I shouldn’t have drank; I need to stay focused. We need to make a plan.

My hand lands on my phone, flashing with new alerts. Three missed calls from Condor. I must have silenced the ringer. He’s sent a text, too, heavy on the punctuation—for some reason it takes me a minute to tack the words down into place, to make them stop blurring together: he wants to know if I’m all right.

Just as I’m about to put the phone down, an e-mail lands. Portland again, forwarding his last message, the one whose subject is Digging. I open it half by accident, squinting at the grid of paragraphs, fighting against a growing blurriness in my brain.

I wanted to be sure you saw this. Could be important.

Below that is his original message. Words leap out at me—Kaycee. Poisoning. Symptoms.

The words circle and I have to pin them down, one by one, staring them hard into place.

I did some more thinking about what you said about Kaycee’s symptoms. You’re right. Her symptoms never corresponded to lead exposure. But they’re identical to the symptoms of mercury poisoning. Check it out.

Tremors.

Confusion.

Aphasia (short-term memory loss).

Balance problems, uncontrolled body movements.

Nausea, vomiting.

Then:

I’m not sure how she could have been exposed, or why she would have been the only one affected. I did some digging and found out that mercury was used decades ago in paint. Didn’t you say she was an artist?

I have to read that line, again and again, before it makes any sense.

Or rather—I have to read it, again and again, hoping it will stop making sense.

All at once Kaycee roars back to life, like I always half expected she would. She is everywhere, urgent and afraid, breathing in my hair, whispering to me, holding tight with sweat-damp hands to my shoulders, willing me to understand, to listen, to see.

Your problem, Abby, isn’t that you can’t draw. It’s that you can’t see.

Look, look, look.

See.

See Kaycee, working alone, thumbing paint across a canvas, dizzied by the smell.

See Kaycee, painted head-to-toe in school colors for graduation.

See Misha and Brent, the way his hand tightened on her knee, the way he spoke to her. Reassuring.

In control.

See Brent coming through the woods, his hair wet, his shirt damp, as if he’d been swimming.

See the way he reached out to kiss you.

See flashes behind your eyelids. Firefly bursts, but brighter.

Flashes. Flashlights. People on the water.

No.

Someone in the water.

We have to make sure…

The scene at the bonfire must have stirred up an old memory, the faint words, a scream, quickly stifled, all of it drifting to me dreamlike on snatches of wind…

We have to make sure she’s not breathing.

See the way you stood in front of the mirror later, tracing the places where he’d touched, trying to figure out if it was real, wondering whether he’d left a mark on you.