“I’m fine,” she murmured.

“You don’t seem fine.”

Silence. The wind carried over the distant sound of a train passing through Gloomswick in the valley below. When I glanced at Noelle again, her face looked like she wished she could be in one of the carriages, rushing through the night to somewhere else, someplace far away from here.

“Noelle,” I whispered. “You can talk to me. What did your mom tell you? Who’s he?”

A muscle twitched in her cheek: the first crack in the marble.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Drop it, Evelyn.”

“No,” I said, surprising even myself with how firm my voice was. “I know that it might be . . . difficult to talk about, but whatever it is, you don’t have to deal with it alone.”

In a jerky motion, Noelle plucked the cigarette from her lips and snuffed it out in the grass next to her. It went out with an angry sizzle: crack number two. “You don’t know anything.”

“Yes, I do. I know that Crystal Danell is your mother. And I know that Noelle isn’t your real name.”

At that, her head whipped around and she finally looked at me. “How?”

The look in her eyes, guarded and blazing with fury, was the same one with which she had fixed me on my first day at Seven Hills. For a split second, I felt the way I had then, small and pathetic, chilled to the bone by the wind and her stare.

However, this time I didn’t look away. “Your magazines,” I said. “I’m sorry if you didn’t want me to look at them. I didn’t think anything of it.”

Noelle was silent for a long moment. Then, she said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“I don’t mind you looking at my magazines or searching things on the internet. I’m glad that’s out of the way then.” She lifted a hand to rub at her temple. “That’s the least fucked-up part.”

I gulped, directing my gaze down at my hands. “Were you going to tell me?”

“Maybe.”

“What about the rest then?” I pressed. “Why did you take an alias? Was it just so that the press couldn’t find you here?”

Noelle shook her head, her jaw clenched and her hands balled to fists where they were resting in the grass. “You don’t need to know about that.”

“But what if I want to?” I asked, blinking angrily to keep myself from crying. “I told you about everything that happened to me.”

The final crack. The marble splintered and gave way to just Noelle, wide-eyed and fragile as the wind tore at her hair. She wasn’t a statue; she was a paper doll trying not to get carried off by the breeze. “Why does it even matter?” she asked. Something in my chest clenched at the way her voice shook, edging on desperate. “You don’t have to know everything about me to know me.”

“Not everything. But today Amelia told me she thinks you’re The Watcher and I couldn’t even defend you because I don’t know enough about you to be sure.” I swallowed hard, fighting down the lump in my throat. “I hate that.”