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She got a table anyway. Ordered water, then amended it to cider—hot, with cinnamon. Checked her phone. No messages.

She gave it ten minutes before she let herself register that this was actually happening. She’d been stood up. She thought about the restaurant she’d chosen, whether he’d understood the cross streets, whether she’d gotten the time wrong. He was new in town, after all. She pulled up their last texts and read them twice. She had not gotten the time wrong.

Fine. People canceled. People forgot.

She drank her cider and pondered whether to order a meal to eat by herself or leave. Her stomach grumbled, so she reached for the menu. The phone chimed.

Keith: Something came up. Can you come to the hotel?

She read it three times. Looked at the door. Looked back at her phone. There was no version of this message that didn’t feel like a brush-off dressed up as a request, but she was already here and she had nowhere to be and she wanted to look him in the face when she said it was fine.

She paid for the cider and went, walking swiftly through streets busy with partying people, to the hotel she was staying at with her friends. She pushed through the heavy revolving door and stepped into the lobby that was surprisingly crowded. At first, she thought a busload of tourists had just arrived, but the buzz was more excited. Alarmingly so.

She spotted police officers and quietly turned to walk out again. She wasn’t dealing with law enforcement today. No way.

“Rachel?” Keith’s voice stopped her.

Turning around, she clocked the uniform before she clocked his face.

Starched and well-fitted, the star at his chest caught the lobby light. His posture was different in it—not different from what she knew of him, which was barely anything, but different from what she’d read. He’d squared off somehow.

Something moved in his expression. She didn’t know him well enough to name it.

She stood where she was and felt the ground shift under her in a way she recognized. The particular adjustment her body made when it caught up to what her mind hadn’t finished yet.

She never would have gotten entangled with him if she’d known he was a cop.

Chapter 6

What the Bridesmaids Said

He’d seen her come through the revolving door like she owned the place, take in the room, and go still. Just for a second. Then her body had made a decision, and she’d started turning back toward the street, and that was when he called her name.

She stopped.

When she turned, her eyes went to the star on his chest before they came to his face. He watched it happen. Watched her read the uniform, watched her face tighten with disgust. She stood where she was with about fifteen feet of lobby between them, and he had the distinct impression she was calculating whether she could still leave.

Brynn had been shaking when she told him. She went after Sloane. She’s been jealous of her for years. Kayleigh had said it quieter, less certain, but the shape was the same. Rachel had fought with Sloane, Rachel had walked out, and someone had found Sloane twenty minutes later on the pavement with her head bleeding.

Keith was lead, which meant he worked outward from that fact, building the picture one interview at a time, and right now the picture had Rachel Grant in the center of it.

He had started with the bridesmaids. Four of them, varying degrees of hungover, all interviewed separately while a deputy managed the room. The stories had matched closely enough to be honest and diverged closely enough to be real. Sloane had wanted to apologize to Rachel after a falling-out at the festival. She’d gone after her. Nobody had seen either of them after that—not until a man walking back to the parking lot found Sloane on the ground near the service corridor and called it in.

That was the last time anyone had seen Rachel, as far as anyone could tell, until now.

He held all of that and looked at the woman in front of him.

She looked bothered. Her jaw was set a degree too carefully, shoulders carrying a tension she was working to keep out of her posture. He knew the difference between someone who’d had a terrible day and someone managing what they said. He couldn’t say yet which one he was looking at.

He wanted to say innocent. He wasn’t ready to say innocent.

She was cooperative, mostly, even at the sheriff’s office. Clipped, yes—her answers landed short and precise, and her eyes moved around his face the way people’s eyes moved when they were calculating rather than listening. He’d have thought more of it if he hadn’t been doing the same thing.

She told him about the mirror maze. The nosebleed—Sloane’s, helped along by a glass panel and poor judgment. The bridesmaids turning on her after. She said it plainly, without any apparent bid for sympathy, and he wrote it down.

When he asked about her jacket—the smear on the left sleeve that had dried to rust—she looked at it with an expression he couldn’t quite read.

“Like, what do you think it is?”