Val slips her arm around my waist, and her long, dark hair spills over my shoulder. “You gonna go find what’s-his-name?” I ask her. I’ve seen her flirting with that blond guy—Nixon—a couple of times lately, but she shakes her head.

“Nah,” she says with a laugh. “He’s not really my type. I can only talk so long about Star Trek.” But then her face turns serious. “I broke it off with Chester for good last night.” Lex rolls his eyes, and Val punches him in the arm. “No. Seriously. We were together a long time, you know? And I think maybe I just need to be by myself for a while.”

“Damn, girl,” Jude says, and he nods. “Good for you.” Lex nudges him in the side.

“Tell them your good news,” Lex prompts, and Jude grins.

“My mom called this afternoon. I got a letter from the University of North Carolina. Full ride scholarship. In fucking ballet.” He shakes his head like he can’t believe it.

“So no accounting?” Val asks.

“Hell no!” Jude says. “I’m a fucking dancer!”

We laugh. And it hits me. They’ve all managed to do it.

They’ve become.

Like Willa said on that very first morning we all huddled on the farmhouse porch.

Every one of them is someone different than they were when they got here.

And I guess I’m someone different, too. I came here wanting to know my own mother. To find out who she was. So I could have something of her to hang on to. And I still want that.

But now I want something else, too.

I want answers.

I want to know what happened that night. At the top of that cliff.

And I’m running out of time.

Cole walks me back to the cabin, and we sit together on the front steps. I ask him if he’s going to sit out here all night. Again. And he nods. Then he looks at me for a long while before he finally says, “I found something. Something you need to know about.”

“What is it?”

“I was looking for that notebook of your mom’s again, like I told you before. But I didn’t find it.”

“Okay.” I’m trying to figure out where this is going.

“I found something else, though.” He pulls a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and hands it to me. “This was crammed into a box of my dad’s personal papers. Way down at the bottom.”

It’s yellow. The bottom layer of some kind of carbon copy pad. The kind where you write on the top layer, and it goes through to the other layers. But when I open it up, I can’t figure out what I’m looking at.