Paul was on me in a millisecond. “Don’t look,” he shouted, covering my eyes, but he was too late. I already saw the way Micah’s limbs were splayed every which direction on the dock, how his eyes were open but the top of his head was a mush of hair and meat and white bone. I saw how Paul sank to his knees and vomited onto the lawn, how Jax’s body seemed to sway with the patch of grass he stood before. I saw it all.

And then the hill came alive with light and sound, with men shouting and waving guns and handcuffs, and I saw the look on Paul’s face when Sam read him his rights. It was like the clouds cleared and God shone a spotlight on all those things I’d missed before. That my husband was old. That he was full of secrets. That I was better off before he stepped up to my counter at the gas station, when I was so eager to claw myself out of that muddy trailer park, I didn’t realize I was trading one set of problems for another. Pretty things for a man still in love with his first wife. No, Paul didn’t kill Katherine, but his secrets are the reason she’s dead, and in my heart that feels unforgivable. There was a hint of truth to all those whispers in town. I should have listened.

“Paul told me he met Sienna the day before she died,” Sam says, watching me from the other side of the kitchen counter. Behind him, on the other side of the glass, the lake is high wattage in the early-morning sunshine. A glorious morning, one that makes me long for sunglasses.

Chet steps up beside me, but neither of us say a word.

Sam’s gaze sits steady on mine. “I just think it’s weird, don’t you? That Paul forgot to mention it the first time I asked him, I mean. He claims you found him talking to her in town, but that there’s no way you would have recognized her. Something about the distance or the angle, I don’t know which, and before you say anything, don’t. This is where you’re supposed to nod your head and agree.”

I don’t disagree, but I don’t nod, either.