“Dad broke my mom’s jaw over a jar of mayonnaise. It’s why she left. Mayonnaise.” Bethany’s nails clacked on the arms of her chair. “Have you ever heard of the Southern Heritage Preservation League?”

“I’ve always been dubious about my heritage.”

“They’re racist as fuck. All the places he sends money to are. All the men here treat my dad like he’s just the bestest goddamn old boy in town, but he’d join the Klan if they had a club here.” She tapped ash between her feet. “Maybe those guys wouldn’t care.”

Joel ran some odds in his head. He had a pretty good idea what this was about.

“Was Jamal Reynolds at your house on Friday night?”

She let out a harsh laugh. “You want to know what’s funny? What’s so stupid about this whole fucking situation? Jamal and I didn’t even do anything. We planned everything out so fucking careful for a month and then when I finally get him into the house that night we stopped messing around after five seconds. It was too weird.”

“You want me to tell the police that Jamal’s innocent?”

“Dylan always said you were smart.” Bethany spat tobacco over the railing. Her father, she explained, had been out of town on business last weekend. Before the game, the boys had stashed Jamal’s Explorer in a stand of trees north of town—“I know the ones,” Joel said—so afterward everyone would say he and KT left together for the coast when, in fact, KT dropped him off and Jamal took the back roads to Bethany’s house, meeting her at the corner of her road so he could follow her Lexus through the property’s gate.

“It wasn’t even supposed to be a big thing,” Bethany said. But of course, once they’d realized the chemistry was off, Jamal couldn’t leave and risk being seen around town—he was supposed to be in Galveston until Sunday. So he and Bethany had idled away the weekend awkwardly, often not seeing one another for hours on end inside Bethany’s enormous home. Jamal had gotten paranoid, became convinced one of the Tanners’ ranch hands could see him from the backyard. Bethany had told Jamal not to be silly. The hand whose job it was to watch her was away that weekend—she’d made sure of it.

Sunday evening came and neither Bethany nor Jamal had heard from KT or Dylan. They weren’t sure when the others would be home but they couldn’t tolerate their confinement any longer. When it got late, Bethany had texted her father to tell him she’d been ill all weekend but was feeling well enough to go and get some food. She did this because Mr. Tanner received an alert on his phone every time the gate on the property was opened. Bethany knew from experience that if her father wasn’t kept abreast of her plans he would keep an eye on her through his security app.

“And then yesterday I fucked up,” Bethany said. The pitch of her voice crept higher and higher. “I haven’t been sleeping right and when I do—Listen, yesterday, it was like my mind just stopped for a second. I’d made up a whole story about having Jasmine and Alisha over for the weekend but I was so damn tired that when the lady cop asked me what I did after the game I forgot everything, the whole story. I panicked. I said I was alone. It was the first thing I could think of.”