"No," I said. "I wouldn't." Almost anything, but not that.
Her smile sharpened. "You're nothing. You know that, right? I made these women accept you. I took you in, told everyone to tolerate your frumpy thrift-store clothes, your disgusting neediness, your ugly shack sliding off a cliff, as pathetic as youare."
Once, those words would have flayed me, destroyed me. Not anymore.
Rowan loomed over me, a vicious glint in her eyes. This was who she truly was.
I tried to take a step back. I realized abruptly that I couldn't. Vertigo slithered through me. Somehow, through our discussion, Rowan had shifted me nearer to the bluff. I was less than a foot from the edge.
Below, invisible in the fog, the steep drop-off lurked. The treacherous fallen logs, the lethal rocks, the spiky branches. The same perilous bluff that had broken Leah's body.
"Enough of your games." Rowan sneered. All pretext had vanished. The tendons stood out on her neck, her eyes bulging with fury. "Where's the camera, Dahlia?"
"In a safe place. You'll never touch it. It's over."
Rowan bared her teeth. "Tell me where it is or so help me?—"
"What? You'll smash my skull, too?"
The fog slithered around us, between us. The houses around us might as well have been a hundred miles away. Damp tendrils of hair clung to my cheeks. "You murdered a child, Rowan."
"She was dying anyway! She would've been brain-dead. I ended her suffering." She said it like she was describing putting down a sick dog. "I did Vivienne and Daniel a favor."
There it was. Deliberate, calculated. Rowan had climbed down that bluff, found Leah broken and suffering, and decided her life wasn't worth saving. Decided it was easier, cleaner, to murder a child.
Mercy, she called it. As if she had the right.
I stared at her, sickened. "By crushing a child's skull with a rock."
"I protected my family!" Her chest heaved. "I did what any mother would do."
"Stop. Just stop with the lies. You were protecting yourself."
Her beautiful features twisted into something grotesque. The blue vein pulsed in her forehead. "Give me the camera, Dahlia."
I was done here. I'd gotten what I needed. The naked truth exposed between us, finally.
I attempted to step around her, back toward the house, toward solid ground. Away from her. "It's over, Rowan."
"No!" Rowan lunged for me. Her right hand closed around my throat. Her face inches from mine, cheeks flushed pink, eyes bright with a feverish light. "You don't decide what happens. You don't know what I've sacrificed. What I've had to do to build this life!"
Fear sliced through me. I was inches from the edge. The unstable ground shifted beneath my feet. I felt it soften and start to give.
I clawed at Rowan's wrist with my free hand. My vision tunneled. White spots danced in front of my eyes. My lungs screamed, I couldn't get air. I couldn't speak, couldn't say the words that would save me.
Panic surged in my chest. I was about to fall.
"You're nothing," Rowan snarled, her breath hot on my face. "Just like that stupid girl. She was a parasite. A waste. A nobody. She didn't get to destroy everything I've worked so hard for. Neither do you."
Her hand clenched tight around my throat. With her other hand, she snatched the rock in its plastic bag from my fingers. Then she shoved me.
The world tilted. My heels skidded in wet grass, my feet scrabbling in desperation. The edge crumbled under my shoes. Chunks of earth tumbled into nothing, the sound swallowed by fog and distance.
The same edge Leah had gone over. The same drop. The same fall.
Rowan raised the rock above my head.
I scratched at her face. My fingernails raked her cheeks. Rowan screamed. Her grip loosened. I wrenched free, twisted sideways, and fell to my knees. “Help!” I croaked.
