The way she’s looking at me—like I’m a stranger who just insulted her—makes my insides go cold. I’m nobody to Tessa. I’m just a girl she met yesterday who is already asking her to keep a secret. I’m not sure which is worse—to know for certain you’re all alone or to see a glimpse of what could have been, of people who might have loved you, but to be on your own just the same.

“I’m not doing something stupid,” I tell her, my voice flat. Something in her expression changes. She sinks to the floor and rests her back against her mattress.

“But what’s the harm in getting Norah’s advice? Not telling her is reckless. Don’t you trust her?”

“I do trust her,” I say. “But involving her will just give Latham more power.”

Tessa purses her lips. “Saskia, I don’t think—”

“If we tell Norah, she’ll just wrap me in a thousand layers of protection, and the only effect will be to hold me down so Latham can kill me more easily.” Tessa opens her mouth to argue, but I keep talking. “He’s a spider. I’m a fly. And Norah’s attempts to help will be the web that pins me in place to be devoured. But she won’t realize until it’s too late.”

I can see Tessa weighing this image against everything she knows about Norah. Everything she doesn’t yet know about me. Still, I can tell she wants to believe me. She just needs a little push.

I sit next to her, press my shoulder against hers. “We were friends once,” I say. “In another life.”

She looks at me as if I’ve spoken in a foreign tongue. “What are you talking about?”

It’s a risk to tell her the truth, one I may come to regret. But if I’m going to have any chance of stopping Latham, I need allies. And everything I know about Tessa makes trusting her feel like the right answer. Ami’s words drift through my mind: Trust your gut.

I tell Tessa about Gran’s broken bone. About the path that didn’t survive. About the friendship we almost had, but didn’t.

“It’s how I knew you were an oldest child,” I tell her. “It’s how I know a lot of things about you that I shouldn’t.”

Her expression is unreadable, and my chest constricts. What if this was a terrible mistake?

“Did I ever tell you that my father is imprisoned on Fang Island?”

The statement hits my ears like shattering glass, startling me so much that every other thought flies out of my head. I half expect to look over and see that Tessa is reading from a letter or a book.

But she’s not.