More scarlet blotches had broken out on Becca’s neck. “It made me so angry. That the biggest thing you had to worry about was whether your daughter’s driving instructor was milking you. When you wouldn’t even let me have a car until I begged like a child last year! Afraid of giving me too much independence . . .”

Steph started to protest but the words dissolved. Becca was right. The things that had once made her indignant seemed unbelievably petty now. And she had tried to restrict her cousin’s freedom—not out of overprotectiveness, like with Freya, but out of fear for herself, a need to contain what Becca represented.

“I sympathized with the instructor,” Becca said. “I imagined this poor guy on the receiving end of your demands and accusations . . . That was how much I’d come to resent you, cooped up here keeping your secrets. I’d reached my limit, I suppose. One day, I got so livid that I looked him up. And . . . and I called him.”

Steph stared at her. “You called Chris Watson?”

Becca wouldn’t return her eye contact. The defiance had evaporated. Tears spilled down her cheeks again. “It was a whim. A reckless decision.”

“What did you say to him?”

“That I’d heard he was having a disagreement over one of his students. And that I was an interested party . . . with a proposition for him.”

Steph could hardly breathe. There was a thick, sour taste in her mouth. “A proposition?”

63.

CHRIS

His cell mate had been taken away. It was hard to tell whether it was a good or a bad exit. Home or prison? Afterward, the silence of the holding cell was as cloying as the stench. Despite how lonely he often felt, Chris realized how little silence he actually had in his day-to-day life. In his car there was always the radio. At home there was the click-clack of Vicky’s knitting needles or the chatter of her sisters. Now the silence felt dangerous, allowing his thoughts to roam.

Would they let him make another phone call? The need to call the number he should have erased, which he’d panic-dialed in his car only two days ago, was prickling over him again. It was an absurd idea to contact her from the police station. She wouldn’t pick up anyway. He had to stop obsessing about her, the woman who’d dragged him into this nightmare, but she and Freya shadowed his every movement.

He’d let a stranger ruin his life.