Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the Author
- About the Book
- Also by Alison Gaylin
- About the Publisher
She’d asked Reg for the sunglasses, and he’d gladly given them to her, along with the address of his onetime second home and, since he apparently saved everything, some of the old clothes he’d found of Kate’s there. He’d given her something else he’d found at the cottage with the clothes—a fluffy pink stuffed dog that looked like something a toddler would own. “I swear this didn’t belong to either of my girls,” Reg had said. “I don’t know what it was doing there.”
We’re gonna figure this out, she told Quentin in her mind. We’re gonna report the hell out of this, together.
Summer flipped on the radio. Aimee Mann’s version of an old song called “Baby Blue”—which, oddly enough, had been Gabriel LeRoy’s nickname for April Cooper. Summer knew that from her research, and she saw it as a sign.
Summer usually wasn’t one for magical thinking. But imagining signs from above and messages from the great beyond and speculating about divinely choreographed podcasts was easier than spending any time on the fact that before killing himself, her best friend had apparently gunned down a defenseless couple in their own home. It felt like fiction to her, less believable even than the existence of ghosts.
At least, that’s the way she wanted it to feel.
The very last conversation she’d had with Quentin had been at 11:30 P.M. her time, the day before his death. He’d been up all night reading, he told her, and he’d thanked her for finally finding the book. “You kill someone,” he had said, “and you become a different person. There’s no lag time. No subtle transformation. In those few seconds it takes to end someone’s life, you go from being someone who has never killed, to a murderer.”
Summer had assumed he was talking about Cooper and LeRoy, and so she’d said, “Imagine how that feels if you’re just a kid.”
But he’d ignored the comment. “What I’m wondering, Summer, is this. How do you live your same life after you’ve become that other person? Because it seems impossible to me. It seems like, if you’re evil enough to kill someone, you probably shouldn’t live at all. Right?”
She shook the thought away, replacing that sad, tremulous voice with that of another Quentin, the imagined one in her passenger’s seat. The Quentin that she knew. Just focus on the story, said the imagined Quentin—smiling, strong, and unafraid. Her best friend, who would stay with her, always. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.