But it was obvious that whatever had broken between Sarah and Diana—whether it was what Alice suspected or something else—it couldn’t be fixed. I, too, was sad that Diana’s life wasn’t as perfect as everyone believed.

But . . . did Calvin’s long-ago infidelity matter if Diana had never known? It looked like he treated her with the same love and care as always, and she seemed happy.

Maybe that was enough.

Grimacing at the low throb of pain at the back of my head, I decided to take a break and read. It was probably just a tension headache. But it continued to grow until I ended up in bed. That proved pointless, however—I couldn’t sleep. Sitting up, I finally surrendered and took a few of the prescribed painkillers.

No point in avoiding them if I was going to end up with an aneurysm.

As the medicine worked its way through my system, I had a thought: that day, the one after Sarah left the family home, was when I’d seen my mother on her knees beside Diana, helping to put her rose garden to rights.

Sarah had ripped out the roses by their roots.

But now, in the painless clarity of my brain, I realized Diana had planted those roses at least three years earlier. I’d seen them bloom multiple times. It was impossible for anyone to just rip them out in a fit of fury—especially not a woman using her bare hands.

My memory of that moment was crystalline. I remembered how some of the rose plants had been dying already, broken off too savagely to save, but only some. The majority had been carefully insulated with dirt, the roots fairly unharmed.

Only way to dig out the roots without damaging them would’ve been to use a shovel.

Why would Sarah dig out her sister’s roses with such care if she was intent on destroying what Diana loved?

The same Sarah who was a ghost.

Getting up out of bed, I stared at the house across the road, its windows aglow with light. I knew what I had to do. It was all so clear now. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

60

It was cold, a light misty rain had just stopped falling, and the sneaker on my good foot was wet, dirty, while the large trash bag I’d tied around my moon boot kept threatening to make me slip. The trees of the watching forest shivered in the twilight darkness. I didn’t know how long I’d been digging, but it had to be at least an hour. I’d managed to uproot the roses, but it was hard going through the packed soil.

Sweat plastered my T-shirt to my skin despite the cold, and my back ached, but I thrust the shovel into the earth and dug. I hadn’t been able to sleep or even relax after my epiphany. I’d stayed awake, eating fudge and chocolate, and drinking Coke while staring at Diana and Calvin’s house, waiting for the lights to go out. The house had finally gone dark at eleven-thirty.

Then I’d had to wait for everyone else in the Cul-de-Sac to go to sleep.

Isaac, of course, had been up, and I’d seen glimpses of light through the trees that told me Anastasia’s family was still awake, but the holdouts had surrendered before two. I’d waited another half hour until all was silent, unbroken even by the passage of distant cars, then crept out of the house, picking up the shovel I’d seen in Shanti’s vegetable patch on my way.

As I’d crossed the Cul-de-Sac by the light of the moon, the streetlights off for some reason, a small part of me had said this was a very bad idea, but that voice was wiped out by the overwhelming wave of certainty in my blood.

The roses, the way Diana babied them, the way she wouldn’t let anyone else near them.

“It all adds up,” I muttered. “It all adds up.”

I dug and dug, until I’d made a hole so big I had to stand inside it to dig any further.

“Sarah’s dead. Diana buried her here.” My head felt thick, my tongue woolly.

I stopped midshovel, unsure what I was doing here in the dark, but then the break in my certainty faded as fast as it had struck, and I began digging again. It all made sense, the pieces fitting together like a jigsaw.

Diana had killed Sarah because Sarah had been having an affair with Diana’s perfect Calvin. Then my mother had helped Diana bury the body—because my mother would do that for her best friend. But the two fought for some reason, leading Diana to no longer trust her to keep the secret, and so she’d killed her.

I paused. No, something was wrong with that picture.

That image of my mother helping Diana in the morning sunshine. There had been no hole, just dug-up plants and a ruined and trampled garden bed. Maybe Sarah had used a shovel to dig them up when she left, for reasons I couldn’t yet see.

Stopping, I shook my head.

No, Sarah was dead.

My mother and Diana must’ve buried her the night before, just been doing the tidy-up the next day.

Yes, that was it. That made perfect sense.

My brain throbbed against my skull, the echo going through my bones.

The scrape of movement on wet grass was light, but it crashed like a drum against my over-sensitized hearing. Twisting in the hole, I looked up in time to see the shovel coming down at me. I had a moment of incomprehension—wasn’t I holding the shovel?—before instinct made me throw myself sideways inside the small space.

I hadn’t dug a very wide hole. It was only big enough to jump inside and go deeper. But it proved just big enough to avoid the first blow.

The sharp edge of the shovel dug into the soil beside my head.

Grunting, the person wielding the garden implement wrenched it out. I thrust up the end of my own shovel into their gut in that increment of time. But I had barely any purchase, and my bad leg was threatening to buckle.

Hissing out a breath, my attacker—a formless silhouette, black against the spotlight of the moon—staggered but didn’t fall, and then they were coming at me again. And I knew. I’d done Diana’s job for her. I’d dug my own grave. She’d kill me, scrape the dirt over me, and have the roses replanted before morning broke.