“Tanner Spencer’s father just called.” Lucy spun around to look at me, her hands on her hips. “He said that you and Berry came to the party uninvited and yelled at Tanner and his friends and when they asked you to leave you pushed over one of the firepits.”

“I did what?” My stomach landed with a splat on the floor.

Millie pressed her lips together.

“Why would I do that?!”

Lucy’s phone pinged from the couch. She walked over to the coffee table and picked it up. “Well,” she said, swiping her screen. “Michael Spencer just followed up with an email. And there’s an email from Principal Lynde. And the school board.”

I could hear all the electricity running through the house. Every buzz coming out of every lamp. I could hear the wind outside. The crickets. The tap of Lucy’s fingers on her screen.

“According to Mr. Spencer’s message,” Lucy said, “Tanner, a girl named Sarah, a boy named John, and a girl named Gilly all saw you start the fire. Resulting in several hundred dollars’ worth of damage to his property.”

“Gilly said that?”

Was that her plan the whole time? To lure me out to Tanner’s house? To make everything worse?

“Why?” Millie looked at me. “Who is Gilly?”

I seethed. “Okay, all the witnesses are Tanner’s friends, Mom. They all hate me, so of course they’re all going to lie.”

Lucy was still looking at her phone. “Mr. Spencer said he is considering suing me or the school for damages.”

“But I didn’t do anything! Berry was there. Berry saw it.”

“Well, they’re accusing Berry as well,” Lucy said, dropping her phone onto the couch. “So, you’re both in trouble.”

“I’m in trouble,” I seethed. “Why am I trouble? I just told you, I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t go over there knowing you were going to get in some sort of conflict with those kids?” Lucy asked, her eyes searching my face.

“No.” I mean, I did. Ish. But then I believed the person whose idea it was to go over there. I believed it was at least possible that things wouldn’t end up a mess.

“I told you to leave it alone. I told you.” Lucy looked at the ground. “No one wins this fight, Anne. Not this way. Michael Spencer is not going to back down from this. You already have a recorded incident of assaulting Tanner at school.”

“With PIZZA!”

“No yelling,” Millie snapped.

“You don’t even care about my side of the story,” I fumed. “You just care about your job.”

“I care about your decisions.” Lucy’s eyes got wide.

“Oh, like you don’t make bad decisions? Like your decision to come to Greenvill e? To move us to a place where you knew people would basically hate us? Where there’s basically only white people?”