“She was married,” Jimmy said.

“She was,” Mia agreed easily.

The silence that followed was weighed down with everything he wasn’t saying. It was almost fully dark now, the light from outside all but gone. The echo of cigar smoke lingered stale in the air, along with the secrets, and both stuck to Mia’s throat, her lungs, as she breathed them in. They burned away, black dust, with each inhale, each exhale.

“I loved her.”

The confession was broken, ugly, almost a sob rather than words.

“Jimmy.”

It was all Mia could say. Just his name. Just a plea. Tell me. Let me help you.

“It wasn’t like that, all right?” Jimmy said, sniffing. “I loved her. But she didn’t . . . it wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?” she asked.

“She loved him.”

“Charles?” Mia wasn’t surprised. That’s how it had always seemed to her, no matter what anyone now was saying.

Jimmy nodded and wiped his nose against the arm of his shirt, leaving behind a damp, greasy stain. “Don’t know why.”

“What was he like? Charles.” All she remembered was a buttoned-up man. He’d never looked at her like Earl Bishop had, like she wasn’t good enough. But neither had he paid any of them much attention. She knew he was a psychiatrist on the mainland, but everyone made it seem more a hobby than anything else. The Bells had no need to work, not with the money that lined their bank accounts.

“Those girls were all scared,” Jimmy said, a quiet hiccup cutting off the last of his words. “You saw them.”

She had. But she wouldn’t have described any of the Bell women as frightened. Brash, bold, witty, and fun, maybe. But not scared.

So was she wrong or was everyone else? Why couldn’t she trust her perception any longer? Why did it feel like everything she remembered from those days had been skewed? As if she had been living in a slightly different reality from the rest of them.

Now she knew there was a fingerprint bruise on Lacey Bell’s arm and ghosts in her eyes. And she was living here despite everything that had happened on the island. Was she running away? Was it desperation that had sent her back to St. Lucy’s? Where was Charles now?

“Did you tell any of this to the reporter?” Mia asked, though she knew he must not have.

“No.”

She thumbed at her bottom lip. How had the reporter gotten the impression that Jimmy had been sleeping with Monroe? There hadn’t been many notes from the interview itself. But she had assumed Jimmy had said something off the record, maybe. Or offhand that the reporter had interpreted.

“Jimmy, I’m going to ask you something, and I need you to be honest with me,” Mia said.

He looked up finally, his eyes wide and red rimmed but dry.