I get cleaned up and head back over to the Hidden Theatre. And maybe that’s because I’m halfway hoping Cole will be there again. But it’s also because there’s something I love about the way this little space is almost a part of the tree. How it’s separate from everything else at Whisper Cove.

I open my bag to get out my script, but I get distracted by the sight of my mother’s notebook. I pull it out and flip through it, studying each entry. I’m looking for any possible clue. Something that might explain why she did what she did. But it’s so hard. The pages are crowded with notes and doodles. And most of the scribbled phrases are impossible to decipher. There are random words scrawled in the margins.

Need more.

Not enough feeling.

Too much.

Acting notes? Maybe? Probably. But what if they mean something darker? I can’t tell what makes sense and what’s my imagination filling in the blanks.

I turn to the page I noticed the other night. Those words circled again and again, so many times that my mother has almost destroyed the paper.

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

I whisper the words out loud, and the leaves of the tree seem to whisper them back.

Nothing else leaps out at me, though. At least not until I turn to the very last page my mother ever wrote on. It’s dated August 22.

It’s the exclamation points that make me take notice. There are three of them. But it’s also the way the letters seem tense. More angled and desperate than the others.

B. C.—Figure out how to end it!!!

I stare at the words, and at first I can’t figure out what they could possibly mean. My brain is kicking out hundreds of possibilities, but none of them make sense.

Then, suddenly, I feel queasy. Dazed and sick. Because I realize there’s only one B. C. around here. Everybody knows that.

Brody Culver.

I think about that picture on the wall in his office. The way my mother was looking at him. All smiles. Laughing. With her hand on his arm.

I remember how he told me himself that he’d wanted her to stay. The way he stood there staring at her photo, even after I left. That look on his face.

Oh fuck. Please don’t let this mean what I think it means.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I reach into my backpack and pull out my phone. Dad picks up on the first ring, and it’s strange to hear his voice. We’ve texted a few times, but I haven’t talked to him since he dropped me off at the airport in Dallas. That was six days and a lifetime ago.