I shook my head, snapping myself out of it. Alice was always leaving her church bulletins around. She never missed a service, it seemed, and she often highlighted passages that spoke to her. This wasn’t new.

I was shocked at how completely helpless I felt without my phone. I had lived my first fifteen years without one just fine. And I really hated that Iris didn’t have hers. I liked knowing that I could reach her.

I ran into my room to grab my laptop. I could at least text from that.

I composed a text to Iris (who I knew didn’t have her phone), Merit, and Emma: Hey, kiddos. My phone is MIA and Iris’s is at the house. I’ll take my laptop to work so you can text if you need me, but call me at work when you get home!

I copied and pasted the same text to myself just in case Iris had my phone.

I glanced at my texts quickly in the iMessage icon on my laptop, noticing one from Bradley. It wasn’t highlighted as unread, but I knew I hadn’t seen it. I opened the link to the Capstone Fund and glanced through their directors. I didn’t know any of them. I mean, I recognized Dan Isaacs from Bill talking about him, but that was it. As I was reading his bio, an email notification from Oliver popped up in the right-hand corner of the screen.

I clicked down to my email. The body said: Client list and amounts. Oliver’s email signature was underneath.

As soon as I opened the file, my heart started racing. I hated seeing these names in black and white, knowing that these people’s lives had been ruined—or at least changed. I knew how that felt. Then I gasped. I looked away from the screen, and then back down. This couldn’t be right. She would have told me, wouldn’t she? We couldn’t have gone this long in our relationship with a secret this big. I felt light-headed, swimmy, my mind careening up hills and around curves. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe I was seeing things. I looked down at my screen again, and there it was, in bold black type.

Bailey, Alice, Juniper Shores, NC

“What?” I said quietly, out loud. “This can’t be true.”

I wasn’t even sure why, but between my missing phone and the “vengeance is mine” verse in her room and this news that surely ought to have come up over the past couple of weeks, my chest started to feel tight. Was the vengeance against us?