Time stops. My breath turns cold and still in my lungs as my eyes lock onto Josh. I see a terrible painting in front of me. The wideness of Josh’s eyes. The knife slipping from his hand.

The long dark line across his temple.

The line widens. Drips.

And Josh falls.

I scuttle back from his body, but he doesn’t move. The shovel drops, and I look up.

Brecken. Brecken had the shovel. He hit Josh. Letters litter the ground around him. Opened letters. Brecken wasn’t ripping them up. He was reading them. My eyes catch on a line I hadn’t read.

You didn’t see me.

I try not to look, but he’s right there, sprawled in awkward angles and face turned toward the sky. Josh doesn’t see me because Josh is gone. His eyes remain, empty vessels staring up into the night as the ivory snow continues to fall.

Chapter Thirty

It is a familiar hitchhiker in a yellow cap who finds us first. Irony, it seems, will always find its way. We are huddled by the car, on the other side of the body.

Because it is just a body now. There’s no breath, no voice, no Josh left. Not that I knew Josh. Everything I thought I knew about him was undone by the stack of bloodstained letters in my backpack.

My instincts were wrong. Brecken wasn’t a monster. Harper wasn’t calculating some master plan. And Josh wasn’t a nice guy. He was delusional. A stalker. He invented a relationship over a cup of coffee in a hospital. And I never saw it at all.

The rugged SUV that stops at the corner of the two roads is as sturdy-looking as the driver. The man in the yellow hat jumps out, but the man driving only rolls down his window, phone pressed to his ear and his body language full of mistrust. He doesn’t care for his passenger and seems to care even less for the nightmare we’re presenting: blood and death smeared on fresh Christmas snow.

The man in the yellow hat seems unperturbed. He tromps heavily toward us, swearing softly at the sight of the dead boy on his back.

“God Almighty,” he says, taking off his hat to reveal thinning hair. He peeks under the sweatshirt I used to cover Josh’s face and shakes his head slowly.

“God Almighty,” he repeats, “what happened here?”

I think he’ll be suspicious, too, like the driver, who’s still waiting on the other road, safely ensconced in his warm, likely blood-free, Ford. But the yellow hat man touches my shoulder with his withered fingers, and I begin to cry.

“He tried to…” My words break off in a sob and I cover my mouth.