“You told her, didn’t you?” she accused. Mira went through the events of the day: how Jesse instinctively knew to take her to the swamps, his assuredness hiking through the trails, knowing exactly where to go, and then his flash of disappointment when they’d gotten to the spot he’d wanted to take her. Jesse’s shoulders turned inward and as he nodded she quickly put the rest of it together. The revolt, the ghosts; he’d told Celine too.

“I did when I found out about the wedding. I thought it would convince her to change the venue, but then she told me she knew about the anniversary and had told Phillip she wanted it on that day.” He shook his head. “She’d laughed when she said it, and that’s when I saw it’d all been a joke to her. Remember that day when we decided to sneak onto the property? She was too scared to go. I don’t know what made her change. Maybe it’s because she felt like we’d kept something from her about what happened to us that day, and she was acting out because of that. Trying to prove I was wrong. I don’t know. I just thought in the end she’d be better than that.”

“She told me you were okay with it. On the phone, when she invited me.”

“In her mind she might have convinced herself I was—because I could have told her no, probably should have, but I had to know the truth behind this photo. I wanted to know if there were others. I wanted to know so bad I didn’t think about anything else, so in the end, Celine and I both used each other to get what we wanted.”

“Jesse, I wish you’d told me all this before.”

“That sounds familiar.” Jesse said it in a teasing way, but when he glanced at Mira and saw her face he sighed. “I was mad at you for a long time, for not telling me what you saw. I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t tell me. I get it now. You were too scared to face it. I also get why you left and never came back.”

“I wanted to forget. I thought it’d make things easier again to push it away and move on.”

“We all do that, to some extent. It’s hard to live with certain truths of this world, so we ignore what we can. Choose not to look. We have to do it because otherwise we have to deal with the burden of knowing. I struggle with it. Living here, working at the Woodsman place, being reminded every day. I used to keep my head down and try to push away what I saw, but that’s the wrong way to be. We can’t ignore it. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to fight.”

“Fight who?”