There had to be more to the puzzle than this. There had to be. I couldn’t just be a random person born on the right calendar date. That can’t be it. What about my mother? What about her secret—a secret she’d mentioned on my fifteenth birthday, a full year before Emily had died? And what about the letter Tobias Hawthorne had left me?
I’m sorry.
What had Tobias Hawthorne had to apologize for? He didn’t just randomly select a person with the right birthday. There has to be more to it than that.
But I could still hear Nash telling me: You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.
“I’m sorry.” Grayson spoke again beside me. “It’s not Jameson’s fault that he’s like this. It’s not Jameson’s fault…” The invincible Grayson Hawthorne seemed to be having trouble talking. “… that this is how the game ends.”
I was still wearing my clothes from the gala. My hair was still in Emily’s braid.
“I should have known.” Grayson’s voice was swollen with emotion. “I did know. The day that the will was read, I knew that all of this was because of me.”
I thought of the way Grayson had shown up at my hotel room that night. He’d been angry, determined to figure out what I had done.
“What are you talking about?” I searched his face and eyes for answers. “How is this because of you? And don’t tell me you killed Emily.”
No one—not even Thea—had called Emily’s death a murder.
“I did,” Grayson insisted, his voice low and vibrating with intensity. “If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have been there. She wouldn’t have jumped.”
Jumped. My throat went dry. “Been where?” I asked quietly. “And what does any of this have to do with your grandfather’s will?”
Grayson shuddered. “Maybe I was meant to tell you,” he said after a long while. “Maybe that was always the point. Maybe you were always meant to be equal parts puzzle… and penance.” He bowed his head.
I’m not your penance, Grayson Hawthorne. I didn’t get the chance to say that out loud before he was talking again—and once he started, it would have taken an act of God to stop him.
“We’d always known her. Mr. and Mrs. Laughlin have been at Hawthorne House for decades. Their daughter and granddaughters used to live in California. The girls came to visit twice a year—once with their parents at Christmastime, and again in the summer, for three weeks, alone. We didn’t see much of them at Christmas, but in the summers, we all played together. It was a bit like summer camp, really. You have camp friends, who you see once a year, who have no place in your ordinary life. That was Emily—and Rebecca. They were so different from the four of us. Skye said it was because they were girls, but I always thought it was because there were only two of them, and Emily came first. She was a force of nature, and their parents were always so worried she’d overexert herself. She was allowed to play cards with us, and other quiet, indoor games—but she wasn’t allowed to roam outside the way we did, or to run.
“She’d get us to bring her things. It became a bit of a tradition. Emily would set us on a hunt, and whoever found what she’d requested—the more unusual and hard to find, the better—won.”
“What did you win?” I asked.
Grayson shrugged. “We’re brothers. We didn’t have to win anything in particular—just win.”
That tracked. “And then Emily got a heart transplant,” I said. Jameson had told me that much. He’d said that afterward, she wanted to live.
“Her parents were still protective, but Emily had lived in glass cages long enough. She and Jameson were thirteen. I was fourteen. She’d breeze in for the summers, the consummate daredevil. Rebecca was always after us to be careful, but Emily insisted that her doctors had said that her activity level was only limited by her physical stamina. If she could do it, there was no reason she shouldn’t. The family moved here permanently when Emily was sixteen. She and Rebecca didn’t live on the estate, the way they had during visits, but my grandfather paid for them to attend private school.”
I saw where this was going. “She wasn’t just a summer camp friend anymore.”
“She was everything,” Grayson said—and he didn’t exactly say it like it was a compliment. “Emily had the entire school eating out of the palm of her hand. Maybe that was our fault.”
Even just being Hawthorne-adjacent changed the way that people looked at you. Thea’s statement came back to me.
“Or maybe,” Grayson continued, “it was just because she was Em. Too smart, too beautiful, too good at getting what she wanted. She had no fear.”
“She wanted you,” I said. “And Jameson, and she didn’t want to choose.”
“She turned it into a game.” Grayson shook his head. “And God help us, we played. I want to say that it was because we loved her—that it was because of her, but I don’t even know how much of that was true. There’s nothing more Hawthorne than winning.”
Had Emily known that? Used it to her advantage? Had it ever hurt her?
“The thing was…” Grayson choked. “She didn’t just want us. She wanted what we could give her.”
“Money?”
“Experiences,” Grayson replied. “Thrills. Race cars and motorcycles and handling exotic snakes. Parties and clubs and places we weren’t supposed to be. It was a rush—for her and for us.” He paused. “For me,” he corrected. “I don’t know what it was, exactly, for Jamie.”
Jameson broke up with her the night she died.
“One night, I got a call from Emily, late. She said that she was done with Jameson, that all she wanted was me.” Grayson swallowed. “She wanted to celebrate. There’s this place called Devil’s Gate. It’s a cliff overlooking the Gulf—one of the most famous cliff-diving locations in the world.” Grayson angled his head down. “I knew it was a bad idea.”
I tried to form words—any words. “How bad?”
He was breathing heavily now. “When we got there, I headed for one of the lower cliffs. Emily headed for the top. Past the danger signs. Past the warnings. It was the middle of the night. We shouldn’t have been there at all. I didn’t know why she wouldn’t let me wait until morning—not until later, when I realized she’d lied about choosing me.”
Jameson had broken up with her. She’d called Grayson, and she hadn’t been in the mood to wait.
“Cliff diving killed her?” I asked.
“No,” Grayson said. “She was fine. We were fine. I went to grab our towels, but when I came back… Emily wasn’t even in the water anymore. She was just lying on the shoreline. Dead.” He closed his eyes. “Her heart.”
“You didn’t kill her,” I said.
“The adrenaline did. Or the altitude, the change in pressure. I don’t know. Jameson wouldn’t take her. I shouldn’t have, either.”
She made decisions. She had agency. It wasn’t your job to tell her no. I knew instinctively that no good could come of saying any of that, even if it was true.
“You know what my grandfather told me, after Emily’s funeral? Family first. He said that what happened to Emily wouldn’t have happened if I’d put my family first. If I’d refused to play along, if I’d chosen my brother over her.” Grayson’s vocal cords tensed against his throat, as if he wanted to say something else but couldn’t. Finally, it came. “That’s what this is about. One-zero-one-eight. October eighteenth. The day Emily died. Your birthday. It’s my grandfather’s way of confirming what I already knew, deep down.
“All of this—all of it—is because of me.”
