The barn where the party was still existed. The barn that, even at its best, was circumstantial evidence, yet was still too damning for them to keep has just been out in the world this whole time. And I missed it. I’d searched for it for years—through college, the whole year after when I was working at the diner. I bribed every dump officer within a fifty-mile radius to tell me if someone ever dropped off a suspicious amount of red painted wood. I searched random hauling sites, lumberyards. I even drove around aimlessly just in case my memory of that night was so skewed I had the wrong house, the wrong family, the wrong targets.

This whole time it was at their fucking now-retired nanny’s house. How did I never think to check up on her, to follow her home one weekend and scope out her situation? If I had done that, just once, I would have figured it all out. Maybe I could have avoided this entire play I’d been putting on for years. Maybe Eliza would never have existed. Maybe I could have actually lived a life that was mine. Maybe—

I stop my own thoughts short. I never found Ruthie’s body. I searched every end of the woods on the Walker property, looking for soil that was recently touched, ground that was recently interrupted. Nothing.

But she was never on the Walker property, was she?

“That’s why I never found her body,” I tell them, so softly I second-guess whether it actually came out of my mouth. “It was never here. It was always with the barn.”

It was always with the barn.

“That’s why they offered to dig up the site,” Molly realized aloud. Just as we all did.

“Why would they do that?” Jess asked. “Why wouldn’t they just get rid of it? Fill a body bag with cement and put her at the bottom of the lake?”

“If there was a chance someone would keep looking for her... Lorraine was their scapegoat. They didn’t know how her parents would react. Her friends. Me. If someone got too close and they got wind of it...just one anonymous tip and the police would find her body and Lorraine would go down for it. It was an easy out.”

I stood up, finally on eye level with my partners in this wild game we’d been playing for years. This hoax to get Reed to confess what he’d done. The retribution we deserved. That Ruthie deserves.

“I’d bet my entire fake life that she’s still under there.”

“If that’s true,” Jess began, “we could get the entire family. We could bring them all down.”

Molly nodded, then looked toward the pool house, where we used the bathroom all those years ago, where Ruthie and I started our fight.