“Max…Max, please…I don’t. I can’t have. I would never…Please. Think what it’ll do to my dad, he’s just lost Julia.”

“Max?” It’s Lena’s voice, raised sharply in warning. She steps into the room, followed by Jack and Sean.

“What the hell is going on?” Jack says. “Why is she here?”

“What’s wrong with her?” I hear Sean say as I struggle to wake up fully.

Someone pulls me up to a sitting position.

“She took too many of her bloody sleeping pills,” Lena says. “She told Max she wanted to tell us all the truth but by the time we got here, she was barely conscious.”

“She said she wanted to confess,” Max says.

“She said it was her,” Lena says. “Her that killed Greg. Max heard her say it, didn’t you, Max?”

No—this isn’t right.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Sean says.

“She called us, I told you,” Lena says. “But she passed out from taking too many bloody sleeping pills.” She turns to me. “I’ve called the police, Tess—told them what you told me. I’m sorry, but they have to know the truth.”

“No—no, it’s not the truth. Max—tell them.” I’ve gone cold, ice through and through.

Max is crying. “I can’t,” he says.

“Your dad raped her,” Lena says to Jack and Sean. “It was him the whole time—Nic Wallace, the other girl. Then he took Tess. Three days before the wedding. She came here to help him in the garden. You know she’d been doing that for months? He was grooming her. I’m sorry, but he attacked her and she…it was self-defense, but she stabbed him with something and he died. Bella helped her bury him and cover it up.”

“How do you know all this?” Sean says quietly, stepping up and looking from me to Lena.

“She told Max. The guilt got too much and she confessed to him. We’ve been trying to convince her to go to the police by herself, trying to convince her it would be better for her.”

“I knew it,” Jack says, and he comes over and hauls me forward by my hair. “I fucking knew it.”

I scream, reaching up to try to get his hands out of my hair.

“Jack, stop. This is too far…too much,” Max says, pulling on his arm. But I see hesitation on his face. He’s not trying that hard to pull Jack away. He’s trying to convince himself that he’s not part of this. But it was him who brought me here.