“I thought you were different than her,” he says, and I’m guessing we’re back to Katherine. “The way you look. Where you come from, your white-trash upbringing. But the more I got to know you, the more it made sense. You and Katherine are a lot alike, you know. You’re both smart. Relentless. So goddamn righteous. You won’t be able to sit on this secret, will you?”

“Katherine knew?”

“Paul told her. That asshole broke the pact we made that night, that we’d take this secret to our graves. But Paul blabbed it to Katherine. She was trying to talk us into turning ourselves in. She gave us a motherfucking deadline. That’s what they were fighting about. What we all were fighting about.”

On the other side of the glass, the woods light up with a streak of lightning, followed by a boom that shakes my bones with meaning.

Fury flashes across Micah’s face, flaring his nostrils, pressing his mouth into a thin line. “I don’t take kindly to ultimatums. Ask any of my ex-girlfriends.”

It’s not an admission but his words still wash over me like a wave. Could Sam have been right? Were those marks on Katherine’s ankle really fingerprints?

I picture Micah swimming up underneath her with his flippers and a tank strapped to his back. Nobody would have looked twice when he walked into the water in his dive gear. He would have been invisible to everyone but Katherine. My cheeks tingle with shock, burning like they’ve been slapped, leaving me gasping.

“You didn’t. You wouldn’t.”

He pushes to a stand, and I think about Chet in his car, somewhere between here and town. How long ago did he leave? How long before he gets here? Micah is so big, so strong. Fast, too. There’s no way I could outrun him. My fingers creep across the cushion, but Micah gets there first. He grabs my phone and tosses it onto the opposite couch.

When he turns back, everything about him is hard. His face. The set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. His voice when he glares down at me.

“She didn’t give me a choice.”

“Oh my God. Micah! Katherine was your friend. Your best friend’s wife. And you killed her for what—to save your own skin?”

“Well...yeah. That’s exactly why I did it—that and because of her ultimatum. It was either that or go to jail, and I am not going to jail. Do you know what they’d do to the son of a police officer in there?” He shakes his head, a slow side to side. “No way. I am not going to jail for Jax’s mistake. Not happening.”