Ethan shook his head slowly. “You never know with those girls. Not that I was privy to their inner-circle secrets, but something has always seemed off about Madeline and Charlotte. Before you came to town, when Sutton was still alive, it constantly seemed like they were vying for her attention and her position at the same time.” He stared off into the distance. “Like they loved her and hated her.”

Gripping Sutton’s phone, Emma touched the Twitter icon and called up each of Sutton’s friends’ pages, finding nothing remarkable on the thirty-first. But when she flipped to the tweets on September 1, something on Madeline’s page caught her eye. She’d written a shout-out to @Chamberlainbabe, Charlotte’s Twitter handle. Thanks for being there for me last night, Char. True friends stick together, no matter what.

“True friends,” Ethan said sarcastically. “Aw.”

“More like Huh?” Something wasn’t right. “Madeline and Charlotte aren’t touchy-feely. At all.” To Emma, they seemed more like uneasy comrades in the same popular-girl army. Then Ethan pointed to last night. “Madeline’s talking about the thirty-first.”

I shivered. Maybe they’d been with me that night. Maybe they’d finished off their pseudo–best friend together. And maybe, if Emma wasn’t careful, she’d be next.

Emma ran her hands down her face, then glanced at Ethan again. Guilt welled up in her chest. Whoever killed her sister was monitoring Emma’s every move. How long before the murderer realized Ethan knew the truth about her and tried to silence him, too?

“You don’t have to help me, you know,” she whispered. “It’s not safe.”

Ethan turned to face her, his eyes intense. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone.”

“Are you sure?”

When he nodded, Emma was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude. “Well, thank you. I was drowning by myself.”

Ethan looked surprised. “You don’t seem like the kind of girl who drowns in anything.”

Emma wanted to reach out and touch the spot where moonlight splashed his cheek. He shifted an inch closer until their knees bumped and his face angled toward hers, like he was about to kiss her. Emma felt the heat of his body as he moved closer, very aware of his full bottom lip.

Her mind swirled, remembering the night before, when he’d told her he’d begun to fall for the girl who’d taken over Sutton’s life. That he’d begun to fall for her. A different kind of girl would know how to seal the deal. Emma kept a list in her journal called Ways to Flirt, but she’d never actually put any of the techniques into action.

Snap.

Emma shot up, cocking her head to the right. Across the court, just behind a tree, came the faint blue glow of a cell phone, like someone was standing there, watching them.

“Do you see that?”

“What?” Ethan whispered.