I sat up, leaned back against Cal’s closet wall. I needed to talk to him, figure out what role he’d played in all this. Because there was no denying now that he was involved, somehow. I leaned forward, reaching to replace the piece of subfloor, and caught a glint of light from the dark hole. Something I’d missed, something shimmering. My brain knew what it was immediately, but my heart refused to believe it until I had it out of the hole, held right up next to my face. A phone. With a pink glitter case and a cracked screen. Izzy’s missing phone. I’d seen her texting on it dozens of times. Izzy’s lost phone hidden away in Cal’s house. There was no explanation for it, no reason he could possibly give for having it that didn’t end with two girls dead in the snow.

I thought about the text Izzy had gotten on her phone that morning, luring her to her death. Jimmy Ray’s black eye from Cal, and my too-quick assumption that he was interrogating Jimmy Ray when maybe he’d really been covering his own ass. The way Cal steered me away from Jimmy Ray’s advice to follow the money, subtle and delicate, but maneuvering me just the same. How fast he’d shown up after Matt’s trailer had blown up, there practically as soon as the explosion lit up the sky. Because he’d been there all along, I realized. Had killed Matt to keep me from finding out what he knew, to keep Land from asking Matt all the right questions.

The walls of the closet moved closer to me and then away, rippling like waves, and I lowered my head down between my knees. Up until this moment, some part of me had still hoped that maybe it was only the money. That whatever Cal had been involved with, however bad it was, didn’t relate directly to the girls’ deaths. But the phone changed everything. The phone was proof that the person I trusted most in the world was responsible for my daughter’s death. Now I had to figure out what I was brave enough to do about it.

• • •

Zach smiled when he opened his front door and saw it was me, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Hey,” he said, “Come on in.” He stood back to usher me inside. He didn’t move farther into the house, though, and his gaze darted toward the kitchen and then away. For my part, I was so jittery that I bounced up and down on my toes, my eyes swinging from him to the door, back and forth, back and forth. All I could think about was the time I was wasting. But for some reason I couldn’t even name, I felt like I owed him this chance.

“So,” he said when I’d turned down his half-hearted offer of coffee. “What’s up?”

“I know who did it,” I said. I’d meant to ease into it, not vomit it at his feet, but everything inside me was fizzing and popping, out of control.