She managed to loosen one of the knots enough that when she exhaled and pushed herself up, tightening her stomach muscles as in childbirth, the remaining knot caught on a sharp edge of the metal lift. Then it was only a matter of time. A thread or two with each contraction until, finally, she felt the rope let her go.

How much time would she have saved, she thought as she worked her puckered fingers over the knot around her ankles, if she had just let herself be solid from the start?

She freed her ankles and slipped into the water, taking just one delightful second to feel her body upright and under her own control. But she could feel it for only that one second, because once she knew that she wasn’t going to die there, all her other feelings came rushing in. And she couldn’t feel any of them yet. Not the shock, the horror of what Gavin had done to her—who he was all along, and how very wrong she had been about him. Not Philip’s letter, the answers it gave. Certainly not the terror about what came next, where Gavin had gone after he left her there to drown. She couldn’t think; she just had to act.

The lake was the same color and temperature as the air, a thicker but otherwise equal atmosphere, and if she didn’t focus she could easily mistake one for the other, believing to sink was to swim. Lily felt her way along the shadows of the boathouse’s insides, darker, somehow, even in nothing but darkness, until her fingers gripped a slick pole of the ladder.

When she cut the frenzied thinking out of her brain, the chorus of mean and certain voices she had believed, until that moment, to be her sanity, Lily found she had a lot more room in herself for knowing. And she knew, she thought as she started up the hill toward what was left of the target practice, toward the tree that held Rose’s rifle, that if she had to, she could kill him.

SILAS

IT WAS THE FIRST time Silas had seen him all grown up, but he would’ve recognized him anywhere. Not if Sarah hadn’t died, of course. If Sarah hadn’t died, Silas wouldn’t have even remembered the handful of times he met little Gavin Kelly, who went to a boarding school outside of town. Shy and skinny, uninterested in sports. Gavin, of course, would’ve known Silas. Everyone in their town did. And after Sarah died, everyone knew Gavin too.

“What are you doing here?” Silas asked, but Gavin ignored him, instead walking up to Ruth. When he knelt down beside her and she fell straight into him, Silas knew.

It wasn’t his aching imagination that made her look like Sarah. It was her blood.

“Where is Mickey?” Sean asked, taking a step forward.