“Stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.” Cecily calmly leans over and rips the tape off my mouth. It comes off with an unexpected sharp sting of pain. “What was that you were saying?”
“Cecily…” I say through my teeth, voice shaking with anger. Adrenaline surges through me. “How could you?” From the ground, I try to reach for her, but she takes a step back, and I collapse onto the floor.
“Oh…no. Don’t do that.” She turns and paces to the window. Holds her cup of coffee to her lips. “I loved Naomi, you know that. Don’t you remember how much I did for her. For you?”
“I don’t understand.” My head is still spinning from the drugs. “Why would you help Matthew?”
Cecily’s eyes flick to mine, and for a brief second she looks like herself again—the twenty-one-year-old Cecily, the one who was confident and full of life and always knew what to do. The Cecily I considered family for the past ten years. “Why did you do it?” I ask, desperate for an explanation.
She looks down at the cup of coffee, picks at a tiny chip in the mug with her nail.
And that’s when it dawns on me: the second part of Daisy’s message. Had Cecily really been with Matthew since college? I think back to how long ago that was, how young we were then. That would mean they started dating when he was nearly twice her age, when she was still practically a child. I feel fury churning within me. He’d groomed her. He’d done this. I start to shake. “Naomi found evidence about that night, you know, about Lila. He would have gone to prison. She was trying to put away amurderer.” My voice sounds strange, choked, like it belongs to someone else.
“That’s exactly the problem,” Cecily says abruptly. She’s standing very straight, very still. “I wanted to get her to stop. The article. The investigation. Could you imagine what that would’ve done? Not onlywould it have sent Matthew to prison, but it would have collapsed Theo’s investment fund, bankrupted Sterling and Greystone, and destroyed the very foundation we’veallbuilt our lives on, yourself included. So when she came to me, I had to stop her. I had no other choice.”
“So you drugged her withketamine? A girl you’ve treated like a sister for the past ten years?You dumped her body in the lake?” I feel like I’m choking on the words.
“Well, she wasn’t supposed todie! I meant to just buy us some time to figure out what to do, but then…”
It feels like the wind has been knocked from my lungs. My vision starts to go.
Cecily sets down the cup, shakes her head; she can’t look me in the eye. “I didn’t know what else to do. And when she stopped breathing and wouldn’t wake up, I called Matthew.” She’s crying now, talking quickly. “It was his idea to bring her to the lake, make it look like an accident.” Her voice falters, and when she closes her eyes, a tear escapes and meanders down the side of her face.
Rage swells within me, hot as a burning flame, expanding in my chest, snaking up my throat. “Howcouldyou? Naomi loved you.” This woman is not the Cecily I know. The smart, fun young woman I met in college, the friend who’s been by my side for all these years.
“Matthew has meant everything to me for the past ten years,” she says quietly. She rubs a hand over her forehead. “I was trying to protect him. To protect all of us. I didn’t have another option.”
“You had a choice.”
“No. I didn’t.” She turns to me, eyes flashing, and I stop. “I married Theodore because my mother wanted me to, despite the fact that he was awful to me. He wasn’t faithful, not ever. Not for a day. He was horrible to me, and he controlled the majority of our finances.” She pauses. “But it was okay, because I had someone else. Someone better. Our love was the only thing keeping me sane. I had this whole plan to leave him. To file for divorce. But then—” Cecily blinks fast, turning away again, as if trying to hide her tears. “You lost someone you loved…but so did I.”
I look around the room.Come on. Think.All I can do to buy myself more time is to keep her talking. That’s when I see it: by the fireplace are a set of tools, a heavy iron poker.
With all my strength, I slide toward the fireplace. I’m so dizzy, it’s hard to move. If only I could reach them with my foot and knock them over. I concentrate on the iron rod. All it would take is one hard kick.
“I’m sorry it happened the way it did.” She begins to turn. “I didn’t—” Cecily stops when she sees me.
I squeeze my eyes shut and kick the stand. The tools clatter to the floor with a loud metallic crash. Cecily rushes over, but as she is reaching for the poker, I bring my foot into her knee with all my strength.
She yells out in pain.
It’s enough of a distraction for me to grab the iron rod. I hold it in front of me, my hands bound, as she grips her knee on the floor. I’m unsteady on my feet, but I finally have a chance.
“You’re going to let me go,” I say, speaking slowly, willing my voice to be strong. “I won’t turn you in. I just want to go home.”
There’s got to be some ounce of her left in there. Some part of her that regrets what she’s done. That understands that Matthew was a monster, that he manipulated her just like he manipulated every single student that passed through Greystone. He never cared about any of us, only what we could do for him. The edge of her mouth quivers, and for a brief moment, I wonder if I’ve gotten through toher.
But instead, she laughs, a cruel sound that echoes through the cabin. “With the amount of drugs in your system, I’d be surprised if you could raise that over your head, much less hurt me with it.”
She’s right, I realize. It feels as if the floor is shifting under me. I can’t see straight, and despite the adrenaline, the iron rod feels heavy in my hand. “And…can you smell that?” She sniffs the air. “Is there something on the stove?”
And that’s when I smell it. Gasoline, sharp and acrid, and burning rubber.Oh god. What has she done?
Cecily shrugs. “It makes sense you’d come back here to hide from the police…to destroy everything associated with Greystone.” And now I see it.I’mthe one the police are after, not her.I’mthe one accused of killing Matthew. I hadn’t slept well since my sister died. This isexactlythe type of thing a woman in my position might do.
She’s going to make it look like I’d completely lost it, burned downthe Greystone cabins in a fit of rage, with myself inside, thinking that I was about to be caught and tried for murder. The fire would ensure there was no evidence, no thread to follow.
A trail of smoke drifts into the room, winding its way across the wall like something alive. The sound of crackling flames. My stomach sinks as I lose hope. I want to run after her, but it’s too late. The front door slams, and I realize Cecily is gone.
