“Quincy?” my mother says, clearly shocked to be hearing from me. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me Lisa Milner contacted you?”

CHAPTER 31

There’s a pause on my mother’s end. Long enough to make me think she’s hung up. Seconds pass in which I hear nothing but the whoosh of air sliding across the car’s exterior. But then my mother speaks. Her voice is lukewarm and without inflection—the aural equivalent of melted vanilla ice cream.

“What a strange question, Quincy.”

I huff out an angry sigh.

“I saw the email, Mom. I know you gave her your phone number. Did she call you back?”

Another pause. A bit of static crackles from my phone. “I knew you’d be angry if you found out,” my mother says.

“When did you talk?” I say.

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“You do, Mom. Now tell me.”

More pausing. More static.

“About two weeks ago,” my mother says.

“Did Lisa say why she was so suddenly interested in me again?”

“She told me she was worried.”

This sends a chill scudding through me.

Quincy, I need to talk to you. It’s extremely important. Please, please don’t ignore this.

“Worried for me? Or about me?”

“She didn’t really say, Quincy.”

“Then what did you talk about?”

“Lisa asked me how you were doing. I told her you were doing great. I mentioned your website, your nice apartment, Jeff.”

“Anything else?”

“She asked—” My mother stops herself, thinks, carries on. “She asked if you’ve recovered any memories. Of what happened that night.”

Another chill goes through me. I switch on the car heater, hoping that will make it go away.

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know,” my mother says.

“And what did you tell her?”

“The truth. That you can’t remember a thing.”

Only it’s not the truth. Not anymore. I remember something. A keyhole-sized peek into that night.

I take a deep breath, inhaling the dusty hot air rushing from the heating vents. It does nothing to warm me. All it manages to do is make my throat itchy and dry. My voice is a rasp when I say, “Did Lisa mention why she wanted to know this?”

“She said she’d been thinking about you lately. She said she wanted to check in on you.”

“Then why didn’t she call me?”

Instead, Lisa had reached out to Cole, Freemont, Coop and my mother. Everyone but me. By the time she did reach out, it was too late.

“I don’t know, Quincy,” my mother says. “I guess she didn’t want to bother you. Or maybe—”

Another pause. A lengthy one. So long that I can feel the distance stretching between my mother and I. All those fields and cities and small towns that sit between this Indiana highway and that too-white house in Bucks County.

“Mom?” I say. “Maybe what?”

“I was going to say that maybe Lisa thought you wouldn’t be honest with her.”

“She didn’t say that, did she?”

“No,” my mother says. “Nothing like that. But I got a feeling—and I could be wrong—I got the feeling that she knew something. Or suspected something.”

“About?”

My mother goes quiet. “About what happened that night.”

I squirm in the driver seat, suddenly unbearably hot. Beads of sweat have popped along my brow line. I wipe them away and click off the heater.

“What gave you this feeling?”

“More than once, she stressed how lucky you were. How you recovered so quickly. How your wounds weren’t that bad. Especially compared with what happened to the others.”

In ten years, this is the most my mother has ever talked about Pine Cottage with me. Four lousy sentences. I’d consider it some sort of warped breakthrough if the situation wasn’t so dire.

“Mom,” I say, “did Lisa suggest that I had something to do with what happened at Pine Cottage?”

“She didn’t suggest anything—”

“Then why do you think she suspected something?”

“I don’t know, Quincy.”

But I do. It’s because my mother also suspects something. She doesn’t think I killed the others. But I’m certain that, just like Cole and Freemont, she wonders why I lived when no one else did. Deep down, she thinks there’s something I’m not saying.

I think about the way she had looked at me after I trashed the kitchen all those years ago. The hurt darkening her eyes. The utter fear quivering in her pupils. I wish to God I could forget that look as thoroughly as I’ve forgotten that hour at Pine Cottage. I want it erased from my memory. Painted so black I can never see it again.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I tried,” my mother says, going heavy on the faux indignation. “I called you two days in a row. You didn’t call back.”

“You talked to Lisa two weeks ago, Mom,” I say. “You should have called me as soon as it happened.”