Ethan is incredibly gifted at playing to an audience. I have caught him in dozens of lies in the past six months, all engineered to manipulate my opinion of him. In our first sessions he seemed confused and saddened by what he had done; once he’d made sure I could not do anything to indict him, however, he couldn’t seem to resist telling me the details of what must now be called a murder. He has a need to show off and reveal the depths of his own cleverness, which in this case has led to his confession for a crime he can no longer be charged with. I am of the opinion that Ethan has antisocial personality disorder with obsessive tendencies, possibly bordering on psychopathy. It is likely that he will display violent behavior again.

She whipped through the pages of the report, looking for a note that said obviously this had been a huge mistake, that Ethan Landry couldn’t have hurt a fly. She tried to find the word CURED rubber-stamped across a page in green ink. But the transcripts attached to the report didn’t seem to challenge the doctor’s opinion. “If she wasn’t going to be my friend, she didn’t matter anymore. She deserved what she got,” Ethan said in one session. In another, he boasted: “The police officers in San Diego are stupid. They were really easy to trick. You’re actually pretty stupid too, Dr. White, but that’s okay. I like talking to you anyway.”

The taste of bile filled Emma’s mouth. Even as her brain spun, making frantic excuses and explanations—this wasn’t her Ethan, the shrink was wrong, the reports were fake—in some dark corner of her mind, thoughts were cascading into one another like falling dominoes.

Only Ethan had known she wasn’t Sutton. None of Sutton’s friends or family had figured it out. But Ethan, a boy Sutton barely knew, had confronted Emma that very first week in Tucson. You’re not who you say you are, he’d told her. You’re not Sutton. You’re someone else. She remembered, with a cold, sick dread, that she’d immediately accused him of killing her sister—how else could he have known that Sutton was gone? He’d recoiled as though she’d slapped him, his face gray. Sutton’s dead? he’d repeated, clearly shocked. And Emma—trusting, naive Emma—hadn’t questioned him again. She’d simply broken down and told him the whole story, desperate for an ally.

Another domino fell. Ethan lived across the street from the canyon. Ethan had a telescope that was always angled in that direction. Ethan had been positioned perfectly to watch Sutton on her last night alive—and to watch Emma arrive and leave her duffel bag on a park bench.