“How do you know it wasn’t Asher she was meeting?” Mia asked. They all snuck out. Sometimes together, sometimes not. She’d assumed Monroe and Asher had found a place to be alone that summer, just like she and Cash had.

“Little things,” Lacey said, picking up the cigarette pack once more. She didn’t open it. “A weird, I don’t know . . . giddiness . . . she never had around Asher. She’d smell different, too. Like the man wore cologne.”

So more a feeling, than anything else, really. Mia trusted feelings. She wasn’t sure if she trusted Lacey, though.

“It was kind of a high for her, you know?” Lacey continued, her eyes on the floor. “Playing men. Getting them to do things for her.”

That . . . that Bell girl. Dot’s wobbly lip, her wet eyes, came to mind. That’s how she’d painted Monroe. Mean for the sake of being mean.

“She liked the attention?”

Lacey’s face contorted, as if she wanted to disagree, defend her sister, but then it smoothed once more. “I wouldn’t say it was like that.”

“How would you say it was like, then?” There was a harshness that was emerging beneath the soft memory of Monroe Bell.

Was there something beneath Mia’s own skin that would be just as ugly?

Lacey shook her head, looking out the window. “Don’t. That’s not what I meant.”

Mia recognized a dead end when she came to one.

“Do you remember?” Mia pivoted, asking what she’d wanted to know since she’d stood in the lighthouse two days before surrounded by ghosts. “Do you remember finding me?”

Lacey froze, and Mia was starting to be able to read her. It was in the pauses that she revealed her truths.

The silence that followed the question was unnatural. There was no rumble of the dishwasher, no bird chatter outside the window. Just a fragile hush and too many memories of blood-slick skin and wide eyes and the unrelenting roar of waves.

“Yes,” Lacey said, a whispered confession falling from reluctant lips. The woman cleared her throat, and then she was back, shifting, hiding. “Yes.”

“What . . . ?” Mia started, but the rest of the sentence didn’t form, her thoughts too tangled to slot words together.

Mia stared at her own hands, her eyes tracing the cracked skin there. It always got that way on the island.

“Why were you coming out there? Just then?” Mia asked finally, lifting her gaze back to Lacey, who had completely composed herself.

“I didn’t know you’d be there,” Lacey said, fiddling with her bangs with gentle fingers. “I was meeting someone.”

“Who?”

Lacey lifted one perfectly sculpted brow. “You think you’re the only ones who were getting some that summer?”

That’s not what she’d asked. Mia waited.