It’s so ludicrous that neither of us can say it. Like it was so much of a mistake that we can’t admit that we had sex. I roll over on the couch, facing him. “And she told Declan.”

He nods.

“He hated me. He hated me after that. Everything I’d ever told him was a lie. And he…” I suck in a breath. All that time, he’d known. It would have been bad enough if he’d confronted me, but he never did…which was worse. He’d let the knowledge fester, stopped going to church, started seeing Luisa, and then…

“Hailey. I’m sorry. But Declan wasn’t unbalanced. He didn’t kill himself because of that.”

“He didn’t kill himself at all!” I fire back. I’m surer of that than I’ve ever been. Still, I know that sex was huge to him. All he ever did was talk about our first time. Our first time. And I never told him. I never admitted that everything he thought he knew about me was a lie.

I let out a choked sob.

“Hey,” Kane says, sitting me up and putting an arm around me. “Come on.”

“I’m the worst person ever,” I sob, my body racked with convulsions. “I lied to him through our whole relationship. He had every right to get back at me.”

“And then you got back at him,” Kane says quietly.

“What?”

He reaches into his backpack and pulls out a small bag. From it, he pulls a strawberry-colored Fujifilm Instax camera. I stare at it, two and two coming together in my mind. I remember sitting in front of the Christmas tree, unwrapping this gift as my parents snapped pictures, pretending I was six years old, and me indulging them since it was the first time since I’d gotten my car that they weren’t at each other’s throats. I’d kissed them both, then, since Declan wasn’t around, taken a bunch of pictures of the snowy outside before realizing I should have saved the film for New Year’s.

THIS ENDS HERE.

“This is your camera,” he says. “You took that picture of them. You showed it to me. You’re the one who gave that picture to Declan.”

26 Days Before

“You’re coming with me,” Nina said, grabbing my hand and yanking me toward the stairwell.

It was Friday afternoon, and I was congratulating myself on having survived what had been the worst two weeks of school ever. Not only did I have to deal with Luisa’s eye daggers, but Kane and I had agreed to maintain a distance, because we didn’t want to cast any more suspicion on ourselves. I knew that was a good move, but it didn’t stop me from missing him.