“Lizzy.” Andrew folded his paper napkin and laid it aside. “I get you needing to do this. In fact, I admire the hell out of you for it, but maybe you should slow down, give Roger time to get through his notes. If there’s something to find, he’ll find it. And then he can deal with Summers, and you’re out of it. In the meantime, maybe I could do some poking around, see if anyone knows how to contact her.”

Lizzy managed a smile. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but he was doing it again, stepping in to protect her, like he had the night Rhanna went wading in the fountain. Only this time he had more to lose. “Andrew, I’m grateful to you for putting me in touch with Roger, but this is my fight. I’ll be gone in a few weeks, and you’ll still be here. Your business will still be here. The last thing you need is to get mixed up in this.”

“I’m not worried about what this town thinks.”

“You should be,” Lizzy replied, thinking of the men at Mason Electric, of Jake and his buddy, and how they’d bowed up at the mere sight of her. Fred Gilman was right about one thing. No one wanted her here. And if Andrew was seen as choosing the Moons over Salem Creek, no one would want him here either.

“I shouldn’t have involved you,” she said, setting aside her plate. “I knew better.”

“You didn’t involve me, Lizzy. I involved myself.”

“Why?” The word was out of her mouth before she had time to think about where it might lead, but now that it was out, she was curious. “Why did you agree to help me—when you’re clearly not convinced I should be poking around in this? You’re always doing that, you know? Helping me. And it’s not just making the call to Roger. It’s the greenhouse, and the barn, and all the other stuff.”

Andrew arched a brow. “Other stuff?”

“In school. The Twizzlers at the assembly. The ride home the day of the hailstorm. We barely knew each other then. Come to that, we barely know each other now.” She paused, ducking her head. “I always wondered . . . Was it because you felt sorry for me?”

Andrew stared at her, as if genuinely astonished. “That’s what you thought? That I felt sorry for you?”

She responded with a half-hearted shrug. “I wasn’t exactly Miss Popular in school. All I wanted back then was to be invisible. I thought I was doing a good job of it too. Except you kept turning up, being all nice. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. I still can’t.”

Andrew paused, picking up his napkin again, and slowly wiped his hands. Finally, he looked up. “Why is a boy ever nice to a girl? I wanted you to like me. I still do.”

Lizzy blinked at him, cheeks tingling. There were no dimples this time, no sign that he was teasing. There were only his words hovering between them, and something warm and unfamiliar unfurling beneath her ribs. She’d had her share of adult relationships, but she’d skipped over this part of adolescence, the giddy flutter of first attraction, the breathless tug of young heartstrings. There’d been no point back then. And there was certainly no point now.

She scrambled to her feet, careful to avoid Andrew’s eyes, and headed for the front door. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was so late. I need to get home before Evvie starts worrying.”

Andrew stood and followed her to the door. “Lizzy . . .”

She turned, her hand already on the knob.

“You could never be invisible to me. Not then, and not now.”

Lizzy nodded, cool and careful as she registered what he was trying to say without actually saying it. “It isn’t about me liking you, Andrew. It never was. But the stakes are higher now. For both of us.”

TWELVE

Andrew watched, cursing himself as Lizzy moved down the front walk. What was he thinking? She’d come to him for help, and instead of offering advice, he’d babbled on like some lovesick teenager and run her off.

Again.

She’d always been skittish around him. Around everyone, really. Why should things be different now? Could he blame her for keeping her guard up? Eight years might seem like a long time to most, but not in a town like Salem Creek, where minds changed slowly—if at all. Though he supposed she knew that better than he.

It had taken less than twenty-four hours for things to get ugly after the Amber Alert went out for Heather and Darcy Gilman. By the next morning the town’s whisper mill had sputtered to life, grinding out a series of ridiculous and baseless speculations. In small New England towns where nothing much ever happened, gossip was a favorite pastime, like high school hockey or cornhole contests at the Sunday barbecue. And like good barbecue, the locals lapped it up.

By the time the girls’ bodies were recovered from the Moons’ pond, the torch-and-pitchfork brigade had begun to clamor for their own brand of justice. After Rhanna’s coffee shop escapade, several churches banded together to organize a midnight vigil—to pray away the evil dwelling in our midst, and see the Lord’s will done.

Flyers had gone up all over town the day before, in shopwindows and on telephone poles, inviting the faithful to gather and pray for the soul of their God-fearing town. The name Moon wasn’t mentioned that night. There was no need. Everyone understood.

All three local news channels had covered the event, complete with plenty of B-roll capturing a sea of righteous faces lit by flickering white candles. When the story was picked up by the larger news outlets, a feeding frenzy ensued, and Randall Summers had been forced to issue a statement urging patience while law enforcement did its job—a hedge against the possibility that such talk might be seen as a call to action by those looking to take matters into their own hands.

Even now, the thought of it made Andrew sick. He’d had every intention of attending that night, prepared to tell every last one of them what they could do with their so-called prayers, but his father had urged him to stay away, explaining that the surest way to fan the flames was to point fingers and pit neighbor against neighbor. He promised that right would win out in the end, that the truth would come to light and the Moons would be left alone. His father hadn’t been wrong about much in his life, but he’d been wrong about that. Salem Creek had never forgiven the Moons. Not for the murders of two young girls, but for the sin of being different.

The day after the vigil, Rhanna had skipped town—proof of the power of prayer, the candle wavers had claimed. Althea had done the only thing she could: keep her head down and fight to hold the tattered remains of her business together. And Lizzy had retreated to the barn, out of the reach of customers and curiosity seekers. And him.

He’d hung around after undergrad at UNH, taking postbacc classes and helping his father with the store, inventing one lame excuse after another to put off applying to grad school. Not that he’d actually fooled anyone. Still, he rarely saw her. Unless he manufactured a reason to walk over to the farm, which he’d done with embarrassing regularity. She’d been a riddle he needed to solve back then, the answer to some question he’d yet to fully form. He’d never walked in her shoes—the other in a world that rewarded sameness and conformity. Instead, he’d been president of the student council, a high school all-American, the son of a respected businessman, who graduated with a fistful of scholarships to his name. It was the kind of white-bread existence guys like him tended to take for granted. But Lizzy had lived a very different reality.

Her family’s history, their choice of livelihood, even the way she looked, was so far from conforming to the norm that she was punished for it. But instead of lashing out, or embracing what made her different, she had withdrawn. And when that didn’t work, she left.

It was Althea who had broken the news. He’d gone over to the farm on some made-up errand for his father, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Her car, a battered blue Honda Civic, was gone. It should have been his first clue. She’d stopped going into town by then. He was pretending to check the flue in the parlor fireplace, trying to think of a way to bring Lizzy into the conversation, when Althea finally volunteered the truth. She was gone, off to New York to study fragrance.

After that, it didn’t take his father long to convince him that it was time to quit moping over a girl who didn’t know he was alive and get himself to graduate school. Eight weeks, maybe ten, and he’d left town, bound for Chicago and the Illinois School of Architecture, vowing that his days of pining for the illusive Lizzy Moon were over.

Now he was back—and so was she.

THIRTEEN

July 23

Evvie was pulling a pan of lemon–poppy seed muffins from the oven when Lizzy came down the stairs. She straightened, the fragrant steam fogging her glasses. “You’re up early.”

Lizzy checked the clock above the sink. It was just after six, early even for her, but after a night of jumbled dreams in which Fred Gilman’s face kept morphing into Andrew’s, she was more than ready to be up and moving. “I had a rough night.”

“That’s what happens when you skip supper. Sit, and I’ll fix you some breakfast.”

“I didn’t skip supper. I ate with Andrew—sort of. I wanted to talk to him about Fred Gilman.”