Mrs. Mercer passed a basket of steaming rolls to Emma, her eyes never leaving the fifteen-inch television they’d propped at the end of the island. The Mercers almost never ate dinner in front of the TV, but there seemed an unspoken consensus to do so tonight.

Emma and Laurel had both been surprised when the Mercers said they would be missing school that day—until they looked out at the front lawn and saw the crowd of news vans gathered outside. The Mercers had refused to open the door, but any time they saw someone in front of a window the reporters started shouting questions. “Sutton! Sutton, did you know Emma? What do you think happened to her, Sutton?” So Laurel and Emma had spent most of the day in the kitchen, baking cookies and flipping through magazines. “You are looking for answers in the wrong places,” Emma’s horoscope had said, and she rolled her eyes. Tell me something I don’t know.

For most of her life, Emma had wanted to be an investigative reporter when she grew up. But now that she was experiencing a media siege firsthand, she wasn’t so sure. The reporters felt like nothing so much as vultures, circling her family, waiting for one of them to show signs of weakness.

The TV screen cut to a young man with glasses and a long blond ponytail, standing in front of a dormitory building on campus. “She was covered up with leaves and branches,” he said, his voice breaking. “All I could see was her . . . her foot, sticking out at a weird angle.” He looked terrified, blinking in the bright light like a nocturnal creature out during the day. This will haunt him for the rest of his life, Emma thought sadly.

The reporter returned. “The body has been identified as Emma Paxton from Las Vegas, Nevada.” The previous year’s school photo flashed on the screen. Emma had worn a vintage wrap dress she’d scored from a garage sale in Green Valley. Her bangs were shorter then; she’d grown them out to match Sutton’s longer hairstyle. Her smile was maybe a little more guarded than Sutton’s, a little less confident. Still, the image made the Mercers stir in their seats. Mr. Mercer dropped his fork onto his plate of untouched lasagna, and Mrs. Mercer stared at the screen with a rapt, shocked expression.

“It’s so weird,” Laurel said. “She looks just like you.”

All Emma could do was nod.

Watching news coverage of her own death was dizzyingly surreal. She felt weirdly exposed every time her picture appeared on-screen, as if the Mercers would suddenly be able to see that the girl in the photo was sitting right in front of them. The newscasters had said her name so many times it was almost easy to believe that poor Emma Paxton, foster kid, was dead—that she really was Sutton Mercer now.