“It’s all right,” I say, suddenly feeling very tired. “You don’t need to say anything.” The words betray me. She needs to say something. Anything. There are still so many unanswered questions. So much I don’t know.
I clear my throat and find the courage. “How, Meg? How did this all happen?”
Meg presses her hand over mine. She clears her throat and motions to a cup of water on the table next to her. I stick a plastic straw in it and bring it to her lips. She takes a sip and locks eyes with me. They’re full of sadness and panic.
“I got laid off in New York and I knew I couldn’t stay in theStates without a visa.” Meg looks down at the tube sticking out of her body and starts picking at her cuticles, the skin around them red and raw. “I needed to.”
“Levin?”
Meg nods. “I didn’t know who else to call. Stu and Mellie told me to take the train out to their place in Connecticut.” She gazes out the window at an empty parking lot, the mountains near Alpine Lake rising behind it. “They took me in and said they could take care of my visa if I did some tasks for them. Minor ones. Paperwork, reviewing applications. That kind of thing.”
“You worked out of the winter cabin,” I say.Just like me.
Meg sniffles. “It was so cozy, being up there. I wanted to call you. Desperately. But Mellie said I couldn’t. She said we had to keep it a secret while they sorted out all of my immigration stuff.” Meg shrugs. “I wasn’t supposed to work outside of New York state, so it was a whole thing.”
She leans back against the pillows. “But everything changed when Levin dumped me. I was depressed, stuck up there all alone. Bored as hell.” She sighs. “Stu came up one day and left his email open. I couldn’t help taking a peek.”
“What did you find?”
“So many messages to Mark Cantor, asking him when they could make their next trip to Switzerland. They wanted to deposit more money, make a few withdrawals before the summer started.” Meg huffs and crosses her arms. “But Mark said no. He was getting paranoid that someone was onto him so he was asking all his clients to keep low profiles.”
“Is that why so much shit was weird this summer? The AC in the office? The late check to Heller’s dad?”
Meg nods. “They were low on cash.”
“Geezus.”
“It gets worse.” Meg shakes her head. “I didn’t want to be privy to any sort of information that could get me in trouble, not when I was trying to stay herelegallyand get Levin back, so I confronted them.”
“What did they say?”
“Stu convinced me that by working for them andknowingabout the accounts I had already become complicit and that if anyone found out, I’d get sent back to the UK immediately. I’d lose Levin for good.” Meg clasps her hands together. “Mellie said the best thing to do was to help them. She got me a fake ID, found me an apartment twenty minutes away, and arranged for me to get a job at the clerk’s office to make sure no one in Roxwood caught on. But then...”
She shakes her head, sniffling.
“Then you met Heller.” His name catches in my throat.
Meg nods and sniffles.
“Were you two...”
“Hooking up? God no!” Meg swats at me. “That boy was head over heels for you. I loved hearing him talk about you.”
A lump forms in my throat.
“Broke my heart we couldn’t all hang out together.” She inhales deeply. “We got close and he told me about how all the facilities in town had gone to shit. How the school needed new laptops. How they couldn’t pay the parks department employees so they had to furlough the whole team and shut down Little League. It’s not like Stu and Mellie could have fixed everything, but the fact that they wanted to keep everything for themselves... it made mefurious.” She shakes her head, her brow furrowed. “They take and take from this town, never giving back.”
“You told Heller what was going on. Gave him photocopies of the debit and phone cards.”
Meg nods. “When it was time for me to come back to camp, I made him promise to wait until after the summer to leak the news. It was selfish but I wanted one more summer at camp.”
“One more summer with Levin.”
Meg covers her face with her hands. “It seems so stupid now.”
“But he couldn’t wait. He wanted me to know. That’s why he tried to tell Ava.”
Meg turns to me. “I didn’t know he was there that night. I swear.”
