“Don’t. I can’t do this!” I screamed, surprised by how pathetic I sounded. “You can’t love me. Do you know how twisted this sounds?”

He looked like I had physically wounded him, but it was nothing compared to what I felt.

“You need to let me leave here, Hayden. Please.”

Hayden shook his head. “You have to let me explain”

“Explain what?” I cried. “You killed my fatheryou killed me, for chrissake!”

“What?” he gasped.

“I saw the papers, Hayden! I saw them. And you’ve basically admitted to it.”

His brows furrowed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I never admitted to causing that accident because I didn’t! How could you even think that?”

God, he sounded so honest, so genuine, like the words were tearing him apart. But the evidencethe evidence was right on the floor.

I dropped to my knees and grabbed for the menu, planning to shove it his face. “This is the menu to… toI don’t understand.” I turned the menu over.

“It’s a menu to the Smoke Hole diner. And no, I don’t know how it got there.”

“No, no, no. This wasn’t a menu to the diner!” I flipped it back and forth. “This iswas a menu to Salt of the Sea.”

“Obviously, it’s not, Ember.”

I looked up, shaking my head. Hayden’s arms were folded across his chest and he looked angry. “No. There were dates written across the menu! The date of the accident was circled. It was in your handwriting! There were newspaper articles about my Dad, my school schedule” I made a grab for them, only to find out that they, too, weren’t what I’d previously seen.

The article clippings were of Cromwell’s election. The schedule was council meetings. The directions were to Morgantown. “I don’t understand. This isn’t what I saw!”

“I didn’t touch those papers.”

“I knowI know you didn’t.” I dropped them and sat back. Hayden hadn’t been talking about the car crash when he’d said he’d killed people. Oh, God. He’d been talking about the fire and… and I’d yelled at himdemanded how he could’ve done that.

“Ember, what’s going on with you? Dammit, was this why you wanted to drive to school by yourself today? So you could sneak through our stuff?”

I dropped my head into my hands. None of this made sense. I know what I saw and yet, it wasn’t there.

“And still after everything, you don’t trust me. You really think that I would have ever hurt you or your family? That I could have done something like that?” He gave a harsh laugh. “Wait. What am I saying? You read my file. You know why I was in foster care. So yeah, I guess you’d think I’d murdered your father, too.”