When her vision cleared, she was gazing up at Ethan. He knelt over her, his eyes burning, his lips drawn back in a tight grimace. Then she felt metal against her neck, and looked down to see the edge of a knife in his hand.

The world tilted around me, and for a moment I couldn’t tell where my memory ended and Emma’s present began. They were one and the same. And now she was going to die . . . just the way I had.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispered. His hand dug into her shoulder where he pressed her down in the dirt. She wondered if this was how it happened with Sutton, if he’d chased her, pinned her, and thrown her off the cliff. A sob shuddered through her throat.

Ethan frowned and gritted his teeth. “I did everything, everything, for you. God, Emma!” The muscles in his neck tightened as he spat the words out. “I warned you so many times to stop digging. And you wouldn’t. It’s like some kind of sick compulsion with you, isn’t it? Why couldn’t you just be happy with the life I gave you? Why did you have to ruin everything?”

Emma stared pleadingly up at him. At the back of her mind she wondered fleetingly if Laurel was looking for her even now—but Laurel thought she was at the Banerjees’. No one was coming to help her.

“Why did you kill my sister?” she asked, desperate to keep him talking, to buy any time she could. “Was it because of the science fair prank?” The Lying Game girls had done something to Ethan in eighth grade that had cost him a scholarship. Was killing Sutton some kind of long-delayed revenge?

Ethan’s derisive snort echoed around the canyon. Nearby some small animal scrabbled away through the brush.

“That? That was years ago. That doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“What, then?”

For a second his expression shifted. His eyes softened, and he looked sad, regretful even. He shook his head. “I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said softly.

“Liar!” I shrieked, an electric rage spiking through me. Emma’s body tensed beneath his, and she closed her eyes, as if trying to hear something far away. I’d been able to communicate with her once before, the night that she met Becky out here. Could I do it again?

Slowly, Ethan pulled the blade away from her throat and sat back, though he kept the knife at his side. Emma could see it clearly now—a leather-handled hunting knife with a long, tapered blade, the moon catching on the polished steel. She tried not to stare at it.

“I loved her,” he said shortly, his lips curling with bitterness. “I came out here to tell her that. I thought I could make her see that we were meant to be together.”