Through the sliding glass patio door, she could hear her family’s animated voices discussing the Minnesota Vikings preseason tickets her father had purchased for them. The normalcy of their conversation was almost surreal. Just hours ago, she’d been sitting on her bathroom floor preparing to say goodbye to all of this. To the yard, the laughter, the easy warmth of a Thursday evening with people who loved her. And now here she stood, untouched by handcuffs, free in the technical sense of the word if not in any way that actually mattered.
“No body, no crime,” Kinsley whispered, and the cynicism in her own voice startled her.
The phrase had been repeating in her mind since Shane had stood on her porch and delivered the news that had both saved and damned her. She closed her eyes and let the memory of that night surface again, the way it always did, uninvited and relentless. The dead weight of Gantz’s body as she and Noah had shoved it into the trunk of his car. The grinding effort it had taken to roll the vehicle down the embankment. The slow, greedy sound of the water as the lake swallowed all evidence of what she’d done. The memory was vivid and tactile, real enough that she could still feel the grit beneath her fingernails and the ache in her shoulders from the effort of it all.
And yet Shane had been adamant.
The extensive search had yielded nothing.
No car, no body, just murky water and lake-bottom silt.
Kinsley pushed her hair back from her face, noticing how her fingers trembled. She was still coming to terms with the outcome, still trying to understand how the ground beneath her had shifted so completely in the span of a single afternoon. After Shane had left her place, her father had sat with her for a good thirty minutes on the porch, his legal pad abandoned on the coffee table inside.
“Breathe, butterfly,” George had murmured, one arm around her shoulders as she practically hyperventilated. “Just breathe. Whatever this is, we’ll figure it out together.”
She’d never witnessed such disdain before, not directed at her, not from someone whose opinion she cared about. The disgust in Shane’s voice as he’d basically assured her that her secret was safe with him had been almost worse than an arrest. He wasn’t keeping quiet out of loyalty or love. He was doing it because he had no proof, and the frustration of that had rolled off him in waves. He was a detective who couldn’t arrest someone he knew was guilty, and the futility of his position had turned whatever remained of his feelings for her into something cold and bitter.
“You stay out of my way, and I’ll stay out of yours.”
The man who had shared her bed, who had whispered promises against her skin in the darkness, who had begun to build a place in her life that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding open for someone. Gone. While she’d initially been the one to pull away after the shooting, today had solidified the break beyond any hope of repair. Whatever had existed between them was dead, killed by her confession as surely as her bullet had killed Calvin Gantz.
Last night, she’d made peace with the idea of prison. She’d accepted the consequences of her actions. But now she stood in limbo, both saved and cursed by a mystery she couldn’t begin to understand. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths toremove the evidence of her crime from the bottom of that lake, and she had no idea who or why.
Her father’s cover story, at least, had been brilliant in its simplicity. The Vikings tickets had been a nice distraction. The original plan had been a goodbye dinner, a last meal with her family before she turned herself in. When Shane had upended everything, George had simply proceeded with the ruse, turning a farewell into a celebration that the rest of the family would never know had almost been something much darker.
The sliding door opened behind her, and Kinsley hastily wiped at her eyes. She’d known it was only a matter of time before her oldest brother joined her outside for a private conversation.
Noah’s shadow fell across the fire pit as he approached, positioning himself directly across from her. He slid his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts, and she didn’t have to meet his gaze to perceive the protective, concerned expression that had been a permanent fixture on his face since that fateful night. It was the same expression he’d worn as he’d helped her lift Gantz’s body, the same tight jaw and furrowed brow that told her he was carrying the weight of what they’d done just as heavily as she was, even if he’d never say so out loud.
Noah and Olivia were the oldest of the Aspen children, fraternal twins born while their father had still been in law school. They were the steady ones, the responsible firstborns who had blazed the trail for the rest of them. Kinsley had come next, with Dylan trailing just a year behind her. And then Owen, the baby, born a mere eleven months after Dylan, completing their tight-knit crew.
Five Aspen children, all with the same blue eyes and the same fierce sense of family loyalty that bordered on reckless at times. That loyalty had driven Noah to the side of a dark road in the middle of the night without a single question asked, and it wasthe same loyalty that now kept him standing in front of her with his hands in his pockets, waiting for the truth.
“Preseason tickets?” Noah studied her carefully. He’d always been able to read her, even when no one else could, and that ability had only sharpened after they’d shared the weight of that terrible night together. “Talk to me, Kin.”
“A distraction.” The two words were inadequate, but her throat constricted around anything more. Her eyes filled with tears that she refused to let fall, because she’d cried enough today to last her the rest of the year. “I was going to tell everyone what I did, Noah.”
She cleared her throat and steadied herself. She wouldn’t keep what happened with Shane from Noah. He deserved to know the truth, all of it, even the parts that made her voice shake.
“Shane confronted me last night,” Kinsley managed to say before glancing toward the patio doors to make sure no one else had wandered within earshot. “He knows that I killed Gantz.”
Noah slowly took his hands from his pockets and backed up a few steps, continuing until his knees hit the chair behind him, and then he sank down into the seat. His face had drained of color, so she quickly filled in the rest of the facts before the panic could take root.
“I took full blame,” Kinsley hastened to add. “He has no idea that you helped me move the body, and it’s going to stay that way.”
“You can’t guarantee that, and it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not allowing you to go down alone.” Noah had leaned back in the chair, but he was anything but comfortable. His knuckles were white where they gripped the armrests. “Gantz threatened my daughter, Kin. My little girl. I’ll talk to Dad first, and then we can?—”
“You aren’t going to say a word, Noah. Not one.” Kinsley didn’t bother to soften her tone. She couldn’t handle a single additional thing today. A laugh escaped her then, a strange, brittle sound that held no humor. “There’s not going to be an arrest. No one is going to prison, because there is no evidence of a crime.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Shane took divers up to the lake on the premise that he’d received an anonymous tip about a body. They found nothing. No car, no body, nothing at all.”
“But that’s impossible. I was there. We both were.” Noah leaned forward in the chair, his voice dropping to a fierce whisper. “We watched it sink, Kinsley.”
“I know what we did.” Kinsley’s fingers dug into her upper arms as she hugged herself tighter. “I remember every second of that night. But Shane had the divers search three times. He was furious, Noah. He thought I was playing some kind of sick game with him.”
They fell silent, and the sounds of the yard filled the gap between them. The faint laughter of her family through the glass door, the evening birdsong from the tree line. Normal sounds for a normal summer evening in a life that was anything but normal anymore.
