She should say yes. She needed to know that more than what she had been asking, needed to focus on the case, the reason she was here.

“The night Asher died,” she corrected instead. Maybe it was the three glasses of bourbon.

His lips parted, perhaps a start to something, but in the end he simply shook his head.

“I don’t remember any of it,” Mia answered the unspoken question. “I don’t remember any of that day.”

He inhaled at that. “Nothing?” It was stripped clean of any accusation, curious and probing but not threaded with disbelief.

“The last thing that’s clear is the evening before,” she said slowly. She’d never had any interest in telling her side of the story. It wasn’t one she could give, anyway, since the memories had never stuck. Letting the gossips talk always seemed preferable to that simple admission. But that’s when she’d thought she’d never be back on St. Lucy’s. And here she was. “We snuck out. You brought whiskey.”

“It was just the two of us,” Cash said.

Even fifteen years later, that memory was there, clear. Smooth rocks and even smoother liquor. Searching tongues and roaming fingers. The solid weight of a boy on top of her, with the air cool against her skin.

But then everything went blank. No matter how many times she’d tried to probe the darkest recesses. Eventually she’d given up.

Some things were meant to be forgotten.

“You weren’t at the lighthouse, though,” Mia said. During a summer where she and Cash had been inseparable, it seemed almost inconceivable to her that he hadn’t been there. “The night he—they—died.”

“I was grounded,” Cash said, running a hand through his hair. “God, Mia, don’t you know how many times I’ve wished I had gone with you guys? How many times I’ve asked myself if I could have stopped it?”

She studied him. “Did you ever . . . ?”

“No.” The denial was harsh, leaving no room for equivocation. “I never suspected you’d do anything like that.”

The “you” was like a brand, hot and searing against her skin, a pain so sharp it brought reality into focus. The few times she’d thought about that night, she’d always put distance between herself and what happened. They’d killed themselves.

She pressed her lips together. Their song had long faded into a one-hit wonder from a few years back, and Cash was a stranger once more.

He sighed and glanced at his watch. “Listen, I better go. But be careful, okay, Mia Mackenzie?”

He didn’t have to go. He’d just come in. But ever since he’d caught her eye, he’d wanted to leave. She could see it in the way he’d kept his body angled toward the exit.

Mia flicked her brows up in acknowledgment, but she didn’t owe him a promise.