Her gaze grows unfocused again. She appears to be slipping away, and I step forward, worried that she’s having a delayed reaction to the news about Madeline, that it’s just now sinking in and she’s going to collapse to the ground.

Or . . . she knows something else, and Sophia’s name triggered it.

“Rebecca?”

“I’m okay,” she says. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the matter?” I ask. “Do you know Sophia?”

“No, I don’t. Not directly.”

“Then what’s the matter? You looked like you were going to faint.”

“I think I knew who Sophia was. I saw her at a party once. And I definitely remember her husband.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

REBECCA

SUMMER, TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO

Rebecca wasn’t a big partier.

She rarely went to parties, preferring to spend her time with the friends she’d made in the dorm or her classes. Movies in someone’s room or at the theater. Game nights at the local bookstore. Writing in Troy’s with coffee and a laptop. Sometimes with a friend who also liked to write, and sometimes alone.

But she wasn’t a prude. She drank on occasion. Freshman year, her friend Monique got ahold of a bottle of Wild Turkey, and a small group of women did shots in Rebecca’s room until the floor started to swirl like a planet, and Rebecca woke up in a chair with the empty bottle and a bunch of red Solo cups scattered on the floor. Her head pounded, and she nearly ran out of the cafeteria to vomit when she tried to eat cereal, but she and her friends had a story to laugh about and a bunch of inside jokes to share, just as they’d shared the bottle.

And then there was Kent, the guy who had lived one floor below her freshman year. They met in the second-floor study lounge one night, when Rebecca was reading Gulliver’s Travels in a chair by the window and Kent was sprawled across one of the couches scrolling through his phone, his books and laptop on the floor by his feet untouched. They started talking after a while. And talking led to kissing. And periodically throughout the semester, they texted each other and then met in one or the other’s room to fool around. And Rebecca loved every minute of it until Kent dropped out of school at the semester break because he hadn’t gone to class in two months and his GPA was just above zero.

So she knew how to have a good time. She just didn’t like parties. People pushing against one another, yelling and screaming. The music always too loud, the beer always gone, and the liquor disgusting.