Kristen stabs her gun in my direction. “Drink it.”

“No,” I say. “I won’t.”

Adam looks at me with sympathetic eyes. “It will make things easier,” he says.

The words swing me back to Albert Hodge. When he put his hand over my mouth and said to breathe in. “Everything will be easier.”

I didn’t fight him. I did what he said because I was so scared. But not now.

“You’ll have to kill me,” I say. “I’ve called the police. They’ll be here soon. You’ll go down for this, Kristen. You too, Adam.”

“She’s bluffing,” Kristen says, measuring my words. “When did you call?”

“When I was in the bathroom.”

Kristen gives Adam a hard glare. “Well, that’s pretty stupid, Adam. Letting her do that.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Adam says. “It was all Kristen. I didn’t even know she was coming to the cabins. She stalked Sophie. She and Connor. Both had their reasons.”

“You’re such a liar, Adam,” Kristen says.

Adam shifts his attention to me. “You know me, Lee.”

I thought I did. Now I know that I only had a fantasy of who my rescuer and my beloved big brother’s best friend really was.

The gun moves closer.

I need one of them on my side. I also need the police to get here.

Where are they?

“I know you couldn’t have done it, Adam,” I say.

Kristen won’t back down. “We did it there because Adam told me an old friend, someone who looked up to him, who owed him, would be the responding detective. Didn’t it ever strike you as strange, as a coincidence, maybe even fortuitous, that your old friend’s wife was abducted in your Podunk jurisdiction?”

I don’t respond. I had thought it was fortuitous, actually. At the time, I thought that it gave me a chance to do something for Adam Warner as he’d once done for me long ago—that I could help him at the worst possible time of his life.

Kristen Moss is a talker. She talks in front of a jury for a living. She might also be the biggest liar on the planet.

“I know you are going to kill me,” I say. “I want to know what happened. I deserve to know.”

Adam looks away.

“This is really messed up,” he says.

He’s not who I thought he was. Or who I wanted him to be.

“You messed it up, Adam,” I tell him. “You did.”

Adam seems scared. Like he’s about to crumble.

“I didn’t do anything, Lee. Really, I didn’t.”

Kristen remains stone. But she can’t stop talking. She wants to control the narrative.