When he looked at me again, I could tell his allegiances had shifted. He was coming back to me where he’d belonged right from the start. I knew it wouldn’t be easy for him to cope, that he’d blame himself for a long, long while. I realized it would take time and patience to put this gorgeous boy back together again. But I also knew I was the only one capable of doing so, the only person in the whole world who understood. As much as it hurt my heart to see him broken, it was what strengthened my resolve. I vowed I’d make his pain go away, that I’d do whatever was necessary to make him happy, no matter what or how long it took. I’d be there for him.

“We can never speak of this again,” he’d said with tears streaming down his face a month after we’d buried Celine on the grounds, when he’d knocked on my bedroom door in the middle of the night because he couldn’t sleep again, the nightmares were too intense. “We’ll protect each other. It’s the only way we’ll get through this. Do you promise me, Maya? Do you?”

As he stared at me now, standing quietly in the garage, I took his hand. “We made a pact that day,” I said. “It bound us together, forever. We pressed her fingers on a notepad to make sure we left her prints, and I wrote a letter for her parents, saying she was running away. Then we sneaked into her house and packed a bag with some of her clothes and favorite things. It wasn’t hard to make everyone believe she’d left, especially when I went to Boston on a school trip and mailed the postcard.”

“Where is she?” Ash said, his voice barely a whisper. “What did we do with her body?”

“She’s not too far from where Mom and Brad are buried. Don’t worry, she wasn’t alone for very long.”

Six months, because that’s when my beautiful mom had died, and if I hadn’t been so distracted by Celine’s incessant pandering toward Ash, I’d have noticed she was sick. Maybe I could’ve saved her. Ash had almost lost it when we’d found out our parents had stated in their wills they wanted to be buried together on the grounds. The guilt of knowing the person whose death we’d covered up would forever lie so close to our beloved parents who were none the wiser almost made him confess everything to the cops. I helped him through that, too.