“You did it,” I said again, my voice low now, commanding them, angry with them.

“You all did it!” I said, shaking my head. “What a pack of liars. I—worked so hard.” I paced, frustrated with the fountain of rage that was exploding beneath my feet. “I worked so hard this whole time because…I thought Carey worked so hard. I thought she was this practical artist like me and you were these, like, intellectual, experimental geniuses who never got your hands dirty, not ever. I thought, oh God, I thought that she was this model of, like, a compulsive person who was fine as long as she made things, that she lost her mind when she stopped. I thought it was, like, this signpost. Be like her. But none of it was real. You did all of it. YOKEFELLOWS. To yoke me as his yokefellow, right? That’s what she wrote…Or you wrote. You wrote it, in the notebooks. All the different colors of ink. And when you stopped helping her, she killed herself.”

As I’d stared them down, pacing back and forth in front of them like an angry general, the four of them had moved next to each other. They stood in a row, hands at their sides, mouths agape.

“And this is bad, but—to keep it a secret for so long,” I said accusingly. “Oh my God. Susan was right all along. What’s eating you? What’d you do? What did you do to her?”

Tyler looked at the rest of them in slow motion.

“Are we agreed?” he asked.

“Why do you care about agreeing with each other?” I snapped. Anyone could see that their bond was broken. Why the charade?

Still—he waited, and one by one, they nodded.

“The last time we disagreed, Maria Clarke killed herself.”

“Maria Clarke? What does she have to do with anything?”

“Maria Clarke was the actress who played Carey. Carey Logan was not a real person,” Tyler said. “She was not a real person. She was our project. It was all of us. Always.”

*  *  *

They told me everything. From the beginning, when they made the first sculpture, to meeting Maria and inventing Carey Logan. It was the biggest fraud imaginable, and they told it with their heads in their hands, crying, arguing, offering justifications, half-truths, selfish righteousness, absolute shame, and unabated sorrow. Sometimes they were the heroes, Maria, the villain; sometimes Maria was a martyr and they were her sacrifice. Sometimes they were simply people locked into a problem. It held all the prisms of who they were, and all of their truths and projected wants mixed up together, and I saw what a mess it all was among them.