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She had a good voice. Low and warm, with a rhythm that had clearly been shaped by a lot of reading, by knowing where a sentence was going before it arrived. He watched her and let the words do what they were going to do, which was gradually stop being words and become texture instead—sound, cadence, the late-afternoon light making her curls golden where it caught them.

His mind went quiet.

He couldn’t have said how long it went on. Long enough for the light to shift a few degrees. Long enough for him to stop thinking about anything else. Just her, in his borrowed bed, in his half-empty apartment, reading Thoreau aloud, with a frog on her ankle, proving that there was something called simplicity that a person might orient a life around.

He was in trouble.

Chapter 5

The Mirror Maze

The festival had transformed Maple Lane Falls overnight. Rachel stood at the edge of Moss Street and let herself take it in properly—not the way the other girls were taking it in, phones up, already filtering. She saw the logistics first, the way she always did: the staggered booth placement that kept foot traffic moving, the food vendors clustered near the far end where the smell would pull people through rather than stop them at the entrance, the lighting strung low enough to feel intimate but high enough not to be a trip hazard. Whoever had planned this knew what they were doing.

Then she let herself see the rest of it. The leaves coming down in the cold morning air, amber and rust and a deep red that matched her jacket almost exactly. The hand-lettered signs. The carved pumpkins massed at every corner, hundreds of them, the candlelight inside each one making the whole corner seem to pulse. It was beautiful. It was genuinely, unironically beautiful, and she was stuck navigating it with five hungover women in heels.

She had thought tipsy bachelorette parties weren’t fun. Hungover ones were a different category entirely.

Brynn had her enormous sunglasses on. Rather than being a fashion statement, today they signaled suffering without having to describe it. Kayleigh was mainlining coffee from a paper cup and barely watching where she was stepping. Tatum kept reaching for her phone and then seeming to forget why. And Sloane, the bride, was holding her own cup in both hands like it was the only warm thing left in the world, her tiara slightly askew, fighting a visible battle with her own stomach.

“The haunted house is that way,” Rachel offered.

“Mmm,” said Sloane.

“Factory of Screams,” Tatum read off her phone. “Reviews are mixed.”

“Perfect,” said Brynn.

The music inside was too loud—loud enough that Rachel felt it in her back teeth—and the lighting was so aggressively strobed that within four minutes she had a headache starting behind her left eye. The skeleton that dropped from the ceiling was so plastic it caught the light like a Christmas ornament.

Tatum screamed anyway. A full, committed scream, hands up, stumbling backward into Rachel.

Rachel would not have pegged her for scaring easily.

They made it through the first two rooms without incident. In the mirror maze, Sloane started struggling, heaving, holding both hands to her mouth as if that would keep it in. She turned toward the exit and walked directly into a glass panel. The crack of it was audible even over the music.

The nosebleed started fast.

Rachel had her out of the maze and into the corridor within thirty seconds, one hand steady at Sloane’s elbow, the other pressing the sleeve of her own jacket against her cousin’s upper lip. Sloane leaned into her, eyes watering, trying to tip her head back.

“Forward,” Rachel said. “Head forward. You’re okay.”

“God,” Sloane said, muffled.

“You’re fine. It’s stopping.”

It mostly did, after a few minutes. What didn’t stop was the nausea Sloane had been fighting since breakfast—she made it to the edge of the building before it won. Rachel pulled her hair back and held it and looked at the wall and thought about something else.

The shoes survived. Barely.

What Rachel had not counted on was the turn that followed. They came back out into the daylight and Brynn looked at Rachel’s jacket sleeve—the blood, drying now to rust—and then at Sloane, who was pale and shaky and leaning against Kayleigh.

“This is your fault,” she said, getting into Rachel’s face. “You were supposed to be keeping an eye on her in there.”

Rachel blinked. “I was the one who got her out.”

“You were supposed to keep her from running into things.”

“She ran,” Rachel said. “I caught her. That’s all I could do.”