“She walks at night.”

I spin around, and Cole is standing at the top of the landing. He looks down at the worn path on the floor. “I hear her out here all the time. Walking back and forth.” He lifts his eyes to look at me. “I don’t— We don’t sleep.”

I remember that strange night in the library. Willa sleepwalking. Pulling books off shelves. Looking for something. Searching.

I wonder if she’d been looking for my mother’s notebooks, maybe. She had to have known they existed. That they were full of clues.

The idea of them being out there somewhere must have haunted her.

I look past Cole to the big picture window at the end of the hall. The perfect view over the tall fence and out to the cliff beyond.

“Did you know?” I ask him. “Did you know she stole Midnight Music from my mother?”

“No.” Cole looks like I slapped him. “I swear. I had no idea. Not until Lex grabbed me and told me what you said tonight. Before you took off.” I’m trying to decide if I believe him. I want to believe him. But everyone at Whisper Cove is so slippery. They all move through my fingers like the damn fog. I can’t seem to pin anyone here down. They shift and change before my eyes. “It all makes sense now, though. The way she wrote it so fast. And we didn’t know—nobody knew—that she’d even been working on a play. The way she’s never written another thing. Not one fucking thing. In all these years.”

A thought suddenly knocks the air out of me. “Did she kill my mother? So she could steal her play?” I have to lean against the wall to stay on my feet.

Did Willa Culver drown me?

Is that what Glory wanted me to figure out? Is that why she gave me so many clues?

“I don’t know,” Cole admits. And it’s not the answer I wanted. I wanted him to say that stealing a play doesn’t make his mother a murder. Because I love Willa. I love her so much. But he just repeats those three words again. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there that night.”

“You were there,” I tell him. My voice is rising. I’m frantic now. Desperate for an answer. Something that will finally put an end to all this. “You did that magic trick for me. The one with the sea glass and the flashlight, and—”

“No. That’s one thing I know for certain, Avril. I wasn’t there when your mother died. When you—”

“Cole. You told me to look at the stars.”