“Folie à deux,” he tells me. His mouth is so close to my ear. I feel the words more than hear them. “Madness shared by two.” Cole takes my hand and pulls me up off the steps. “We need to go.”

We step into the fog, and Cole slips an arm around me, but I pull away. I’m so confused.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he says. “If I did something to piss you off, or if—”

“Your father was having an affair with my mom.” The words hang like water droplets in the heavy air. We’re standing toe to toe. No space between us. It’s the only way we can see each other.

“No,” Cole says. He shakes his head. “No way.”

“She wrote it in her notebook,” I tell him. “And then my dad confirmed it.”

Cole shakes his head again. “I don’t believe that.”

“I get why you don’t want to believe it,” I tell him, “but—”

“No,” he says again. “You don’t understand.” He glances up at the light in the farmhouse window. Pulls me farther away from the sea porch. “It’s not like that. It’s just, my dad would never. Not because he loves my mom or he’s such a good man, or whatever. He just—” Cole stops. He shakes his head. “My dad’s a fucking coward. He likes the girls. Sure. But he’d be too chickenshit to take it that far. There’d be too much to lose.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you all of this belongs to my mom on paper. The house. The whole fucking theatre. Everything they built together.” Cole shakes his head again. “He’d never risk her finding out. She wouldn’t put up with it. My mom, I know she seems so warm, and she is. Or she can be. But she’s ruthless, too. Willa looks out for Willa. She’d snatch it all away. Leave his ass with nothing. And he wouldn’t survive that. This fucking theatre is all that’s ever mattered to him. It’s his whole goddamn life.”

I hear the echo of my mother’s angry whisper. Those words she said on the sea porch while I was hiding under the picnic table.

I want everything out in the open!

Cole thinks he’s clearing his father’s name, but all he’s done is assign him a motive for murder. If my mother wanted everything out in the open—if she wanted to stay and build a life with Brody—if he’d made her a promise and she’d already told my father she wasn’t coming home—but then Brody decided he couldn’t risk letting Willa find out—what would he have done to keep that quiet?

How far would he have gone to hold on to everything?