“What about your mother?” she asked after a moment.

My hand froze, the piece of coffee cake I was worrying slipping between my fingers. “What about her?”

Jenny shifted in her chair, but she kept her eyes on me, not looking away the way most people did when my mama was the subject of conversation. “Come on, Eve,” she said. “Everyone in town knows about your mama. The crowd she runs with. The kind of stuff she’s mixed up in. If this was over money, it stands to reason that maybe it involves her.”

“She didn’t even know Junie,” I shot back. “Someone hurting Junie wouldn’t matter to my mama.”

Jenny stopped fidgeting, hand grasping hard around her coffee mug. “We both know that’s not true. There’s two basic facts about your mama that are never in dispute: She runs with a rough crowd, and you don’t mess with her family. Any of her family. If someone wanted to teach her a lesson, I imagine that’s where they’d start.”

My heart thundered in my chest. I wanted to lash out with self-righteousness, scoff at her claims and force an apology. But not a single false word had left her lips. Hadn’t I known, deep down, that this was always going to come back to me, to my family? I’d tried to pretend like Izzy might be the key, but I knew she wasn’t. It was Junie. It was me.

But I couldn’t roll over and take it. Because admitting it out loud was a step too far. It was one thing for me to know; it was another to lay myself bare to Jenny Logan. “What about Izzy and the older guy she was seeing?” I heard myself ask, hating how easily the question left my mouth. Jenny’s head snapped back like I’d slapped her, her eyes wide with surprise. But not shock. She’d known about Izzy, I realized, but not that I was in on the secret, too. “When did you find out?” I asked.

“When Land told me. A few days ago.” She shook her head. “Not before that.”

“You’d never seen her with Matt?”

“No. I would have put a stop to it if I’d known.” Spoken like a woman who couldn’t imagine a defiant, sneaky daughter. Who knew nothing of the myriad ways girls will find to circumvent their parents’ rules: broken window screens and bedsheet ladders, secret notes and messages passed from friends, yes ma’ams followed just as quickly by a rolled eye and a hidden smirk.

“I would have liked to hear what Matt had to say about it. See his face while I asked him some questions.”

Jenny’s mouth twisted, her eyes going distant and hard. “Yeah, well, he’s dead. He won’t be saying much of anything anymore.”

I stared at her across the table, and she stared back. She didn’t look like polished, polite Jenny Logan anymore. She looked like a mother whose daughter had been wronged—the scariest creature in the world. After the murders, I’d made the easy assumption that her tears meant weakness, but I was learning that nothing about Jenny Logan was weak. I heard again the eerie, whooshing silence the moment before Matt’s trailer exploded. Heat and light and sound slamming in to me, bowling me over like a runaway truck. Did Jenny Logan have it in her to light that match, flip that switch? Looking at her face right now, I didn’t doubt it for a second. For the first time, I felt a kinship with her. Suffering the same loss hadn’t bonded us, but maybe fury would.