“But then she got that modeling contract with Guess. And suddenly she was poised for superstardom. I should have been happy for her, but all I could focus on was this idea that it was going to take her away from me. Maybe not at first, but eventually, she’d be moving in a different circle of people. Famous people. Powerful people. Would she have been happy with me, when she could be on the arm of a movie star, or a tech billionaire? I knew she wouldn’t have. Not forever. That’s why I proposed to her that weekend. I hadn’t even planned it—it was just a last-ditch effort to keep her.”

I wrapped my arms around myself then, knowing that I probably didn’t want to hear whatever was coming next. I’d been pushing so hard for the truth. And now that it was being laid out in front of me, one devastating word after another, I wasn’t sure if I could take it.

“You hadn’t planned to propose to her?” I heard myself say.

“No.” James shook his head. “I already knew something was very wrong at that point. I just didn’t know what.”

“What do you mean?”

James sighed heavily. “I didn’t know that Hannah and Parker were having an affair.”

“What?” I tried to make sense of this. James was afraid he was going to lose Hannah to a rich, powerful man. But Parker wasn’t any of those things at the time. He was fairly successful now, but at that point, in his mid-twenties, he’d been working as a car salesman for a Toyota dealership, and DJ’ing part-time on the weekends, which he’d just done to meet girls. “Why would she be interested in Parker?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because he was always around. I was pulling long shifts at the hospital, and Hannah would hang out at our apartment, waiting for me. They were thrown together a lot. Or maybe it was because Parker worshipped her even more than I did. But no matter how or why it started, they’d been sleeping together for weeks by the time we went on the camping trip. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

“And then you proposed to her.”

“And she accepted. And Parker was mad. No, it was more than that—he was furious. That’s the real reason he followed her that night. When she left the campsite and walked down to the beach, he went after her to confront her.”

I could feel my heart start to speed up, my pulse quickening. “And that’s why he killed her?”

James looked at me strangely. “Parker didn’t kill Hannah.”

“How can you be so sure? You just said he went after her to confront her.”