“Three days.” He exhales deeply, as if recalling the hours, the nights that passed when he sat beside me, waiting for me to stir. “You woke up a few times, but you were pretty out of it.”

“I was probably hypothermic,” I say, then chew on the corner of my lip, imagining him feeding me soup while I mumbled nonsensically. When I found him in the woods, he was near death, chilled to the bone, and I made him strip out of his clothes and sit beside the fire. Now we’re even. “Thank you,” I say. “For pulling me from the lake. For taking care of me.”

His sleepy eyes settle on me, and his jaw contracts. “You could have died in that water.” I understand now why he looks at me like this, why the muscles in his arm tense when I speak.

“I know,” I say flatly, feeling my heart rise and then fall, recalling the cold depth of the lake trying to swallow me up. “I’m sorry.”

“Why did you go out there?” he asks pointedly, swiveling to face me, but still keeping my arm looped in his. So I won’t collapse.

I shake my head because I don’t know what to say. Because my grandmother slipped into my dreams and whispered about the lake, about remembering. Because I thought I was brave. Because I thought the lake would give up its secrets to me. Because I’m a Walker. “I found a broken chain on the ice,” I say at last, as explanation. “The chain from the watch I found in your coat.”

Oliver’s expression goes cold, as if his heart darkens in his chest, turns as black as magpie wings. “You still think I killed him?”

I don’t answer, and I pull my arm away from him—afraid to tell him what I think. Afraid to say that even if he doesn’t remember it, he might have killed a boy. And that this single thing might destroy everything.

“I didn’t want to be there that night,” he tells me, his voice tiptoeing around each word.

“But you were,” I say.

He shakes his head and looks back at the sky, a waning moon peeking out from clouds, blurring the stars around it. Devouring them.

Oliver bites down on the words before he says them, and they come out bitter and clenched. “And what happened can’t be taken back,” he says. The wind kicks up over the lake, sending spires of white rising into the air.

“If it was an accident, like the others said, then it was no one’s fault,” I offer, trying to make everything okay. Not as bad as it seems.

“You don’t understand, Nora,” he says, swallowing hard and turning to look at me. “It wasn’t an accident. They knew what they were doing.”

A river of cold spikes down my center. “Who?” I ask.

“All of them.”