When I was a kid, trying to sleep alone in my bedroom, my imagination sometimes grabbed ahold of me. If I’d heard of a murder on the news or a plane crash or a disappearance, I’d become convinced that the dead or missing people were under my bed, and I’d lie there in fear of a clawlike hand reaching up to grab me as I slept. Sometimes the fear drove me to tears, or else I’d dash down the hall to my parents’ room and wake them up. My dad might gently guide me back to my room and shine a flashlight under the bed, assuring me nothing was there that could hurt me.

If I proved particularly inconsolable, they’d let me climb into bed with them, and the three of us would sleep that way, allowing me to feel safe.

As an adult, I knew Jennifer’s body wasn’t under the bed. I knew no cold hand would be reaching up to grab me. But I felt the same surging, intense anxiety, the same freezing, gripping fear.

And there was no one to run to. No place I could crawl into and hide like my parents’ bed. I was the adult. I was the one the full weight of everything rested on.

And those letters were out there. The ones that told the truth about the accident and my role in it. A truth only Blake and I knew. But if those letters went out into the world—and I had no idea who currently had them—then that truth would spill over like a clogged toilet, destroying everything. . . .

After an hour of staring in the darkness, certain that Amanda was deeply and fully asleep, I slipped back out of bed. When I stood up, I noticed something unusual. Amanda’s phone sat on her bedside table next to the digital clock and the baby monitor. Amanda almost never kept her phone by the side of the bed. She hated the temptation to look at it during the night, to grab for it first thing in the morning.

I went down the stairs to the office, the floor cold against my bare feet, and opened my laptop, hoping to learn something—anything—from the information on Jennifer’s phone.

I’d experienced some good luck. Not only was Jennifer’s phone easy to access, but she used an iPhone and I had an Apple laptop, which had made it easy for me to back up the information from her phone to my iTunes account.

I’d never done such a thing with anyone else’s phone before. Every device Amanda and I owned was backed up to the cloud, so accessing them was easy. I assumed reading through Jennifer’s data would be the same way. But it wasn’t. The files in the iTunes backup were gibberish, and I couldn’t make any sense of them.

“Crap,” I said out loud.