“Visit you? Why would I want to visit you?” It’s the champagne that makes these blunt words come out and I regret them as I see his cheeks go red.

“Yeah well, I…it doesn’t matter.”

I can see Bella talking to Max at the top of the garden, leaning in really close, a glass of champagne in her hand, Jack hovering near the band, watching them. I turn to look at Sean at the same time as he turns to me and I don’t know if it’s him or me who leans in first, but then we are kissing. But when I close my eyes, the world started to spin and I have to pull away.

I open my eyes and, for a second, he isn’t Sean, he’s Greg, and my stomach somersaults remembering the lies I told Bella.

“Sorry,” I say. “Too much. Too much champagne. But I like you too.” I sink down onto the grass, my eyes closing. Too much. All too much.

NOW

Chapter 37

Chapter 37

I wake with vomit in my mouth, sour and bitter. I swallow it down and gag. My head feels groggy, my eyes are gritty. Just a dream, I tell myself. Just my brain warping memories. It’s not real, not the truth. But the memory, not one that’s been lost, but one I’ve tried so hard to forget, is ugly enough and my cheeks grow hot thinking about it.

She raged like fire when I said it, my lies about Greg Lewis. Raged and talked about the police and revenge and proof. She raged that it was true, all true, the rumors. Him and teenage girls—I was her proof. My lies were her proof. He was a pedophile. He was the one who killed Nicole Wallace and that other girl. She was convinced because of what I told her. What did she do? What did my sister do with the lies I fed her?

And Dad…Dad, who’s been down to the police station twice now, who had a fight with Greg, who never asks me what I remember about the night of the wedding. I always thought he was trying to protect me from remembered trauma. But what if Bella went to him, told him the lies I told her? I shudder. If Bella told him, did he go raging after Greg? No, he couldn’t have. My dad is not a murderer. But what about Bella? She was so angry. Oh God, oh God.

I look down at the photograph I went to sleep clutching, the last photo from Bella’s camera. It’s him, Greg, standing at the top of his stairs, bare-chested, looking confused and frightened, night sky in the window behind him, shielding his face from the glare of the flash.

Did she go there for me, whatever night this was captured on her camera? Did she go there for her proof, for her revenge?