“Mira,” Jesse said, pausing over what he would say next. “What if—what if we didn’t go back to the plantation?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. What if we let the night play out?”

“We can’t do that. We can’t—”

“Why not? It’s not our problem, is it? I mean, what responsibility do we have to tell any of those guests anything? We don’t owe anyone there anything.”

When Mira looked at his face, she saw he was serious. He didn’t want to go back. He didn’t want to warn them about what they’d learned because that’s what this whole wedding had been for, why he’d bothered to come. His interest in the wedding had been a pretense meant to test his theory, and he hoped now that his theory was true.

“But to let all the guests—to let them all be murdered? That’s what you’re saying, what you’re telling me, that in reality they should all be murdered? Come on, you couldn’t—you couldn’t possibly want to be complicit in that. Wait,” Mira said, stopping herself as she realized something else. She thought back over the course of the day and how Jesse had found her near the tobacco fields. It was his idea to leave the plantation and go to the Dismal Swamp, his idea to come to his house afterward. “Have you been stalling this entire time?”

“If I’m right, you wouldn’t want to be there. Mira, I wouldn’t want you to be there.”

“God, Jesse. This is—we have to go back.”

“I forgot. You’re a good girl. You’re so good you’ve let the desire to be it overtake you. It’s defined who you are. That day we came to the Woodsman house, I loved you for finally admitting something true to yourself, that you wanted to go, despite it being wrong. Despite it being bad. It was the first time you let what you wanted get in the way of how you felt you needed to be. You’ve always believed being this way was going to somehow save your life, but it has stolen it instead. Let me ask—what did being good ever do for you? For any of us? You can be good and it doesn’t matter. It never mattered.”