Kaycee Mitchell is sorry.

But Kaycee Mitchell is never sorry. I never once heard her say the word.

She missed recess for a whole week rather than apologize to Matt Granger for stealing his crayons. She couldn’t apologize. She didn’t have it in her.

Kaycee Mitchell is immune to guilt.

Whoever’s on the other end of the line, it isn’t Kaycee Mitchell.

“Well, look, you know where to find me,” she says.

“Just one more thing.” My heart is beating so heavy and huge I can barely breathe around it. “It’s stupid, I know. But I’ve always been curious.” One, two, three heartbeats. Sun streaks through the windshield and across my lap. I remember the warmth of Chestnut curled beside me on the front porch. “What really happened to Chestnut?”

There’s a long moment of silence.

Then Kaycee again—or whoever is pretending to be Kaycee—this time sounding uneasy. “It was a long time ago…”

“Does that mean you don’t remember?” Beyond the windshield, the world goes on.

She gives a staccato laugh. “Remind me.”

“My dog,” I say shortly. “The one you killed.”

There’s another short silence. “I have to go,” Kaycee says abruptly. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” she says. There’s that word again, sorry.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “You did enough.”

—

Someone is going to an awful lot of trouble to prove that Kaycee’s alive.

Which means, almost certainly, that she isn’t.

The Kaycee impersonator, whoever she is, said that Misha had told her I was looking. And I’m willing to bet that this, at least, is true. Someone had to feed her the information. And the best liars ride as close to the truth as they can.

Besides, the example Misha chose when we met at the new community center to prove her point about the complexity of right and wrong couldn’t have been random. Misha plays dumb, but she’s anything but. Let’s say Frank Mitchell had a customer, a normal man. And let’s say that what he’s really after are the younger girls. She’d said pictures were better than them going out and finding the real thing.

But was she really just talking about Frank Mitchell? Or was she actually defending herself, too? It might have been a kind of confession. It was definitely a hint.

Back in the day, when the Game was heating up, Kaycee kept the photographs for herself, even when her victims ponied up cash. Maybe Frank Mitchell found a way to turn a bigger profit on them. It would certainly explain her father’s nice, new house. And why he’s so eager to tell everybody who asks that Kaycee ran off on her own.

And what does Misha have to do with it?

I remember the secretary who poked into her office that day I went to visit the high school. Misha collects student phones…to prevent cyberbullying, she’d said.

But could she really be looking for new targets?

It all comes back to the Game.

I can think of one person who might be able to help: Tatum. Monty mentioned that she and her friends were involved in the Game. I need to know whether the rules have changed, who the other players are, and who’s keeping score.