Bea. I wasn’t sure how good a jury I was, but I did believe that it wasn’t her. Her emotion felt genuine, despite my impaired perceptions, and the person sending the texts would be the sort of sick fuck who would want me to know they were behind it all. I felt like they would have wanted me to know it was them. Or at least they didn’t seem particularly bothered about getting in trouble for it. Getting in trouble. That phrase seemed too juvenile, now, for whatever this was.

With Bea acquitted, it could have been anyone. But who else was there? There was no pool of suspects. It was me, and everyone else. Me against everyone else.

And then a flash of clarity, like a lightning bolt: that this had to do with what happened to Dad.

No. It couldn’t have been.

But it could have been.

Maybe Dad was killed. Maybe Dad was killed and the person behind all this killed him. Cut the brakes. Slashed the tyres. Maybe, maybe –

Breathe.

June.

June. June at the River Styx. June in a beanie. June on the roof.

June. She was impossible to place. She was a mess of extremes and I was a monotonous hum. Why had she taken me there, of all places? I mean, I had understood her reasoning. That she thought it would help. But why did she even want to help? And why did it always feel like for every word she said, there were three others she wouldn’t?

I could practically feel her folder pulsating all the way from Dad’s office. I contemplated opening it, the allure of knowing almost too powerful to ignore. I also contemplated bricking it up into the wall so it could slowly starve to death and I’d never have to think of it ever again.

I went to pull up the texts to read them closely.

My phone buzzed before I could.

I wasn’t sure who I expected it to be. Maybe Olivia asking what had happened. Better yet, June asking if I’d made it back OK.

Neither.

Come on. Now they weren’t even trying.

And then a picture. Dark, blurry, taken from far away and from an odd angle, but the subject was apparent.

June and me. Huddled up together on Heath Alderman’s roof.

That’s when the glass shattered.

A faint, distorted clink from downstairs.

Maybe Mom was still awake. Maybe she had just dropped something. A mug. Right?

I rose from my bed, slowly, and crept out of my room, each step measured and deliberate.

Mom’s room was across the hall. I nudged open the door, and there she was, duvet rising and falling softly with her breath.

OK. This was fine.