I never went back to the spa. They closed to deal with the fire damage—the fires had stopped, but that was yet another crime no one could, or would, figure out. The company issued a clichéd statement that Emily would have laughed at, about the way she helped bring more beauty into the world. I pictured her throwing her head back, her teeth gleaming with wicked delight. Gone was the word I used to myself for the first few days. I wasn’t ready for the finality of the real word. Emily. Dead.

I WAS out of the hospital for a week before I heard from Clara. She texted me, apologizing. Said she had no cash so it had been a little while before she could add minutes to her phone, and now that I wasn’t at work, she didn’t know where to find me anymore. We agreed to meet in Margate, and I picked her up from the bus stop near Marvin Gardens. I jumped when she reached for the door handle: She had dyed her hair dark brown. I hadn’t recognized her at all.

“Wow, I like it,” I said.

“Yeah, it was time to go back. Plus, I was a little nervous with the red … it just makes you stick out a lot, and with everything going on …”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. We didn’t need to talk about how afraid we both were. How I looked over my shoulder every time I heard a piece of trash rustling in the breeze. How I double-, triple-checked the locks on the door before I went to sleep. I imagined that Clara probably still felt the same way.

“Did the cops talk to you, too?”

“No,” she said. “As soon as the ambulance pulled into the parking lot, I ducked behind a car. Peaches’s—I mean Georgia’s— mom was still there. She’s the one who found them, you know. I’m sorry, Lily. I didn’t want to have to talk to the cops, to tell them how I knew to get there. It would have been too weird.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I read about that, with Georgia’s mom.” It felt strange, to use a different name for her after all that time. And then I remembered what Des had said, when I came looking for Clara at the shop. What’s her name, then? Even after everything we had been through, I felt shy bringing it up. But if I didn’t ask, then she would be one more part of this summer that felt unbelievable, unreal.

“I’m sorry I didn’t ask this before. But what’s, you know, your real name?”

“It’s Ava,” she said. “Same as my mom.”

“That’s nice,” I said.