Izzy stepped closer, their shoulders nudging. “What?”

Mia wanted to curl up, ignore these questions, these gentle pokes at a wound that was so raw, so tender still. After all these years. She licked her lips. Then she glanced up, meeting Izzy’s gaze. “I remember doing it.”

Silence dropped. When Edie’s house came into view, Izzy reached out, tugged at Mia’s arm to get her to stop, to force her to look at Izzy.

“Do you really remember doing it?” Izzy asked. “Or do you just think you do?”

It took a few tries to get the words out, her brain heavy and slow. “What do you mean?”

“Why do you only know that? And nothing else? Why are you so certain?”

Mia looked down toward her wrist. “The pain, I think,” she said. “It was sharp, where everything else was blurry. It sliced the moment into memory.”

“You’re taking it as fact, though,” Izzy said. “Come on, think like a cop instead of a scared teenager.”

The roughness of Izzy’s voice actually helped. Mia had always been so scared about what lay beyond the fog that she’d never tried to clear it, had tried to never even look directly at it. But Izzy was forcing her to.

And, yes, they’d worked enough cold cases to know memories couldn’t be trusted. They warped, they shattered, they were put back together in ways that looked nothing like the original. Too many people took them as fact. But memories didn’t work like that. They were more of a perception of what happened than actual reality.

“Maybe you remember the sting of it,” Izzy said, keeping up the pressure. Part of Mia wanted to shrug her off. Part of her thought Izzy was onto something. “But do you remember holding the razor?”

“It was too easy,” Mia said. Because that had always been a truth to her. That had been her reality. The sting of pain. And how easy it was. “The blade. My skin.”

“Maybe it was too easy because you weren’t holding the razor,” Izzy said. And just like that, a different perception, a different reality. Something Mia had never even considered as a possibility. “Someone said it was suicide, and your brain ran with it. You know that happens, Mia—it happens all the time.”

Everything in her tilted and then righted itself.

Mia had known people thought she was responsible for the pact, that they thought she had talked Asher and Monroe into it. If either of them had been the ones to survive, they would have faced the same rumors. It was just how people were.

But she’d never seriously considered homicide. That was a fringe theory to give bored people something to talk about.

“Shit,” Mia said on a breath.