Max is shaking my shoulder and I struggle to open my eyes. The room is dark and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed and I frown. He’s holding Bella’s camera.

“Where did you get that?” My words come out slurred. What time is it? How long have I been asleep?

He looks at the camera in his hand. “I found it downstairs—it was on the table.”

No, it wasn’t. Unless Sean left it there…

“You had it all along?” he says.

I shake my head to try to clear it. My box of sleeping pills is open on the cabinet next to the bed, but I don’t remember taking one. I haven’t seen the pills since they went missing last week.

Once upon a time…Bella’s voice whispers in my head.

“So where’s the film?” Max asks.

I think of the photo of Greg, the last one on the film, the shadowy unidentified figure.

“There was no film in it.”

He looks at me. “Really?”

I nod, swallowing down the dryness in my throat.

He laughs and it sounds so odd in the stillness of the night, so wrong.

“I was so worried about that bloody camera. Bella wouldn’t tell us where she’d hidden it, told us she was going to take it to the police to prove…”

“To prove what?”

He smiles at me, but it’s Max the stranger, the one I met in my flat.

“Why did you do it, Tess?”

“What? Why did I do what?”

“You didn’t have to kill him. We would have helped you. Bella…all she wanted to do was help you. You didn’t have to kill him.” Max strokes my hair and I feel my eyes drifting shut, my mind drifting.

No.

That’s not right.

I need to stay awake and think.

It wasn’t me…

I didn’t…

I…

Wake up, Tess.

The words are hissed in my ear in Bella’s voice and it pulls me awake. I don’t…I’m not in bed anymore. I’m in a car and Max is driving. What? Where are we going? I can feel myself drifting again and I swear I feel Bella’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing, keeping me awake, pushing me along toward the truth. Problem is, I’m no longer sure I want to remember. Once upon a time, two girls went into the woods and only one came out. I’m less scared about getting to the end of the story than I am of finding out the beginning—why the two girls went into the woods in the first place. Did one of them do something awful, something that merits a whole story in its own right, something so terrible it never made it into the storybook, because it was too grim even for a Grimm’s fairy tale?