I’m sorry, Shelby. I wish I could keep this from you forever. I’ve held back my secret from you, and maybe that was wrong of me. Maybe I should have told you at the beginning—told you who I am and what I did—but then what? I couldn’t expect you to understand it until you knew me. Until you knew my whole story.

But now?

Now I have to tell you who your mother really is. You can decide for yourself if there is any salvation possible for someone like me.

I stared at Ricky. It was obvious what he wanted to hear, and there was no point in holding it back anymore. It was time to say out loud what we’d both known and both kept from each other.

“So you knew all along that I killed them,” I said. “You knew when you met me that I was the one who murdered Kip and Racer.”

There was enough moonlight through the window for me to see his white teeth.

“Yeah. That was part of the thrill.”

I stood up from the bed. I had to swallow down the urge to vomit, hearing my own confession. For seven years, I’d hidden my sins from the world. I’d lied to Darrell. I’d lied to everyone. I’d lived in terror of being discovered. And all along, the whole time, Ricky knew.

He’d found my camera.

“Where are the rest of the photographs?” I asked, with a kind of clinical curiosity. “I want to see them.”

“They’re in the cabinet over the sink.”

I went and turned on the small light there, and then I opened the cabinet door. There was a small envelope of pictures on the lowest shelf, next to a dated thirty-five-millimeter camera. I grazed my fingers across its familiar frame.

It was the camera that I’d seen in Ricky’s hand in the film I’d watched at Ben Malloy’s house.

The same camera I’d used to take the photograph of Gordon Brink, Kip Wells, and Racer Moritz seven years earlier.

The same camera I’d dropped that day when I was running for my life.

My camera.

I’d dreaded for years that someone would find it. I’d searched for it after I escaped from the trailer, and I’d come back during Ben’s Ursulina hunt to search for it again. But I never found it. I’d assumed, hoped, prayed that the camera—and the roll of film inside it—had long since decomposed with the rain and snow.

But I was wrong.

Ricky had found it. He’d found the camera and developed the film inside. And then he’d set about finding the girl who’d taken the pictures.