Charlotte could feel her heart beating, just thinking about it. She sat up and realized that Sterling wasn’t the only one missing. Julia was asleep on top of her sleeping bag. Thomas was passed out beside her.

But J.D., Sterling, and Liv were gone.

Charlotte stood up. It was dark, but the moon overhead was bright. She heard something in the distance.

In the direction of the cliff.

Wishing she had a flashlight, Charlotte followed the noise. There was a giggle, and another, unmistakable sound.

Cheeks burning, Charlotte quickly turned on her heels. What J.D. and Liv were doing out there was none of her business.

And then, on the way back to her sleeping bag, she ran smack-dab into J.D.

CHAPTER 54

I woke up in darkness. At first, I thought there was something wrong with my vision, but as my eyes adjusted, I realized that it was the dead of night. It took me a second to focus visually and longer than that for my brain to catch up. Scant moonlight overhead made it possible for me to just barely see—and eventually, realize—where I was.

A hole.

I could smell the dirt all around me, but I couldn’t feel it against my skin. I was lying on my back, my eyes skyward. I couldn’t feel anything except for my face.

I couldn’t move.

“Sawyer, are you there?”

Turning my head felt like swimming through cement. I only managed a slight movement, not enough to even brush my cheek against the dirt below me. “I’m here.”

“I can’t feel my feet,” Sadie-Grace told me, her voice high, the words bursting out at rapid speed. “Or my hands. Or my elbows . . .”

To say that Sadie-Grace was not the optimal person to wake up drugged and halfway buried alive next to would have been an understatement. She was 50 percent uncontrollable babbling and 50 percent utterly misplaced optimism.

When Aunt Olivia came to check on us, I fully expected Sadie-Grace to start chatting away and blow our cover, but she stayed quiet. I heard the sound of Aunt Olivia moving up above—and then the sound of a shovel hitting dirt.

I waited for her to toss it in the hole, waited for my proper, prim, perfectionist aunt to properly, primly, perfectly bury us alive.

But she didn’t.

After a minute or two, she dropped the shovel and left, and I resumed my job of managing the situation—and Sadie-Grace. The entire time, I silently reminded myself, over and over again, Aunt Olivia called Ellen “Mama.”

I had no idea what to make of that, and as I listened to Sadie-Grace insisting that the glass was half full and that she could somehow give herself a boost out of this godforsaken hole, I tried to make any of this make sense.