“If they find out who I am, they’ll think I killed her. And you’ll look like my accomplice.” She pressed her face against his shoulder.

“I don’t care,” he said, his voice muffled, his face buried in her hair.

Her tears dampened the cotton of his shirt. “Ethan, I don’t want what happened to Nisha to happen to you, too.”

He took Emma by her shoulders and held her a little apart from him, forcing her to meet his gaze. Half of his face was in shadow, but his eyes shone with determination. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

She desperately wanted to believe him. The idea of going through the investigation without him felt like sending her heart through a shredder.

“Ethan,” she whispered. “I think Garrett might be the killer.”

His eyes widened. “Did you find proof?” he asked.

She told him about seeing Garrett in the classroom, about the way he watched her unfold the note. “He just sat there grinning at me. Like he was having the time of his life watching me squirm.”

Ethan’s jaw tensed. With another glance up toward the canyon, he took her hand and led her onto the dimly lit porch. Two small brown moths flung themselves at the bare bulb that hung over the house numbers. Ethan’s telescope sat near the railing, angled toward the sky. Next door, Nisha’s house was dark and silent. Emma ran her fingers through her hair nervously. The whole street felt haunted to her now.

Ethan’s laptop sat open, a cursor blinking placidly on an open document. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment sat splayed out, spine up, on the seat next to it. “Oh, sorry. Were you doing homework?” she asked, another pang of guilt cutting through her. She wondered how much of Ethan’s schoolwork she’d interrupted since she’d arrived in Tucson.

He sat down on the porch swing, picking up the computer and setting it on his lap. “It’s not due until the end of the month. I was just trying to get a head start.” As he spoke, he exited the document and pulled up Facebook. Emma loved the way his hands flew over the keyboard, doing everything with the shortcuts he’d programmed, never using the mousepad. Even though his computer was old and dented, Ethan had painstakingly built the machine inside.

“What are you doing?” she asked, sitting next to him on the swing. She’d stopped crying, but now the salt of her tears was drying on her face and making her skin feel stiff. Rubbing at her cheeks, she cuddled against Ethan’s shoulder as he pulled up Garrett’s profile.

“I want to know what Garrett was up to the night of Sutton’s murder,” he said. He handed her the can of root beer, and she took a small sip. The bubbles churned in her fluttering stomach.