Mia’s stomach clenched and heaved, and she was thankful she hadn’t eaten anything that day, because bile she could swallow down. Her ulcer throbbed beneath her breastbone, but the pain was almost welcome as she stared at the floor where her friends had dragged razor blades across their wrists. Where their blood had slid from their bodies only to be absorbed by the hungry wood of the floor.

The stains were still there, copper and clinging to the boards. Or was she imagining it? She was probably imagining it.

Izzy brushed by her, headed toward one of the windows. She was silhouetted by the light pouring through it, her tall, lanky frame a dark shadow that betrayed no reactions.

The move was purposeful, and Mia was pulled back to the present.

“The Bell family owns the mansion at the other side of the island,” Mia started, because if nothing else, it was a place to start.

Izzy whistled low. “That huge one?”

“Yes.” Mia’s eyes tracked to the window as if she could see it. “The Bells always came in the summer, left by fall. Before winter.”

“Can’t blame them for that,” Izzy said, an overdramatic shiver unsettling her body, which she’d otherwise been holding unnaturally still.

Mia huffed a small breath, then continued: “The Bells had never brought their daughters until that summer.”

Izzy had gone quiet again. Maybe because she’d heard the tremble in Mia’s voice.

“Monroe was the older one, my age at the time. Lacey was only a year younger,” Mia continued, tripping only slightly over the names. “Monroe dated one of my best friends. Asher Lowe. They killed themselves here.”

Hooking the tip of her finger into her glove, Mia then pressed on the scar there. “And I tried to, as well.”

The shifting light protected Izzy’s reaction, kept it hidden. Just like she’d planned. There was a sharpness to her voice, though, that wasn’t usually there. “You had to watch your friends die?”

Mia’s gaze slid back to the floor. “I don’t remember it,” she said, an answer that wasn’t really an answer to the question Izzy had asked. “At all. I’m told it’s common for traumatic events.”

She didn’t bother mentioning that she’d seen the aftermath—Asher and Monroe’s bodies, their limbs at such odd angles.

“None of it?” Izzy asked as if she could hear a hint of all the things Mia hadn’t told her.

“Afterward,” Mia said. “But. Everything else is . . .”

Izzy just waited, and Mia almost wished she wasn’t so patient, so she could be prodded into speaking instead of having to admit it herself. Izzy would find out eventually, anyway.

“Everything else is gone. That entire day.”

Silence dropped for a beat.

“What do you remember?” Izzy asked then, because she was a good cop.