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Isat up so quickly my spine creaked. I heard the doorbell again, then thud thud thud. A voice yelling my name from the street.

I threw myself out of bed, grabbed a kitchen knife from the draining rack, pushed the dresser away from the door and then hurled myself downstairs before the noise woke the neighborhood.

The thudding was making the whole door shake.

“Marlowe!” The voice sounded desperate. A woman’s voice.

Callie.

But that fist didn’t sound like Callie.

I looked through the peephole. She stood on the front porch, mascara smudged down one side of her face, hair in a disastrous knot. Behind her, tall and loose-limbed and unmistakable, was Kai.

Everything in me went cold.

But he didn’t look angry. He was barefoot. Wearing sweatpants, a faded surf hoodie, and a look on his face like he’d spent the evening talking with God. Or puffing on a vape pen.

I stood with my hand against the door. “Callie, what’s going on?”

“Marlowe…Marlowe, open the door. Please. Oh god—”

“She needs to talk to you inside, man,” Kai said, like he’d made a philosophical observation.

“Callie?” I said.

“Marlowe, it’s just us. It’s just Kai, he’s…”

She turned her whole arm to gesture at him, gently slapping him in the chest. It hit him like a little ocean wave.

“Callie,” Kai said, his voice low. “Breathe, yeah?”

He looked at me through the glass with his hands loose at his sides, calm and glassy eyed. He gave me a quick nod, like he knew why I wasn’t opening the door. That nod scared me more than anything.

I opened the door six inches. “Talk.”

“We were at the beach,” Callie said, the words tumbling out of her. “We got…okay, we got high, just like, a little, it was so nice, and Marlowe, for like an hour everything was fine, and I just… I just literally forgot.”

I swallowed. “Forgot what?”

“That I wasn’t supposed to tell him.”

I pressed my fingers into the door. I was still gripping the kitchen knife.

“Callie,” I said, struggling to get it out. “What did you tell him?”

Her face folded.

“I told him everything. I didn’t mean to; it just came out. It’s like I was speaking but my mouth wasn’t mine and I couldn’t stop.”

For a second I couldn’t feel the floor.

“What do you mean, ‘everything?’”

She was crying now. “The whole plan. You, Damian, the house, the mean dead lady, the beach. I told him about Damian. Marlowe, I’m so sorry. I broke the… I know it was the one thing, I know—”

“Get inside,” I said. “Both of you. Now.”

I shut and bolted the door behind them and stood with my back against it, deciding right then that if Kai made one wrong move, I’d scream the building down.