This is the right thing. I’m sure. But I can’t tell if I think that because it’s actually the right thing or because I’m too scared to go through the window.

Ellis hisses again. ‘Shit – fine. Take this.’ He squashes the letter into my hand and I jam it in my pocket. ‘Yeah, Mom.’

The door flips upwards and there’s Sylvia’s head, like a mole, and less like a mole when her eyes open wide and she sees me. ‘What are you doing up here?’ She pieces it together quickly. Sylvia is resolute. ‘Right. Get out of my house.’

In my peripheral vision, Ellis moves towards me, his voice small and wavering. ‘M-Mona …’

I stay firmly rooted to Sylvia. ‘Please. I’m sorry we’re here and sneaking around but it’s really important that –’

She sets her jaw. ‘Get out. Get out, or I’ll rescind your accommodation in a heartbeat.’ Not even a sliver of the agreeable, soft-eyed woman from before.

‘Just go, Mona,’ Ellis says miserably.

I stomp down the cavelike staircase without looking back, and realize that Peyton’s at the bottom, close enough to have heard the whole thing. Behind me, Peyton says my name weakly. ‘What’s going on? Mona?’ I don’t stop for her.

What happened to the process? The careful chess moves, the beat-by-beat, the considered method I’d come here intending to uphold? What happened to ‘nothing like the police station’? Why can’t I do any of this right?

That’s what Celeste would be saying, if she were here.

I grind my teeth all the way home, the white sun assaulting my face, sweat tumbling down my back the way the world is collapsing around me.

I’m in the dorm writing everything down, trying to rid my mind of the embarrassing confrontation.

Lenore said Frank had given Roxy money, that Roxy might have been blackmailing him.

And whoever wrote the note in Roxy’s car all that time ago wrote the one delivered to the Willowwood, only a few months before now. Tormenting, for some reason. Had a reason to hate Constance, for – what?

How long have I been on Sandown? I arrived last Friday. A week and a day. Time moves so unusually here, rushing and dragging at once.

Lenore said we should speak to Henry, the guy at The Indigo Lounge. We – or, I – will talk to him next.

Peyton gets back later in the day, smelling of sunscreen and sweat, the bridge of her nose a little rosy. ‘What’cha doin’?’

At this point I’ve been staring mindlessly at my journal for the past half-hour, practically drooling on to it, so I say, ‘Fuck all, apparently.’

‘What were you talking to Ellis about today? You guys were upstairs. Which is. Weird. Suspicious. Secretive. Sort of like you’re still … hm. Oh, right, doing exactly what I said you shouldn’t.’

She heard. She knows. ‘Peyton –’