I exhale. So Jay’s reason for blackmail is twofold: to keep Colin quiet and to punish him. All those menial tasks, all that pretending was designed to strip Colin of his individuality and turn him into the very thing he hated: Jay himself. But Jay’s not a complete idiot. Blackmail’s a criminal offense. So he gets a prepaid phone, the burner kind, not linked to his name. And it worked: had I not found it, we’d never have connected him to Colin. How long can something like that go on? Months? Years? I purse my lips. Maybe it would have continued even after they left the university. But then, Colin met Katie. And something shifted. He changed the rules of Jay’s game. Jay was worried enough to rent the locker, hide the cell phone he used to call Colin, to message Katie begging her not to tell anyone about Colin or the basement. But Jay made a fatal mistake. Most blackmailers stay anonymous. These days almost everything is online—they send encrypted messages and use untraceable email accounts that hide their IP addresses. But Colin knew exactly who the blackmailer was, and at some point, he must have realized that the threats end when you eliminate the one making them. So it was Jay and Colin together all along. The pair of them working in tandem to destroy each other, and in doing so destroying themselves.

Outside there’s a crack of thunder.

“And Michael—”

“He didn’t know.”

“Don’t tell Mike,” I say.

“Yeah,” Tripp exhales. “His last text. Jay didn’t want Mike to know about Colin.”

“But Michael put up the cameras,” I remind him. “He must have given Jay the video.”

“No—I mean, look, Michael was just as pissed at Colin as Jay, but he would never have shared the video of the basement. Our rituals are secret. That’s a huge violation.”

“But he recorded them—”

“Yeah,” Tripp concedes. “But it was just to…”

“Control you? Manipulate you into doing what he wanted?”

He exhales impatiently. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. At least if we were in Kap-O, we were brothers. Mike would never have released the footage.” He stares out the window. “He and Jay were the same, really,” he says after a pause. “Only children. Asshole fathers. We were a family.” He sighs. “They’d do anything to protect Kap-O. We all would. Michael and Jay just went about it in different ways.”