She nodded once, as if she'd braced for that. She stared out at the lake. "What if it's someone I know. What if it's… one of us?"
"Then we'll face it," I said.
She didn't pull away when I reached for her hand. Her fingers were cold and damp. I tightened my grip on the leash, on her hand, and kept walking. The wind pushed at our backs, up toward the streetlights and houses and the tidy lies waiting there.
Chapter Eighteen
I sat at my desk after dinner, the house finally quiet. Mia was upstairs, supposedly doing homework with her door cracked, the newest Sabrina Carpenter song playing on her iPad.
Apollo snored pleasantly on the rug beside my chair, legs twitching as if he were chasing something that only he could see. I envied him.
My browser was open to Instagram. Mia's phone lay in front of me, screen dark, face down. I flipped it over, unlocked it with the code I'd watched her use a hundred times, and opened the app.
I started where I'd left off, with LakeshoreTea.
I went to Mia's DMs. Most of her messages were what I'd expect from a teenage girl. Homework questions. Funny, mildly inappropriate memes. Comments about the hottest guys at Lakeshore Prep. Snaps of outfits posted on her own Instagram account. A long-running group chat with some classmates full of slang and inside jokes that felt like eavesdropping on another language.
I navigated to the "Recently Deleted" folder, expecting to find the usual—bad selfies, failed attempts at aesthetic posts. Instead, I saw a thread of gray boxes where messages should have been, each marked "Message unsent."
All from the same username: @alexis.august.
I exhaled slowly and clicked.
Most of the messages were gone. The visible fragments were one-sided—Mia's responses, still present, hanging in the air with no corresponding texts. The conversation looked like a phone call recorded with only one person's voice.
i didnt say anything i swear
alexis pls
pls i promise
i literally cant do this rn
alexis pls just stop
One message remained, dated the morning after Leah died, unsent but partially cached by a glitch or a lag in the system. A digital ghost.
I leaned in closer.
From: @alexis.august:if u snitch ur literally dead idc
A threat. Against my daughter.
My stomach churned. With anger, with horror, with sympathy for Mia.
I sat back, heartbeat loud in my ears. Alexis August. Once Brooke's highly curated golden child, who now defiantly wore Doc Martins and black hoodies, scarlet lipstick, and charcoal cat-eye eyeliner, with a perpetual scowl on her face.
I recalled how she'd stood next to our mailbox on Tuesday morning, watching us as she held up her phone. That mocking wave as her sweatshirt sleeve slid down her wrist to reveal the mottled bruising.
Bruises like fingerprints. A hand encircling her wrist. As if someone had seized her arm to keep from falling.
Alexis had a capacity for violence. Leah's diary had described the bathroom incident in humiliating detail. Alexis with scissors in her hand, advancing on a cowering Leah. Hair falling to the tile in clumps. Leah trapped against a tiled wall, sobbing and helpless.
Mia had claimed Alexis wasn't in her sleeping bag that night. Then where was she? Outside on the bluff, pushing Leah overthe edge?
I checked the time. Past 8 p.m. The kind of hour when respectable mothers were settling into their wine and Netflix, not expecting unannounced visitors.
I didn't care.
