“Have you ever thought that someone out there thought you deserved a little payback and decided to teach you a lesson?”

The thought had occurred to me. All our friends thought they could tell the Stockton twins apart, but that wasn’t true. We’d fooled them before.

“What lesson?” I was careful to keep my voice even, steady.

“I don’t know. But I bet there’re a few people in that room that don’t like you.”

“Who?”

“If you sit down and think about it, you could come up with a list,” he said.

Jo-Jo and Kurt weren’t taking my calls anymore. And there were certainly others. Tamara, my dad’s girlfriend’s daughter, wasn’t a fan, but she had sense enough to keep it to herself.

“Like I said, Marisa, I’m not judging you. Girls like you with brains and too much money get themselves into trouble. What I care about is who you pissed off so badly that they killed you.”

Color drained from my face. “Not me. Clare.”

“No, kiddo—that killer was after you. I’d bet my reputation on it.”

I had shut down after that conversation. That night I swiped a bottle of vodka from the reception, went to my room, and drank until I passed out. I didn’t really climb out of that bottle for thirteen years.

In that time, my father sent me to rehab several times. By the time my third stint failed, his third marriage was falling apart, and Brit was in law school. I was on my own.

When I really sobered up, I couldn’t look in a mirror without seeing Clare. Even the reflection wasn’t buying my own bullshit excuses. To block out that face, I returned to anything that would numb me.

With Richards’s words always echoing, I’d never figured out what I had done to kill my sister. I never meant for you to be hurt. I never, ever . . .

Now, as I ran my fingers over the copied pages of Richards’s notes, I realized I had to make my own list of people who wanted to hurt me. It wasn’t a long list, but all it took was one to do the deed.

19 MARISA

19

MARISA

Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Midnight

I spent the next few hours rereading Detective Richards’s copied notes. My friends’ candor, their willingness to throw me under the bus, shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. And it hurt.