What if he was lying? What if he had a family all picked out? I turned back to the folders I’d set aside as being within the window and shuffled through the Candidates’ to find Campbell’s. What if that family was his own?

I tried to wrap my mind around the way that might have played out. Would Campbell’s father have told his wife the baby was his? Would Charlotte really have agreed to pass the baby off as her own?

It might explain some things about Campbell’s relationship with her mama.

I flipped open Campbell’s file. My birthday was in July. Lily’s was the last week in August. Campbell’s was September 1.

“When was Walker born?” I asked. He’d been a year ahead of Lily and Campbell in school.

“October,” Victoria answered. “Walker and Campbell are only eleven months apart.”

“So either their mother got pregnant when Walker was just a couple of months old or . . .”

“Or,” Victoria echoed. She let that sit with me for a minute and then executed an elegant shrug. “It’s a theory, but not the only one I’m working on. There’s one more folder you should read through before we join the rest of the White Gloves and Candidates in the guesthouse.” She nodded to her dresser. A single folder lay there.

“Why wasn’t this in with the others?” I asked.

“Because,” Victoria replied, “it’s not from a White Glove in your year. Ana’s baby would be getting ready to turn nineteen—they’re just as likely to be a sophomore as a freshman.” I opened the folder and saw a girl with dark blond hair and light brown eyes staring back at me. Then I saw the last name.

“Hope’s little sister,” Victoria told me. “Also Nessa’s girlfriend. Her name was Summer.”

“Was?” I asked.

Victoria got quiet for a moment, and I thought of the secret Hope had buried during her initiation process years before. The cancer came back.

“Summer joined the White Gloves last August,” Victoria told me. “She and Nessa started dating in December.” Victoria looked down at Summer’s picture—blond hair, brown eyes, just like Ana. “She died in March.”

CHARLOTTE, LIV, JULIA,
THE INTERLOPER, AND THE BOYS
SUMMER BEFORE SENIOR YEAR
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER

“Here are the rules.” Liv smiled, leaning into J.D. “First one to jump makes them. Last one down pays the price.”

Before anyone could process that statement, Liv was running, full blast, for the cliff’s edge. Charlotte watched her in the air. There was something beautiful about this version of Liv. Something wild.

Something that made Charlotte think Liv might have considered jumping, even if there hadn’t been water down below.

In the time it took that thought to register, J.D. and Julia had followed Liv’s lead. Thomas Mason went after Julia, and that left just three of them on the ledge.