Chapter 27

I glance back desperately atChase and Mila, but the door swings shut behind them.

Ryan stares down at me coldly. "I didn't think you'd break so easily."

"Break?" I take a nervous step backward toward the house.

"I trusted you, and you sided with them." He laughs bitterly. "Why would I expect any more from you? Kennedy says jump, and you sprint for a cliff."

I feel frozen. This isn't the Ryan I know anymore. He was never cruel. "That's not fair. You were the one who lied to me about the gas leak. Why, Ryan?"

"Maybe I did it to test you. If you bought the lie, you couldn't have known the truth, could you?"

"But why play all these games? You know none of us would have hurt Emily on purpose. Every one of us was destroyed by her death."

"Then what did happen?" he pushes.

I struggle for an answer. "The house. There's something wrong with it."

"Houses don't set themselves on fire. They don't murder their friends."

"Neither do we."

His jaw tightens, and for a moment, I can feel the sharpness of his pain. I want to be able to comfort him. To make everything okay. But things have become too damaged.

He looks up at me. "Face it, Chelsea. You picked sides a long time ago. And you chose the wrong side."

Tears sting my eyes. "There are no sides."

"There have always been sides. Long before now. Before the fire, before the boat."

I think back to what Mila said. "You mean the Summer of Swallows? I don't…." I haven't thought about that summer in ages. I've been laser-focused on last summer. But before I can pick through my memories of lake-house summers to separate it out, Ryan interrupts me with a glare of impatient disappointment. "Stop testing me. What happened on the boat?"

He laughs dully. "Come on, Chelsea. You know this one."

But I don't. I hate sailing, the unsteadiness. The feeling of standing on a tilting, shifting earth, like trying to balance on a spinning top.

"You were there, weren't you?" He stares intently.

"No, I wasn't." I wouldn't have gone out the night of the fire. Chase said I didn't. I don't remember it because it didn't happen.

"There's a difference between not being able to remember and not being able to admit the truth," he says quietly.

"You're lying," I say. Ryan, my Ryan, is lying to me. "You lied about the gas leak."

"And it worked."

"Because I believed you?" I feel sick. "You betrayed your friends."

"Did I?" He looks at me sharply. "When did you start thinking you were better than me?" His voice is chilling, whisper soft. "You're the one who turned on me."

I search for something familiar in his eyes, but I've lost him. My Ryan is gone. "If I'm the traitor, tell me why you came back for Mila instead of Emily?"

"Instead of you, you mean," he says. "Right?"

"No." Yes. No. The guilt is razor-sharp, ice-cold. I hate that I want to be the one he came back for. Emily died, but we were both left behind. We were both left behind.

"I didn't," he says. "It was some Boy Scout fireman. I didn't come back for any of you. Feel better?"

"No," I whisper. I start to walk back toward the house, tears streaming down my face, but I hear footsteps pounding behind me and turn, fear spiking in my chest.

He grabs my arm and looks into my eyes. "Wait. Don't go back in the house." I can't read his expression, but he says it with such urgency that my heart begins to race.

My voice catches in my throat. "Why?"

"Because no matter how mad you make me, I never want to watch you die."

I stare at him, frightened. "Why would you say that? Did you do something?"

"I didn't do anything. I told you, Chelsea—you picked the wrong side."

But he's looking up at the lake house with an expression of such pure hatred that I wrench my arm away from him and run. Right into the heart of the monster.

I push the door open slowly, afraid of what I might find. "Chase?" Silence. The candle on the living room table is burned down almost to the bottom, but someone has placed more around the room, filling it with eerie, flickering light. The cellar door is slightly ajar again, which makes me shudder. I run upstairs and burst into Kennedy's room to find the candle lit and the balcony doors open, fog spilling into the room. There's a long, low creaking sound behind me. A flood of hot air. Whispers, or maybe the rustling of leaves. But we're inside and the windows are in front of me. I grip the balcony door handles, knuckles bloodless, heart beating so fast I lose the sensation of individual beats, a horrifying hum in my chest, and I realize I'm holding my breath. Dare: Hold your breath for one minute. I feel them watching, eyes on the back of my neck. Dare: Hold your breath for two minutes. Footsteps, slow as death. Dare: Hold your breath for three minutes, six minutes, twelve minutes, forever. I turn around to see the attic stairs are unfolded and clap my hand over my mouth to stifle a scream.

"Chels?"

Kennedy's voice from the attic snaps me out of it. I hesitantly approach and climb a couple of steps. "Kennedy?" She doesn't answer. I turn away for just a second, and in that blink of time, the ladder snaps up like a snarling pair of jaws, and a terrifying weightlessness surges through me. It happens so quickly I don't hear myself scream. I shoot upward, falling up the stairs, the world upside down, soundless and breathless, and then down, hard, flat on my back on the attic floor. The door slams shut behind me.

I lie there for a moment, stunned, afraid to breathe. The air feels even more stifling than before, thick and suffocating, like a gaseous form of hot wood. Terror solidifies every cell in my body. Someone has placed another candle where I took the last one, along with the flip-book, in the center of the room. And they've added another creepy touch: a chalk outline of a body in bright red with little spiky lines coming out from it like in a child's drawing of the sun. I run to the window to shout for help and freeze. Ryan is standing outside, looking up at me with an expression I can't read. He lifts his hand in a heavy, resigned wave and then turns away.

One in the attic, one in the cellar.The voice is so soft, I can't tell if it's a memory or a sound. I am in ruins. I cannot escape her twilight voice. Emily is everywhere. She speaks through me in the lucid in-between. The between that is growing. That thrives on forbidden luxuries like sharpened pencils and pulpy wood, on postcards and newspapers, old books and recipes, pine trees and tarot cards, coffins and rope and bones and skin and everything that burns. There's a sudden crash somewhere below, and I'm jerked back into the present. I shake myself. No. Not Emily. She wouldn't turn Ryan against us. She wouldn't do any of this. None of us are monsters.

There's a loud banging on the trapdoor, and then Kennedy's head pokes through the door and she stretches her arms out to me. "Quickly." I follow her down the stairs and into the master bedroom, locking the door behind us.

"Where were you?" I tiptoe to a window overlooking the backyard.

"I was searching the lake for Mila." She starts throwing clothes into a suitcase. "We're getting out of here."

"Ken. I talked to Mila. I know you're all hiding something from me."

She turns to face me, her chin trembling. "Damn it, Mila." She paces back and forth rapidly. "Tell me why you want to know the truth so much. What is so special about the truth?"

I stare at her, bewildered. "Because Emily deserves justice."

She shakes her head. "This has nothing to do with Emily, Chelsea. It's about you. Why do you need to know the truth? Do you know what I think about the truth? I think truth breaks people. It twists them in knots until they snap. It turns them against one another. Truth is a poison, and we treat it like an antidote. It doesn't change the past. It doesn't bring anyone back from the dead. It just rips open old wounds."

I back away from her. "Why are you so angry?"

"You can't even see when your friends are trying to protect you, Chelsea!"

"I don't need to be protected."

She zips up her suitcase. "The less you knew, the better. That's how it was with Emily. When the truth hurts, friends lie." Her voice keeps rising in pitch as her speech becomes more rapid. "Everyone does it."

"Not me."

She stops short. "You lie all the time, even to yourself."

"I do not."

"Please, Chels. You lie to yourself about Ryan constantly. And then you lie to everyone else."

I stare at her. "You aren't just talking about tonight."

"No."

"Well, I'm not lying anymore. So why can't you tell me the truth?" I grab my bag, heart pounding.

"Because I'm afraid of what will happen if I do." Her eyes are glassy and vacant, and her voice is dull. She looks like a pretty zombie. It's terrifying. "You knew, deep down. Didn't you? It's why you came back. Guilt."

"Survivor guilt," I whisper.

"What do you remember?"

"Being surrounded by smoke and flames. Trying to get to Emily. I did try."

She squeezes my hand and sighs. "I know you did."

"But I still left her behind. That was my choice." I always wonder if I'm lying to myself about this part. People lie to themselves about this sort of thing. It's human nature, self-preservation. I've read about it. I tell myself that I tried to reach Emily for a reasonable amount of time. But the smoke was thick, and the ground was scorching. Flames had made their way in through the open bedroom door. I heard Emily in the attic, crying for help. The trapdoor was closed, and the string that pulls it open was missing. Missing like someone had removed it, like maybe the fire wasn't an accident. I panicked, shouted up at her to jump on it. Throw all her weight against it. Try anything. But I knew there was no way to open it from the inside. And from below, there was nothing I could do to open the door either. There were no chairs in the room, and I didn't have time to push Kennedy's bed or a dresser all the way across the burning floor to the closet to try to reach up. I told myself that my best bet was to get out the window to safety and tell the rescuers that Emily was trapped in the attic.

I had to.

But I didn't really have to.

I chose to.

I chose to save myself.

I chose to leave Emily behind.

Maybe I never really tried to save her at all.

I look at Kennedy suddenly. "I know why I feel guilty. What about you? Why does Mila think all of this is your fault? And what does it have to do with the summer before last? The fire couldn't have been an accident if it was a year coming."

"I swear to you that to my knowledge, the fire was an accident." Such a carefully worded sentence. What we don't know can't incriminate us.

"Kennedy. I know something happened. I know about Chase's phone call."

She flinches and stills. "On the night of the murder?" My heart drops into my stomach. The night of the murder. She called it a murder. "You wanted the truth."

Kennedy's words reverberate throughout my body with my racing pulse. Truth is a poison. The night of the murder. Your friends are trying to protect you.

"I thought I did," I whisper. Time slips backward, and I hear Ryan telling me again that I chose the wrong side.

"What if I told you that Mila set the whole thing in motion?" Kennedy says. "Or that I came up with the cover story? What if we really are guilty? Do you really want to know?"

And then, as if in response, the sound of doors slamming echoes through the house, one after another. Windows slam shut, quick and sharp as guillotines. I hear Mila scream somewhere nearby. I rush to the bedroom door and wrench it open.