Emma shrugged. “Maybe the killer noticed that, too, hoping I’d suspect Gabby and Lili because of what Sutton did to them.” She winced, thinking how she’d taken the bait. Even if Gabby had only fake-fallen, even if it was all a ruse, Emma had still lashed out in anger. What if things had gone wrong and the force of Emma’s push had really killed her? She’d never felt so out of control.

Ethan shifted his weight and coughed into his fist. “The reason I’ve been trying to get ahold of you is that Sam told me something really . . . strange. At the end of the night, she got kind of fed up and asked what I was doing hanging out with someone like Sutton. She was like, ‘I heard Sutton Mercer hit someone with her car and almost killed them.’”

“What?” Emma shot up. “Who?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. Or maybe she didn’t know.”

Emma squinted. “Had you heard anything like this before?”

Ethan shrugged. “Maybe it’s not true.”

Emma’s heart pounded. Who could Sutton have almost killed with her car—and when? How could she not have known something so huge? “Maybe it is true,” she said hesitantly. “I went to the impound to pick up Sutton’s car earlier this week . . . but it wasn’t there. Sutton signed it out . . . on the thirty-first.”

“The night she died?” Ethan’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously.

“Yes. Not a single one of Sutton’s friends knew she’d picked up the car.” Emma tied her hair in a tight knot. “What if she had a reason not to tell anyone she picked it up? Maybe this rumor about her almost killing someone with her car is true. Maybe she tried to run someone down on the thirty-first.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Ethan waved his hands across each other. “You’re jumping to conclusions. Sutton wasn’t always nice, but she wasn’t a killer.”

“Yeah,” I wanted to add. Now Emma thought I was a hit-and-run kind of girl?

Emma took a deep breath. Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her. “Still,” she said. “We need to find Sutton’s car. We need to figure this out.”

“So it’s we again, is it?” Ethan asked, smiling. “I’m allowed to be part of the investigation after all?”

Emma stared into the distance over his shoulder. “I guess.” But embarrassment and rejection still pulsed inside her. This was what scared her about getting too close to someone: all the mixed signals, all the misinterpreted gestures, all the emotions that became overamplified because something big was on the line. It was so much easier to steer clear of all that. It prevented so much potential pain.

“I’m sorry about Sam,” Ethan said, reading her thoughts. “But she really is just a friend.”

“I don’t care,” Emma said quickly, trying to look like she meant it.