“If she does, she didn’t find out from me.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“I think I have to. There’s no reason the police should have to spend time and money finding out something I can tell them for free.”

Mom complains about the Clifford PD’s budget almost as often as she worries about ours.

“But …?”

I flop back on the bed again, my arms tossed over my head. “But … as mad as I am at Jake, telling Mom about the bag still feels like betraying him.”

Penn lifts one brow at me, in this way he has of saying a lot without saying anything at all.

“Yes, I’m aware that it sounds like I still care about him. But that’s irrelevant.”

“You caring about him is irrelevant to your relationship?”

“He cheated, Penn. And he won’t admit it. I can’t forgive either of those.”

I can’t stop him from hurting me, but I can make sure he does it as my ex rather than my everything.

“Okay. But is it possible—just possible—that he didn’t cheat, but now that you’ve said he did, you can’t let yourself be wrong? Even if you’re wrong?”

“No.”

Penn snorts. “You’re not right all the time, you know.”

“I know.” But I’m not wrong about this.

When my mom isn’t home by eight o’clock, I make myself a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich and eat it in my room, while I fill out the note card I’m allowed to bring to my chemistry midterm.

My phone beeps with a Twitter notification, and I hardly glance at it. Then my phone beeps again, and I turn off the notifications. They’re probably questions about why I was escorted into the library by a policeman during seventh period, and I can’t deal with that right now.

I’m halfway through my sandwich and a third of the way through the formulas I’m printing as small as I can when Penn knocks once on my door, then bursts in without waiting for a response.

His hair is still wet and he smells like shampoo.

“Have you seen what’s going down on Twitter?”

“I turned off notifications. Why?”

I open the app, and a string of new @ mentions scrolls rapidly down the screen. There must be at least two dozen of them. The one on top—the one with the most interaction—is from someone I’ve never heard of, retweeting someone else I’ve never heard of, with added commentary demanding to know how I could be so heartless.

“What the hell?”

I click on the original tweet and read the username. “Crimson Cryer. Who is that?”

“It was the name of our school newspaper, until it got cut for lack of funding, after my freshman year.”