“Abby, your dad is sick,” Joe says, very slowly, as if he’s holding a fishing line and just begging me to follow the hook. “We can’t exactly assume he’s dealing in facts. Doesn’t he have Alzheimer’s?”

This isn’t the time to correct Joe, so I don’t. The symptoms are the same. But my father hasn’t lost his grip on the past; it’s the present that seems slippery.

“Kaycee and her friends played an awful game in high school,” I say, ignoring his lead. “They weren’t the first ones to play. But Kaycee was the one who thought of a way to make money off of it.” Briefly, I tell him, tell the whole room, what Cora Allen told me. “Blackmail,” I finish, out of breath.

For the first time I realize how strange I feel. But I won’t sit down; if I do, it would be like admitting that Joe is right, that the interns with their shifty glances are right, that I’m standing here babbling nonsense instead of trying to explain that I’ve finally seen the truth.

“Sorry.” Joe rubs his forehead. “What does this have to do with the Optimal case?”

“Blackmail,” I repeat. “Don’t you see? It was her pattern. She’d gotten a taste for it when she realized she could use the Game to get payouts from people terrified their photos would go public. But how much could she possibly have gotten? Forty, sixty bucks a pop?” I’m filling in holes as I go. “Kaycee must have heard about the case Optimal settled back in Tennessee before they moved to Barrens, and she set her sights higher. So she comes up with her little scam to pretend to be sick, maybe persuades her friends to go along with her, thinking they could go to Optimal for a payout. But she didn’t understand how serious things would get. Optimal was working its own scams, flouting environmental regulations, cutting costs, hiding money, bribing officials to look the other way. They couldn’t afford publicity. They couldn’t afford the scrutiny.”

“So they killed her.” Joe’s face is blank.

And here, under the painful bright lights next to crates of file folders and office supplies, I have the sudden sensation of drowning: It sounds crazy. Of course it does. But I’m right. I have to be. “Or they hired someone to do it. For all I know, they paid off her fucking father. But it fits.”

For a moment, there’s silence. I can feel my heart jumping rhythms in my chest.

It’s Portland who speaks up, slowly. “But the school nurse said Kaycee was really sick,” he says. “The pictures prove it.”

“The pictures prove she was a good actress,” I snap, although once again I see Kaycee on the bathroom floor, a swirl of blood in the toilet. And then another image of Kaycee shuffles up from the past, this time from when we were kids. Kaycee’s face, shuttered like a closed door, when I confronted her about Chestnut. I didn’t do it, she said calmly, biting off all the edges of her words so instead they sounded like a brag. You must be really screwed up, Abby, to even think I would do it. “She was a liar. She was always a liar. Maybe she made herself sick.”