My entire body froze as I read her words.Check Isaac’s description? Why?
I flipped back to the page she was referencing and my blood went cold as I read his description again, the words jumping back out at me: “frosted tips,” “the slightest edge of a tattoo.”
Holy fuck.
I hadn’t ever seen Issac’s tattoo. He’d been wearing a polo shirt the one time I met him, only the faintest lines of it curving out of the sleeve, but whatif itwasa sailboat? I’d been so shocked and horrified when I’d caught Alex that I’d just assumed the mystery boy was a partygoer. Someone from the senior class. Maybe even Nick. I’d been young and drunk and scared, and I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I’d never considered that it could be Isaac.
How did I not see it? I’d written the fucking thing.
Had I been too close to it? Too distracted by the tension between Victoria and Alex that night to consider who the guy was? Between him and Nick, I was sure there had been others too. On some subconscious level, I must have had suspicions. I’d described the two of them similarly.
Could Hazel, with her fresh unbiased eyes, have caught what I was too involved with to see? I flipped back to her commentary. Her next note was direct.
Find pictures of Isaac’s tattoos.
I opened my laptop without hesitating, going to Facebook. I opened Sam’s page and searched her connections and found four Isaacs. Even from just the profile pictures, I quickly found the one I recognized: Isaac Kelly.
He hadn’t changed much in the last eleven years. He looked older, his hair cut shorter and settling into a darker, almost dirty blonde color. His face was still easily recognizable though. He had become some kind of financial planner and married a curly-haired woman who seemed to run a cottage-themed lifestyle blog. I scrolled through pictures of the two of them eating lavish homemade meals and on trips with their two toddlers. In all of them, Isaac was fully clothed, arm tattoo hidden. There wasn’t a single shirtless picture of him, even though it seemed like they spent a lot of time outdoors, even on boats. Was this on purpose? Had Isaac read his description in my book and purposefully avoided being photographed shirtless? It took hours of stalking people close to him—family, friends and coworkers—before I found one. Aphoto from one of his cousins where Isaac sat on a boat, in the very back of the frame, shirt off. I zoomed in. The cousin had captioned it:Nothing I love more than the sea!It was basically a selfie, no one else was even tagged in it, but it had happened to catch Isaac in the back, holding his daughter to his chest. His arm was wrapped around the little girl, showcasing the tattoo on his bicep.
A sailboat.The same one I remembered from that night. The one I had written about in the book.
Oh my fucking god.
Hazel had been right. Tree Boy was Isaac. Alex had slept with Sam’s boyfriend.
My mind was racing. Was Hazel the only one to do this? Did she ever tell anyone?
I had a thousand questions. Questions I now needed to ask Sam first thing in the morning. Showing up at Victoria’s door had worked surprisingly well, so I decided I’d use the same strategy for the eldest Hopely. Sam’s Instagram told me she was living in Miami, and a follow-up search of the voter database gave me an address. It was only half an hour away from Will’s prison, so I’d be able to confront Sam first. Then I could visit Will and pick his brain about Victoria Hopely and find out what else he might be hiding from me.
I felt a renewed frenzy. If Isaac had been sleeping with Alex, did that mean he had a reason to kill her too? He was now at the top of my mental suspect list, but then I had a chilling realization. If Sam had known her little sister was fucking her boyfriend, it wasn’t just Isaac who was suspicious. Sam may have been mad enough to kill her sister. And if Hazel had come around asking questions about it … I stopped breathing for a second.
It would give Sam motivation to kill me too.
19
It was pouring rain on my way to Miami the next morning, which pissed me off. The only thing worse than being surrounded by Florida drivers was being surrounded by Florida drivers in the rain.
It had also paused the search for Hazel, though Detective Pullman had called that morning and told my parents that a good rain might help “uncover” something, as though that was a comfort and not the most horrifying thing on earth.
I tried very hard not to think about this as I drove down I-95. I’d told my family I was visiting Will when I left the house. A half-truth.
It was 1 p.m. by the time I arrived in Sam’s neighborhood. My online stalking had revealed she was an Etsy seller, so I decided to take my chances that she worked from home. I turned my SUV into the parking lot. Her apartment was part of an aged pink stucco building in Wynwood, two stories high with outdoor entrances and a winding staircase. It looked like it hadn’t been attacked by greedy developers yet, but being in Miami, it was probably still very expensive.
I walked over to Sam’s apartment and took a deep breath before I knocked on the door. I didn’t know what might be waiting for me on the other side. Sam had been vehement in the years since I’d last seen her about her dislike for me. She’d called me a bitch, whore, slut, hypocrite, and cunt. She had sent me very long, very detailed DMs. Had she hated me even more because she knew, even if I didn’t yet, that I’d exposed her boyfriend’s cheating to the world?
There was silence for a few seconds before I heard rustling and a dog barking. Someone shushed it as they approached. I heard a chain slide then the front door ripped open.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Sam snapped. “What are you doing here, Rose?”
I couldn’t get over how different she looked. She was so thin. She’d always been skinny, but now she looked almost malnourished, just bones and a thin layer of flesh. I wondered if she had suffered from the same afflictions as me. Her hair was different too. Gone was the familiar Hopely gold, replaced by yellowing bleached hair cut into a choppy shag, dead and dry. She was wearing wide patterned pants and a thin grey tank top with no bra.
I tried to remember the last time I saw her. Probably at the trial. Sam had left Loxahatchee for good the fall after Alex died.
“Hi, Sam,” I said carefully. “Can we talk?”
“Now what the hell do you want to talk about?” she asked, her voice rising. “My murdered sister? Your heinous book? My dead dad?”
I squirmed. Straight to the point. “I have good intentions here, I promise. My little sister, Hazel, is missing, and I think it might be connected to everything that happened—”
