“What do you want from me, Coop? You said what you have to say. What else do you want?”

“You,” he says softly. “I want you, Quincy.”

Contrary to what I’ve told Sam, I have thought about what could make me succumb to my attraction to Coop. Those blue eyes always struck me as the likely culprit. They’re bright as lasers, seeing everything. But it’s his voice that finally does it. That soft confession pulling me into his arms.

It’s our first embrace since Pine Cottage. The first time he’s wrapped those strong arms around me. I expect the memory to tarnish our current one. It doesn’t. It only makes it sweeter.

With him, I feel safe.

I always have.

I kiss him. Even though it’s wrong. He kisses back, lips hungry, biting. Years of pent-up lust are finally being released, and the result is more need than desire. More pain than pleasure.

Soon we’re on the bed. There’s nowhere else to go. My clothes come off. I don’t know how. They seem to simply fall away, as do Coop’s.

He knows what he wants.

God help me, I let him take it.

Pine Cottage, 11:42 p.m.

He was still asleep when Quincy slipped from the bed and crossed the room on tiptoes, hunting her shoes, her dress, her panties. It hurt to move. Soreness lingered between her legs, flaring whenever she bent over. Still, it wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be. There was consolation in that.

She dressed quickly, suddenly aware of the sharp chill hanging in the room. It was as if she had a fever. She shivered from the cold even though her skin was burning hot.

In the hall, Quincy ducked into the bathroom, not bothering to turn on the overhead light. She had no desire to face herself in the mirror under that harsh glare. Instead, she stared at her dark reflection, most of its features erased. She had become a shadow.

A chant popped into her head. Something from grade school. She and her friends in the pitch-black girl’s room, repeating a name.

Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.

“Bloody Mary,” Quincy said, eyes on her eyeless reflection.

Once out of the bathroom, she paused at the entrance to the great room, fearful that Craig and Janelle might have returned, drunk and giggling and pretending like nothing had happened between them. She only proceeded once she heard nothing. The cabin was silent.

Quincy headed to the kitchen, standing there, pondering her next step. Should she confront them? Demand to go home? Maybe she’d look for Craig’s keys and take his SUV, leaving all of them stranded without their cell phones.

The idea made her smile. Already she had entered the second stage of grief, which she learned in psych class only three days earlier. Janelle skipped that lecture and Quincy had yet to give her the notes. She didn’t know that second rung in the ladder of grief. But Quincy did.

It was anger.

Full-throated, bitch on wheels anger.

Quincy felt it warm in her stomach. Like heartburn, only hotter. It pulsed outward, zipping through her arms and legs.

She went to the sink, ready to put that fiery energy to use. That was her mom’s way. Good old passive-aggressive Sheila Carpenter, cleaning instead of screaming, fixing instead of breaking. Never, ever saying what she felt.

Quincy didn’t want to be that woman. She didn’t want to clean up the mess that everyone else had made. She wanted to get mad, dammit. She was mad. So angry that she plucked a dirty plate from the sink and prepared to smash it against the counter.

It was her reflection that stopped her. That pale face staring back at her from the window above the kitchen sink. This time she couldn’t avoid it. This time, she saw herself clearly.

Eyes red with tears. Lips curled into a snarl. Skin throbbing pink from anger and heartbreak and shame that she had just given herself to a complete stranger.

That wasn’t the Quincy she had thought herself to be. It was someone else entirely. Someone she didn’t recognize.

Darkness crept up around her. Quincy sensed it moving in. A black tide washing onto shore. Soon it had surrounded her, shrinking the kitchen, eclipsing it. Quincy could only see her face staring back at her. The stranger’s face. Until that, too, was consumed by darkness.

Quincy put the plate back in the sink, replacing it in her hand with something else.

The knife.

She didn’t know why she grabbed it. She certainly had no idea what she was going to do with it. All she knew was that it felt good to hold it.

With the knife firm in her grip, she passed through Pine Cottage’s back door, crossing the deck in three quick strides. Outside, the trees closest to the cabin stood like gray sentinels guarding the rest of the forest.

On her way past, Quincy slapped one with the flat of the blade. The impact shivered into her hand and up her arm as she moved deeper into the woods.

CHAPTER 35

A door slams shut, echoing down the hall and jerking me out of a dead sleep. I open my eyes with a gasp, dry air scraping across my tongue. Morning sun burns through the window in a diagonal streak that lands directly onto my pillow. Clear and sharp, it feels like needles poking my retinas. I roll over, cursing the sun as I throw my arm across the other side of the bed.

It’s empty.

That’s the moment I remember where I am.

Who I was with.

What I’ve done.

I leap from the bed, head dizzy, room spinning. I make it as far as the miniscule bathroom before collapsing to the floor, its tile cold beneath my bare ass, knees drawn to my chest. My thoughts are clouded, indistinct. I feel of this world but not part of it.