He handed me the house keys as I turned off the engine. “No,” he said. “Leave it on.” He cleared his throat, looked out the window. “It’s cold.” He put his hands in front of the vents and rubbed them together.

  “Okay, sure,” I said.

  “Don’t fuck up,” he said as I hopped down from the car.

  “Thanks for the pep talk,” I said, closing the door behind me. The sound carried over the running engine. Justin was right: it was cold. I could see my breath as I picked my way through the trees, checking to make sure Holden’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

  Nothing but trees and rocks and packed dirt from here to the house.

  I stayed in the trees, like Delaney and I had two nights before, making our way from the party back to Maya’s place. I snuck to the side of the detached garage that doubled as a shed.

  No car.

  But there was something. Something through the dirty glass window on the side. A wheelchair. A pile of pill bottles across the dirt floor. Boxes that were never emptied.

  Great. Now I felt like an ass. A creepy asshole. But I took the key from my pocket and walked across the yard and up the front steps anyway. I rang the doorbell to make sure nobody was inside, then looked around behind me, checking that nobody was walking in the woods or driving down the road. Then I slid the key into the lock and turned it.

  I stepped across the threshold, officially a criminal. Wait, if I had a key, did that make me a criminal? Probably. Maybe somebody used a key to get into my house, too. I hated that I was doing the same to someone else. Except this was for a different reason. I wasn’t here to destroy anything.

  The house looked the same as it had the night of the party. Barely lived in. The same furniture we’d seen, and used, for years. And suddenly it didn’t feel like trespassing. This place was ours. Our life. Our history. Like I could see our names carved into the walls: Decker was here, Carson was here, Janna was here, Delaney was here, Tara was here. …

  I ran my fingers along the back of the couch and walked to the kitchen. I opened the fridge—saw the bare essentials. Juice. Milk. A box with leftover pizza.

  I let it swing closed, and the sound of the door catching echoed through the kitchen. I ran my hand along the counter, stopped at a pile of mail. Saw a bunch of opened envelopes addressed to Katherine Johnson. For a second I wondered if this was who Maya really was, but then next to the pile of mail, I saw a check made out to Katherine Johnson from social security, and another one from some official-sounding company. Probably for disability, which backed up Maya’s story. I wondered if this was what they lived on now. I assumed so. Though I hoped they got more than this, because not that I knew much about money and the cost of living, but I got checks bigger than this from working over the summer, and the money went fast.

  I dropped the checks back on the counter. One landed upside-down, and I saw the messy scrawl of Katherine Johnson on the back. I fumbled to turn it the right way, hoping to leave no evidence that anyone had been in here.

  I went down the hall to the bedroom with the closed door. The one Holden had walked into that night. I knocked, then turned the handle and pushed it open. There were half-unpacked boxes on the floor, the furniture this place came with, an old computer set up on the tiny desk in the corner. The closet door was open, and I could see a few random pieces of guys’ clothing hanging.

  Definitely Holden’s room.

  I went back into the empty room with the quilted bedspread that I’d passed Saturday night. I reached for a drawer, to see if there were clothes inside, and heard the sound of the back sliding glass door.

  I froze, tiptoed out of the room, back down the hall. I knew this house by heart. There was a second exit that cut out the side, down toward the lake.

  I heard footsteps in the kitchen—walking past the kitchen—the sound of shoes being kicked off. I kept moving down the hall, slowly, silently, but the footsteps started moving again, toward the hall. Toward me. I was losing time, so I ran the last few steps in the hall and hoped for silence. No such luck. The floorboard creaked one step from the exit. I froze. The footsteps froze. Please let them think it’s the house, settling with the change in temperature. I held my breath, my heartbeat pounding in my head.

  “Holden?” I heard. Maya.

  Shit. I flipped the lock to the door, the sound echoing through the empty hall, and reached for the handle as the footsteps started moving again.

  I stepped outside and eased the door shut behind me, holding my breath, hoping she’d waste time checking the rooms first, hoping I’d have time to get away.

  But the door flew open as I was darting down the hill toward the lake.

  “Decker? What the hell are you doing?” I froze at the bottom of the hill. Turned toward her voice. Maya was standing in front of the door I’d just escaped from. She was in jeans and a sweatshirt and socks. No shoes. Her hair was back in a ponytail, and she looked like a kid. Like someone’s little sister. Not someone who had Kevin wrapped around her finger for months, not someone who made everyone turn their heads. Not the person who gripped my chin and smiled meanly and told me to grow up. Someone people had to take care of.

  “Shouldn’t you be at school?” I asked. Deflecting accusations with accusations.

  She laughed. “Who’s going to make me go, Decker?” Then she pulled her phone out of her back pocket and held it up, like a threat. “Now tell me what the hell you were doing in my house before I call the police.”

  “Where’s your mom?” I asked. I couldn’t stop the accusations. Couldn’t let her get a word in. “I saw the checks, but I know she’s not here.” Strong offense is the best defense, so said my dad. “Is she at the hospital? Is she with Holden? Was she ever even here?”

  Maya narrowed her eyes, started stalking down the hill toward me. “Of course she was here. What kind of question is that? You think I just conjured up the existence of my mother? An entire person? That she was never here?”

  No, I knew she had been here. Delaney said as much. Said she felt her … had seen her once. What I really meant was, Is she dead? But I couldn’t bring myself to say it with her standing in front of me all alone.

  “You break into my house. And you’re asking me questions. Accusing me of inventing an entire person, like she doesn’t even matter. So you tell me. What. The hell. Are you doing. In my house.” And she was still waving that phone around as she spoke.

  I swallowed. “Want to know why I’m in your house? Trying to figure out why the hell you’re here,” I said. “I mean, here. In this place. In this town.” I thought of the windows in Delaney’s house, the glass on her hands. Tara’s body floating in the lake. They had to be connected. Nothing else made sense. “What the hell do you want with us?”

  “What are you talking about?” Maya asked, folding her arms across her chest.

  “You know what Tara says? Tara says someone dragged her into the water.”

  Maya’s entire body stiffened. “And you’re accusing me?”

  “Or your brother,” I said.

  “How dare you! What right do you have?” But her eyes were flittering past me, searching, searching. I wondered if he was around here somewhere.

  “You know what I think? I think he thought she was Delaney. I think Delaney knew something that Holden didn’t want her knowing.”

  “You are out of your freaking mind, Decker. He would never.”

  “Why are you here, then? Why? Why did you guys come here?”

  She shrugged, like it was obvious. Like I was the only one who couldn’t see. “My mother always wanted to live near the water,” she said. “She said it’s the one thing that brings us all together. That I can have my toe in the ocean off the coast of Maine, and a girl my age can have her toe in the ocean off the coast of Africa, and we would be touching. On opposite sides of the world.” She looked at me with glassy eyes. “If you drown off the coast of Florida, you could wash up in England or something,” she said. But I didn’t think that was true. Currents. Animals. “She said it binds us all together.” Maya dipped her toe in the lake and closed her eyes. It must’ve been freezing. I watched as her sock turned dark, the water seeping through it. Up it. But Maya breathed out slowly, with a sigh. I strained to see the far shore. Nobody else was touching it. Nobody else to feel connected to. Not at Falcon Lake. Not here.

  “There are plenty of lakes,” I said, trying to understand why here of all places. Why this one? I felt like Delaney would have. Coincidence: like the world was playing a trick on me. “Around here, I mean. Why here?”

  “There’s no place like this, Decker,” she said. I wondered if there was something special to this place, that you had to come from the outside to appreciate it. “Where you can get a lake house in the summer for dirt cheap, and not by the week.” Nope, not that special. Just a place. A cheap place. “We thought we were so lucky. Though now I understand.”

  “It’s cursed,” I said, meaning it.

  The side of her mouth quirked up. “What’s cursed? The lake? No, the lake is everything it’s supposed to be. It’s not cursed. You are. All of you.”

  She pulled her foot back out and took her sock off, freeing her foot, which was red from the cold. But she didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she wrung the sock back out, over the water. Returning it to the source.

  “How’d you get in my goddamn house?” she asked, but everything was moving in slow motion. Her words felt like they were moving through water to get to me. Like I wasn’t quite understanding.

  “I had a key.” Part of the truth. Let her think it was from years ago. From another life.

  She held out her hand. “Give it to me.” I did. “And get the hell off my property.”

  I did.

  I ran, though I didn’t know what I was running from. I ran back to the side of the road, where Justin was waiting in the driver’s seat, his hands already on the steering wheel. I hopped in and yelled for him to go, but I didn’t have to. He was already driving.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Maya was home.”

  “The key?” he asked, and I could hear the panic in his voice.

  “Yeah, bad news about the key.”

  “Shit. Did you at least get what you were looking for?” he asked. Her mom wasn’t there, but we already knew that. I still couldn’t prove anything else. Not that their mom was dead, not that Holden thought Delaney knew, not that he dragged Tara into the lake thinking it was Delaney.

  “No,” I said. “Drive faster.” The curse is us, Maya had said. It lives in us. I wanted to get away. Away from Maya, away from the water. Or I wanted to get closer. Closer to those of us who belonged to this place. Belonged together.

  I saw a flash of color through the trees as we drove away. Maya, down at the lake, able to believe she was touching something that didn’t exist.

  And suddenly I wished we had done something for my dad. Scattered his ashes into the wind so I could imagine them in China and Russia and Brazil. So I could imagine him anywhere and everywhere, conjuring him up at will. Not buried under the earth, kept in a box, connected to nothing. I wished, like Maya said, I could dip my toe in the water and imagine him on the other side.

  Chapter 19

  I waited for Delaney after class, before lunch. She looked around the hall, her eyes wide. “Have you seen Maya? She keeps calling me,” she said.

  “She’s not here,” I said.

  “It’s like she knows what we’re thinking,” she whispered, leaning close. “Like she’s got some sixth sense.”

  “Yeah, not a sixth sense. She maybe knows because I maybe went to her house when I maybe thought she wouldn’t be there.”

  “You what?”

  “I thought she’d be at school, and I went there because I’m trying to understand,” I said, like Delaney had been trying to understand by going to Boston. By giving too much of herself away. “I wanted to see the rooms. I thought I’d know if I could just see them.”

  She tapped her foot against the floor. Gave me her you are such a moron look.

  “Research,” I said, smiling. Trying to make her smile.

  She wasn’t smiling.

  “There are checks,” I said, showing her I did actually get something. “And they’re endorsed. So either the mom is alive and has been there, but I don’t think that’s the case, or someone else is cashing them.”

  “So, basically,” she said, “you know nothing. Did you ask Maya?”

  “I asked Maya a lot of things,” I said, putting my hand on her back and leading her toward the cafeteria. “But she was not all that forthcoming with information,” I mumbled.

  “Decker, I love you, but sometimes … sometimes being on the receiving end of your questions can feel a little bit like being on trial.” She pulled out her phone again. “I need to talk to her.”

  “You don’t,” I said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  I cringed, thinking of the way I had just shot questions at Maya. “She might need a little more time.”

  At lunch, Tara was sitting at our table. She still had a bandage over her forehead, and her shoulders were hunched forward, like she was hiding out with us. “God,” she said as we sat down, “Everyone keeps looking at me.” Any other day, every other day, that would’ve been just fine by Tara. I glanced around the room, and she was partly right. They were looking at her. They were looking at all of us.

  At Kevin, who put a hand on Tara’s arm, as a faint tremor ran through it. At Justin, who looked like death. At Janna, without her brother. And me, without my father. At Delaney, who almost died.

  And at the center, the empty seat where Carson should’ve been, where Janna had carved his name into the tabletop with the edge of a fork. Carson was here, it said, etched into the plastic.

  It’s not the lake—any outsider could see that. Even Maya.

  It’s us.

  I knew, from the look on Delaney’s face after school, we’d end up back here. Didn’t mean I was happy about it. Didn’t even mean I was okay with it. “But Holden is gone, right?” she’d said, like that was the only reason I’d want her away from there. But she was as stubborn as I was, which meant she would do this with or without me. I chose with.

  “She’s not going to hurt me,” Delaney said, not for the first time. Her feet crunched the leaves as we walked along the edge of the street. The house looked unfamiliar, suddenly. Unpredictable. For once, I couldn’t imagine Carson running in or out of that door. Couldn’t imagine it had ever belonged to us.

  She looked at me and frowned. “Three months, Decker. If she’s dead, it’s been three months.”

  Delaney wanted me to feel sympathy for Maya, and I guess I could, kind of. A girl who lost her mother but couldn’t grieve. All alone.

  But they didn’t tell. And they kept cashing those checks. And for what, some money? Like that’s what her life was worth to them?

  We were halfway up the driveway when the front door flew open, and Maya stood there, eyes wide, already shaking her head. “It’s not true,” she said, before we had a chance to say anything. “Delaney, it’s not true. I would never. He would never try to hurt someone,” she repeated, which is what my dad did during trials, when he was driving home a point. Say it again until they hear it in their own head. A simple thing that feels right, whether it is or not.

  Or maybe she only saw that side of him. The side of him that would never do anything to hurt her. Not what he might do to other people. She noticed me, standing there, as an afterthought. “You brought him,” she said.

  “He brought me,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” she whispered.

  I heard the sound of wheels on rocks, moving slowly off the road. Maya’s eyes moved to the driveway next door, where there was a blue car pulling in. Not Holden, not yet. But Maya was expecting him. Because if she called Delaney in a panic, she probably also called Holden in a panic. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said to me, and I could see she was nervous.

  “Maya,” Delaney said. “What happened to your mom?”

  Maya shrugged. She placed her hands flat on both sides of the door frame, trying to look casual, but she was blocking us out. Blocking our view. “She was here one day, and then she was gone.” Part of the truth, skipping over the important stuff.

  “Where is she?”

  “Just let us be,” Maya said. “Please let us be. What business is it of yours? We’re okay.”

  Delaney looked past her, at the half-empty house, and the half-empty fridge, and this lonely, lonely girl who had no reason to show up at school at all, because who would make her?

  And there were boxes on the floor, open and ready to pack. She was preparing for something. As if she was preparing for the end, like she could see it coming. Would it be better, I thought again, not to know?

  She saw us looking, and she shifted her body to cut off my line of vision. “Tell me,” she asked. “Did anyone notice I wasn’t in school today? How about yesterday?” She smiled. “How quickly you all can pretend I never even existed. Hey, remember that Maya chick?” She was mimicking someone’s voice. Maybe Kevin’s. Maybe mine. “Long hair. Sick mom. Right?”

  She cleared her throat. Now she was being someone else. Anyone else. She ran her hands down that long hair now. Fixed her eyes on Delaney. “Let me go,” she said. “Nobody will notice. Nobody will care. It will be like I was never even here.”

  Like we had conjured her into existence for a few months, for fun. For Kevin and the backseat of his car when he got bored of Tara. Never letting her in. Never really here. But this house was starting to take the shape of her. The scent of her. I’d never be able to walk in here again without seeing her, her name carved into the walls with all of ours. Maya was here.

  “Your mom is—” I started.

  “She’s not. She can’t be. Not yet,” Maya said, not letting me finish the thought. Not letting me bring it to life.