“That’s not true. Lia, you are our daughter, and we love you.” Her mom went out into the hall and waved for her father to come. Lia could feel the “but” at the end of that sentence building up in her chest. “We know this Assassins game was important to you, but it’s just a stupid game, and you’re throwing—”

“It wasn’t a stupid game when Mark almost won!” Lia leapt to her feet. The anger welled up in her so fast and hot that she couldn’t breathe deep enough to speak. There weren’t any words left for what she was feeling. There were too many words she wanted to say. It all burst out of her in a shriek.

Lia slammed her bedroom door shut and locked it with a trembling hand. She slid to the floor.

An hour later, when the words came back and her hands stopped shaking too badly for her to write, she slipped a note under the door.

I didn’t.

And it hurt that she even had to say it.

She wasn’t going to school. It was a command passed on through the door of her room. Lia hadn’t expected to even leave the house, and Thursday had gone on so long that the very thought of waking up and facing her classmates made her nauseous. Lia’s potential involvement in the deaths settled over the house like a fine dust all of them were desperate not to disturb, and Lia only left her room to eat when her parents threatened to take the door off of its hinges. It was bound to be worse if she went to school, and she wasn’t even sure she could. Everyone must have known she had been interrogated. Maybe Devon had told more people by now.

There were a dozen official emails, tweets, and Facebook posts, none of which Lia read. They wouldn’t say more than the gossip. Cassidy’s name hadn’t been released by the police but by the neighbors who posted it online the moment they saw the cops. Lia couldn’t deal with what they were possibly saying about her.

But it should’ve been easy to prove she wasn’t the killer. Cop shows did it all the time with phone records and subpoenas for email accounts.

After dinner, she crawled into bed with her journal and her phone—how long until they took all her things and picked through her life piece by piece? Her phone had been off since they spoke to James.

Lia powered on her phone and turned it facedown on the bed. It vibrated with notifications for a full minute.

“Okay,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Okay. Someone is killing my classmates.”

There was no denying it. As much as Abby’s death had seemed accidental and Ben’s could’ve been a one-off, it was clear all three were connected. Those messages, too, tied Lia to the murders.

“Why me?” she asked, flipping open her journal. “Why frame me?”