah was planning to find and expose them. Maybe at the slumber party, Leah discovered Peyton was the guilty one."
"According to the detectives, Leah's phone came back clean," Camille said. "No screenshots, no saved messages, no relevant deletions, nothing incriminating. It makes sense if Leah was paranoid about digital evidence after what happened with those AI-altered images. She didn't trust phones. That's why she kept her diary hidden, not in her bedroom, and why she planned to get Zara to physically clone someone's phone at the sleepover. She needed proof that couldn't be deleted or denied."
I said, "Once she got proof, Peyton would've been outed. Expelled from school, kicked off the swim team, humiliated. Public humiliation is as good a reason as any for a girl to kill to protect herself, especially these girls. Mia said Peyton, Chloe, and Alexis were suddenly cozying up to Leah, so maybe Peyton recruited Alexis and Chloe to help her, and they had something awful planned for her all along. and Mia's accidental push accelerated the timeline. Then Peyton went down and made sure Leah would never talk again."
