All around us, the world settled into silence. There seemed to be an understanding among the Candidates that the words we’d written on our cards weren’t meant to be spoken out loud.

“Now take your partner’s secret . . .” Victoria said. I waited for her to order us to share them. “Fold it in half.”

Hope walked the group, gathering the cards, one by one. “Some secrets,” she told us, “should stay secret. No matter how many cliffs we jump off of or dares we issue and fulfill, society will always have its rules, and our power will always come, in part, from knowing when to break them and when to play along.”

“There’s a time for telling secrets,” Victoria translated. “And a time to bury them deep.”

Someone brushed past me. My eyes had adjusted enough to the dark to recognize Nessa. She was wearing a scarlet robe now, the hood pulled up over her head.

She was carrying a shovel.

CHAPTER 32

They put our secrets in a wooden case. Each one of us took a turn with the shovel. The ground was harder than I’d expected, the digging grueling, but eventually, we had a hole: two feet by two feet and three deep.

The case was lowered in, and one by one, the eight White Gloves took possession of the shovel and started covering it with dirt.

“Choose another secret.” Victoria waited for her voice to break through the odd reverie that had settled over the group. “And find another partner.”

This time, Campbell ended up with Sadie-Grace, and I found myself face-to-face with Lily. I looked down at the second card I’d written, the one about the Lady of the Lake. Before I could decide to hand Lily my third card instead, she took the second from my hand and offered me one in return.

I can’t stop thinking about the Lady of the Lake. I watched Lily read those words. It was hard to tell if they resonated with her, if she was remembering and thinking about and obsessing over two little words her father had said on the recordings.

That body . . .

“It’s nothing,” Lily told me. “It has to be nothing.”

For God’s sakes, I could hear Uncle J.D. saying, it was an accident!

All too aware that the discussions around us were minimal and quiet, I didn’t press Lily further. Instead, I looked down at the card she’d handed me. I recognized her handwriting from the Secrets blog—tiny and evenly spaced and perfect.

SOMETIMES, MY BODY FEELS LIKE IT BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE.

I tried to wrap my mind around that, tried not to find it eerie. Sometimes, as in when she was punching her fist into a wall? Or sometimes, when she wrote other people’s secrets on her skin?

No clarification was forthcoming.

“Take your partner’s secret, and fold it in half.”