Avery.” Rebecca stared down at me. “What are you doing down there?” She sounded perfectly normal, but all I could think was that Rebecca Laughlin had been on the estate the night Drake had shot at me. She didn’t have an alibi, because when we’d arrived at Wayback Cottage, she wasn’t there, and neither of her grandparents knew where she was. She’d said something about warning me.
The next day, Rebecca had looked—according to Thea—like she’d been crying. Why?
“Where were you,” I asked her, my mouth going dry, “the night of the shooting?”
Rebecca closed her eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said softly, “to have your entire life revolve around one person, and then you wake up one day, and that person is gone.”
That wasn’t an answer to my question. I thought about Thea telling me that she was only doing what Emily would have wanted.
What would Emily have wanted Rebecca to do to me?
Xander needed to get back here—quick.
“It was my fault, you know,” Rebecca said up above, her eyes still closed. “Emily was taking huge risks. I told our parents. They grounded her, forbade her from seeing the Hawthornes. But Em had her ways. She convinced our mom and dad that she was done acting out. They didn’t lift the ban on the boys, but they did start letting her hang out with Thea again.”
“Thea,” I repeated, “who you were secretly dating.”
Rebecca’s eyelids shot open. “Emily found us together that afternoon. She was… angry. As soon as she got me alone, she told me that what Thea and I had wasn’t love, that if Thea really loved me, she never would have pretended to be with Xander. Emily said…” Rebecca was caught up in memory now, fully. Violently. “She told me that Thea loved her more—and she would prove it. She asked Thea to cover about the cliff diving. I begged Thea not to, but she said that after everything, we owed it to Em.”
Thea had covered for Emily the night she had died.
“Most of the things Emily talked the boys into, she could do, but even professional cliff divers don’t jump from the top of Devil’s Gate. It would have been dangerous for anyone, but that much adrenaline, that much cortisol, a change in altitude and pressure, with her heart?” Rebecca was speaking so softly now that I wasn’t sure she truly remembered I was listening. “I’d tried telling my parents what she was doing, and that didn’t work. I’d tried begging Thea, and she’d chosen Emily over me. So I decided to go to Jameson. He was the one who was supposed to take her to Devil’s Gate.”
Rebecca’s head dipped, deep red hair falling into her face. Thea was right—Rebecca Laughlin was beautiful. But right now she didn’t look quite right.
“I had a voice recording,” she said softly, “of Emily talking. She used to tell me everything the boys did with her and for her and to her. She liked to keep score.” Rebecca paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was sharper-edged. “I played the recording for Jameson. I told myself that I was doing it to protect my sister, to keep him from taking her to the cliffs. But the truth was, she’d taken Thea away from me.”
So you took something away from her, I thought. “Jameson broke up with her,” I said. He’d told me that much.
“If he hadn’t,” Rebecca replied, “maybe she wouldn’t have needed to push things so much. Maybe she would have relented and jumped from one of the lower cliffs. Maybe it would have been okay.” Her voice got even softer. “If Emily hadn’t caught Thea and me together that afternoon, if she hadn’t seen our relationship as such a betrayal—she might not have needed to jump at all.”
Rebecca blamed herself. Thea blamed the boys. Grayson took the weight of all of it onto himself. And Jameson…
“I’m sorry.” Rebecca’s apology jarred me from my thoughts. Her tone told me she wasn’t talking about Emily anymore. She wasn’t talking about something that had happened over a year ago.
“Sorry for what?” I asked. What are you doing down here, Rebecca?
“It’s not that I have anything against you. But it’s what Emily would have wanted.”
She is not well. I had to find a way out of here. I had to get away from her.
“Emily would have hated you for stealing their money. She would have hated the way they look at you.”
“So you decided to get rid of me,” I said, stalling for time. “For Emily.”
Rebecca stared at me. “No.”
“You knew about the tunnels, and somehow, you told Drake…”
“No,” Rebecca insisted. “Avery, I wouldn’t do that.”
“You said it yourself. Emily would have wanted me gone.”
“I’m not Emily.” The words were guttural.
“Then what were you apologizing for?” I asked.
Rebecca swallowed. “Mr. Hawthorne told me about the tunnels one summer when I was little. He showed me all the entrances, said I deserved something that was just mine. A secret. I come down here when I need to get away—sometimes when I’m visiting my grandparents, but since Emily died, things are pretty awful at home, so sometimes I enter from the outside.”
I waited. “And?”
“The night of the shooting, I saw someone else in the tunnels. I didn’t say anything, because Emily wouldn’t have wanted me to. I owed her, Avery. After what I did—I owed her.”
“Who did you see?” I asked. She didn’t answer. “Drake?”
Rebecca met my eyes. “He wasn’t alone.”
“Who else was there?” I waited. Nothing. “Rebecca, who else was in the tunnel with Drake?”
Who would Emily have wanted her to protect?
“One of the boys?” I asked, feeling like the ground was crumbling beneath me.
“No,” Rebecca said quietly. “Their mother.”
