“Colin?”

Stopping, he turns back to face her. “What?”

She laughs at his stalling, walking toward him. “What’s wrong?”

“I like you,” he blurts. “A lot.” His heart clenches and then begins pounding manically, and he half wants to turn and run down the trail. Instead, he stands and watches her expression shift from surprise to elation.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And it’s hard to be so close all the time and not touching,” he admits quietly.

“For me too.” Stretching onto her tiptoes, she whispers, “But I want to try.”

His tongue slips out, sliding over his piercing.

“I think about it,” she says, her breath smelling like rain and petals. “I want to kiss you until you’re dizzy with wanting, too.”

It takes Colin four tries to get a sound past his lips. “You mean you’re dizzy with wanting me?”

She lifts herself up again, and he feels a sensation like lips against his cheek. He turns to her and is met not with her mouth but with her quickly ducked head. Just before he can step back, a little embarrassed and a lot confused, her hand presses against the front of his shirt.

“Wait,” she says. “Just go slow.”

First with his cheek, then with his nose barely touching her lips, he moves closer, hoping that the way she shakes is from anticipation and not something far less pleasant. She tilts her head just enough for him brush his mouth over hers, and his fists curl in restraint at his sides. It’s different; her skin there feels different. Still buzzing energy and the sense that if he pressed too hard she would evaporate, but lips nonetheless: full and smiling and now wet from his. When he comes back again and tastes her, she makes a tiny sound of relief. It’s a sound of lust, of air and fire, and Colin nearly loses himself: grasping, fingers digging. But instead, he pulls back, breaths choppy as he looks down at her.

“Okay, that was a good start.”

“A good start?” she says with a small laugh. “My mind is a giant sieve, but I’m pretty sure that was the best first kiss in the history of this town.”

He gently touches her elbow, carefully urging her to start walking again. The kiss was an enormous step in the right direction and still only a fraction of what he needed from her. Inside his chest, a rope coils tightly, fraying at the knots.

Colin’s cast came off two days ago, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so grateful to be able to wash dishes. He and Dane finished cleaning the kitchen, and Colin lingers around to keep Dot company. She’s been quiet tonight. No whistling while she cooks, no smacking them with the spatula. Just thoughtful, quiet Dot, and it weirds him out.

“Long day?” he asks. She shrugs. “You know how it is when a storm is on its way.”

“Your barometric knees acting up?”

She scowls at him over her shoulder. “Very funny, smart guy.” When she turns back to the sink, he can see her reflection as she looks out the wide window overlooking the back side of the quad. She looks worried. “It’s sort of like that,” she begins, searching for words. “Something feels off. I’m not sure what.”

Colin swallows hard and busies himself by stacking plates. “Hey, Dot, do you remember a girl named Lucy Gray?”

She pauses as she unties her apron. “Of course. Everyone around here remembers that name.”

“Yeah.” Colin struggles for breath. “So you were here when . . . when it all happened to her?”

“Why’re you asking about something like that?”

He shrugs, taking a heavy sack of flour from her arms and placing it on the counter. “No reason. Some kids were down at the lake, started talking about it at lunch.”

She pins him with a serious expression. “I better not catch you down there.”

“Of course not,” he says. It’s a lie, and as a general rule, he doesn’t lie to Dot. But Colin is always at the lake and figures since it’s the same lie he’s told over and over throughout his life, it counts as only one.

“She was killed,” Dot says finally, watching as he begins sorting clean silverware. Out of the corner of his eye, he can tell she’s got her fist planted on her hip and he can almost hear the ticking sound as her brain works something out. “Do you remember any of it?” she finally asks.

He points a handful of forks at his chest. “Me?”

She nods.

“What? No.”

“She was killed when you were six.”

He lived on campus and had just lost his parents. He remembers so little about that time other than the strange, constant desire to dissolve and float away. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

She nods and turns back around, bracing her hands and looking back out the window. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. You had so much going on around then. It was brutal, Col. Just . . .” Her head drops and she shakes it. “Just awful.”

He doesn’t want to hear her version of the story, but a sick part of him wants to know everything.

“Your parents had died, and you were living at Joe’s. I don’t think you could sleep that night, and Joe was at a meeting with the dorm heads. You were out on the porch playing alone with your little army men.” She turns to look at him and smiles sadly. “You saw him carrying a girl into the woods. You ran and found me. It didn’t save her, but because of you this guy was caught. We had no idea that monster was living right alongside us. And he had killed . . . God, I think he had killed seven other kids.”

Colin stands and bolts from the kitchen, feeling his dinner coming back up.

Chapter 13 HIM

EXCEPT FOR THE BLURRED-EDGE MEMORIES OF their funeral, Colin has few solid recollections of his parents or the car crash that left them dead on impact and Colin strangely unharmed. Their caskets had been positioned side by side at the front of the church, and the smell of lilies was so strong, it turned his stomach. His dad’s chest had been crushed by the dashboard and the funeral home was forced to reconstruct it: replacing muscle and bone with metal rods and wax. Colin remembers only an angry purple bruise peeking out from beneath the cuff of his dad’s starched white shirt. His mother’s arm had been torn from her body by the seat belt—something he didn’t learn about until years later— and the sleeve of her favorite pink dress was just empty. Like they thought nobody would even notice.

He wondered why anyone would want to see someone they loved like that, skin the wrong color and eyes that would never open again.

That’s not how he wants to remember.

He wants to open his brain, to tear out the ugly pages and replace them with new, happier ones. Ones where moms and dads don’t die and monsters don’t carry girls into the woods in the middle of the night.

He hadn’t felt sick like that again until Lucy. He thought knowing more of her story would be a relief, another missing piece of the puzzle fit perfectly into place. Instead, knowing he was the last person to see her alive has taken blank pages and inked them with horror and gore.

But she’s here now, alive or not, standing across the threshold when he opens his door. Her smile makes the other stuff easier to forget. At least for a few hours. It’s been three days since Dot revealed his role in the events surrounding Lucy’s murder. Each night, whenever he started to tell her, his throat felt like it was closing shut.

Like always, Lucy pulls off her boots and heads straight for his window, reaching out to push back the curtains. It’s been trying to snow all day, and a few small flakes flutter beneath the lamppost to fall slowly to the ground. Even though it’s dark out, the sky is bright, practically glowing, and full of clouds that seem lit from behind.

“No stars tonight.”

“It’s a snow sky,” Lucy says, her nose pressed to the glass. There’s no smudge from where her skin touches the window, no cloud of condensation. “My grandma used to say it looks like someone left the TV on in heaven.” She laughs and then pauses, turning to him. “How did I remember that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s like amnesia victims. Certain things trigger specific memories.”