Page 135

I never imagined something this small.

One argument.

One impulsive movement.

One step backward where there wasn't enough ground left beneath her.

“She fell,” Ian says. “It was an accident,” he insists.

“You hit her in the head beside a fucking cliff.”

His entire body goes rigid. “She fell.”

“After you hit her,” I remind him, because I can’t stop myself now.

He crosses the space between us so quickly that my body reacts before my mind does. I jerk backward, his hands closing around my arms on either side of me, trapping me between them as he bends close enough that I can smell alcohol on his breath.

“You weren't there.” His voice has dropped almost to a whisper. “You don't understand.”

My pulse is hammering so hard that my vision seems to move with it.

His face is inches from mine. I can feel the tremor in his body where his hands grip either side of me, though whether it comes from anger or adrenaline, I can't tell. Possibly both.

I make myself hold his gaze. “What happened to the tapes?”

The question catches him off guard.

“If you wanted them badly enough to kill her over them, why did we find them seventeen years later?”

He pushes away from me so abruptly that I rock backward. I brace my feet against the floor, watching him retreat to the other side of the room.

“I looked everywhere. Everywhere, Serena.” He drags both hands through his hair. “Her room. Her car. The launch. I spent weeks trying to figure out where she'd put them. She said she'd made copies, so I looked for those too.”

My stomach twists at the thought of him moving through Casey's things after she was gone, searching for evidence while the rest of us were searching for her.

“You never found them.”

“No. Because Mara had them until a few nights ago.”

I’m certain I’ve misunderstood him. “Mara?”

His mouth twists into something almost amused. “You really don’t know.”

Something about this leaves me newly unsettled. “Know what?”

“Mara steals things. She always has.” He gives a short laugh. “You notice every fucking thing, and you never figured that out?”

Nothing about the sentence fits with the Mara I know.

Except—

A lighter she carried for months even though she didn't smoke. A bracelet I remember appearing on her wrist after a party. Little things I noticed and never had a reason to question.

And then I remember the knee joint in her glove box.

Kleptomania. Recurrent urges to steal things that aren't needed or particularly valuable. Often small, seemingly pointless objects. The act matters more than the thing itself.

A random car part would certainly qualify, if that's really what she thought it was.