Lacey touched her bangs, pushing them to the side, then centering them again. Fidgety. It had only been when she’d been looking at the album that she’d seemed still, calm, peaceful.

“Um, I saw Mia,” Lacey said, hesitant. Izzy’s attention focused. No one seemed to know what Mia had been doing that whole day. “But not the others.”

“Did you just run into her . . . or . . . ?” Izzy waved her hand to prompt the woman to fill in the blanks.

“Look, it’s not important. It was years ago.”

Izzy waited while Lacey crossed and uncrossed her legs, plucked at the seam of her stockings, slipped her heavy rings on and off her fingers.

“Shit,” Lacey finally said quietly, more to herself than to Izzy. “All right. This isn’t meant to make her look bad. We were teenagers.”

“Sure.”

“She came over to the house that day,” Lacey said. “She was messed up. High or something.”

Drugged. “The mansion?”

“Yeah, um, asked if she could come in,” Lacey continued. “She was upset. Talking about Monroe and Cash or something. Maybe Asher, too. I couldn’t really make anything out. She was crying and incoherent, really.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone this?”

Lacey shrunk back against the couch cushion. “I don’t know. She kind of calmed down. Got real quiet. And then left? It didn’t . . . I don’t think it meant anything. I just think they were all a little emotional that night. It kind of fit, you know? With the suicide thing. Emotionally unstable behavior.”

“Did she say anything about Cash punching Asher? Or Monroe being pregnant?”

“No, no.” Lacey’s eyes were wide, the white stark against her smoky liner. It reminded Izzy of Martha. “Nothing like that. I just thought she’d gotten jealous and was on her period or something.”

“Was Monroe interested in Cash, too?” It was still strange to Izzy that Monroe had gone to Cash in the first place about the possible baby.

“Monroe was interested in attention,” Lacey said, her eyes flicking away. “But I never saw her make a move on Cash.” Lacey paused, breathed in. “I think she liked being friends with Mia. It made her feel . . . important or something.”

“Important?”

“Mia idolized her back then,” Lacey said. “It was so obvious. I mean, teenage girls want guys to like them, but more than that, they want other teenage girls to like them, right? It makes them popular. And coming here, Monroe was the queen bee of that little gang.”

“I thought you were a part of it, too.” There was that little-sister resentment that Izzy had heard slip into Lacey’s voice a few times. As a little sister herself, Izzy couldn’t fault her for it.

“Barely.” Lacey shrugged. “Think they forgot about me most of the time. Which was fine. Just . . .”

“But Mia came to you,” Izzy said interrupted. “That day.”