“We were never going to kill my mom.” Lily pushed onto her elbows. “We were just scared of her, and we didn’t know—”

“I knew what to do.” Belle slid one of Jack’s letters out of the envelope. Together, they read the large, messy handwriting that Belle had committed to memory until she could imitate it:

I don’t think you want to hear from me at this point. I think you want to forget what happened between us, because it was too much. Or too soon. I’d never touched you before, and I wanted to make up for lost time, before we had no time left.

I’m sorry for that.

But I’m not giving up. Tonight, I snuck over to your orchard and I climbed into the tree where we first met. I sat there so long, the day darkened to evening, and I thought I saw you in the distance. I thought I caught a glimpse of your curls and it startled me so badly, I almost fell out of the branches. But it wasn’t you. It was your dad, holding his pruning shears and wearing his pruning gloves. He was halfway up a tree, trimming branches, and it broke my heart to see him doing what we used to do together. I was so angry in that moment, and so disappointed it wasn’t you.…

Belle turned the page over for Lily, so she could keep reading. This next part was important. It was the crux of her plan. The fruit of a year-long labor, of practicing over and over again until her hand cramped up. She held her breath as Lily read the backside of the letter:

I thought he deserved to suffer for sending you away. I thought his new, beautiful wife deserved to die on the kitchen floor, a cup of poisonous tea swimming in her veins.

Lily sat up, the blood draining from her face. “Jack was planning to kill my mom? All this time, I thought Jack was the noble one.”

“Lily.”

“My dad swore he didn’t do it. Even after Dr. Holloway called the police, and I admitted that I was with you at the time of the murder, my dad swore he didn’t poison—”

“Lily. Jack didn’t write this.” Belle turned over letter after letter, revealing no writing on the backs. “Jack only wrote on one side of the pages. After I’d learned to imitate Jack’s handwriting, I wrote the part on the back.” Carefully, she procured a packet of poppy seeds from beneath the letters. “I was going to poison your mom with poppies, and then I was going to plant this letter in Jack’s room so the police could find it. Jack would be arrested. Raven’s heart would be broken. And you would get out of the facility.”