I’m lying, of course—to him, to myself. There’s no way I could leave this place, no way if I did that I could ever live with that lie. It would be doing exactly what I’m accusing Paul of, sitting on an awful, unforgivable secret. If Micah knows me at all, he will see right through this lie. He’s already told me too much. He can’t afford to let me go.

“I really wish you hadn’t remembered that night,” he says, reading my thoughts, and this is it, I tell myself. This is where you die.

He’s urging me forward when I slide the box cutter into his side. It cuts through his skin like butter, just slips right in. He jerks in surprise, and the thin metal snaps in my hand. Three, maybe four sections of blade, stuck in his stomach—not deep enough to hit an important organ. Barely far enough to draw blood.

“You stabbed me.” His voice is incredulous. His gaze falls to the bright orange handle in my hand, my thumb rolling out the last segment of blade. “With a Stanley knife.”

“It’s a box cutter. And I wish I’d aimed for your neck.”

Micah laughs. “You’re insane. You know that? I’m really going to miss hanging out with you.” He snatches the box cutter from my fingers and gestures to the dock with his gun. “Now go.”

This is happening. This is really fucking happening. I think of the baby I will never see and the life she or he will never lead, and the hillside blurs with my tears.

He nudges me forward, and slowly, I turn for the dock. “When you flipped Sienna over, Paul knew who she was, and he lied about it to Sam. I saw him talking to her the day before.” Keep him talking. Drag this out and pray. It’s the only strategy I’ve got left.

“I know. Paul told me. He was pretty torn up about it, too.”

“But why would he lie about knowing her if he was innocent? He doesn’t have an alibi for the time she was killed. Maybe it was him.”

The lawn dumps us onto a patch of gravel and dirt, and wet mud squishes between my toes. By now my bare feet are so cold they’re going numb, a sharp mess of pins and needles that’s making it hard to walk.

“Because by the time I fished her out, all three of us knew what she was doing in town. She’d been talking it up in all the restaurants and bars, getting folks riled up about some big new development around Skeleton Bob. When I pulled her out of the lake, Paul and I both knew who put her there.”

“You.”