She looks to me, eyes watery. “It was a prank. I know that,” she says. “When you took my clothes that day, Iggy, when we skinny-dipped in The Hollow…” She pauses to breathe, like she’s steeling herself to let something out she’s held in far too long. “I know you didn’t mean anything by it, not really. But you left me there, and…” She trails off again, the center of our collective concern and attention. “Abel found me.”
Cold dread trickles down my limbs. I don’t want her to keep talking. I don’t want to know any more.
“The cold in that cave was miserable, but in the end, it was a blessing. My skin was numb enough to where I could hardly feel his touch. I didn’t fight back,” she says. “I just—I let him do what he was gonna do.”
My insides tilt and lurch—like the floor is sliding out from beneath me. I think again of when I saw her the next day by the lockers at school, how she acted like nothing had happened, nothing but that blush of humiliation creeping up her neck.
She looks to Sheriff Ryan, whose face looks hard as stone. “I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone knowing what Abel had done to me. What you or Mom, or, later…” She pauses. “What Waylon would think. I just… I guess I just wanted to forget. To pretend it never happened. The only person I ever told was Cat. She begged me to tell you, but I couldn’t. Cat stayed quiet for me, and she always felt guilty. Because maybe if we had told”—she turns her gaze back to me, pleading for me to understand, words quickening—“Izzy was such a spark plug. She must have fought back. I’d always had that thought. I did.” She pauses and looks to her hands, which are folded and holding her belly. “I just wasn’t brave enough to say what he’d done.”
I hold on to the wall for balance.
Everything I thought I knew reshapes itself.
Izzy over at the Sherman house, lying around in her pajamas, teasing Abel all the time, snatching the hat off his head. How she loved to get a smile out of grumpy old Abel Sherman.
How he liked to watch the teenagers floating the river and hanging out down at The Hollow.
How he brought us warm towels and cold Dr Peppers, kept that Polaroid of us in our swimsuits taped to his fridge, let us ride up in the seat beside him in his pickup.
How he closed up his property after Izzy disappeared and watched the search party with a shotgun on his lap.
It was never Ben he was protecting. He was protecting himself.
And, oh God, I think I might be sick.
Because I had told Izzy to rip off the Band-Aid, to go straight to the Sherman house that day. And she must have. But she hadn’t found Ben.
She had found Abel.
“I’m sorry,” Melanie says, pleading to everyone now. “I’m so sorry, everyone.” She starts to cry. Sheriff Ryan embraces his daughter so gently, it feels wrong to witness. This isn’t a moment meant for spectators. He squeezes her shoulders, which are shaking with silent sobs, and shushes her so softly that I know it’s the same way he must have soothed her when she was a little girl.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHTMELANIE
By the next afternoon, the ground outside is slushy with mud and the remnants of snow as I trudge out to pack our things into the back of the van. Waylon is here now, and he takes my hand so we can walk back to the Amenity Center together.
He’d been worried. He had a front-row seat to the damage—live oaks splintered by the wind, power lines sagging under ice, low water crossings glazed slick as glass. In twenty-four hours the storm had paralyzed the whole state. Highways shut down. Families huddled without heat in stone ranch houses built to trap cool summer air, not keep out the cold. He heard about people sheltering in cars to stay warm, about the pileups on the interstates, about fires sparked when space heaters tipped. He heard about the gunshot too, heard about Abel.
He said he flew over the roads, that he white-knuckled the wheel, as soon as he was able.
That made me swat his arm.Waylon Campbell, you could have got yourself killed.
But he didn’t care. He burst through those double doors with such force you’d have thought they were made of paper, and he beelined straight for me, Hannah, and the boys, and gathered all of us up in a big bear hug. He didn’t even pester Hannah about her hair—though I’m sure he’ll have a mouthful to say about it once the shock of all this dies down and regular life settles back into us like sand.
Inside the Amenity Center, only a few of us remain. Most people went home the minute the roads were declared safe to travel. The dressing room and that whole back corridor has been blocked off with crime scene tape, though I guess there wasn’t really a crime, just an old man who chose to leave the world.
Mark is up on a ladder, tugging the sequined curtains from the Miss Lone Star stage, and passing them down to Emily. She catches each length and folds it neatly into a box. They work quietly, efficiently, but something’s missing. Normally, Mark can’t go five minutes without reaching for her—an arm around her shoulder, a brush of his hand at her back, some small sign of affection. Now there’s nothing. Just silence, just fabric sliding from his hands to hers.
I hope they can find their way back to each other, because I know that underneath all this ugliness is love. Emily’s reasoning for hiring the PI, however misguided, came from her love for Olivia, from wanting to protect her. And Mark will always put Olivia first. If anything can hold those two together, it’s her.
I’m glad Olivia has them, two parents who care deeply about her. She has me too. She’ll always have me.
And, of course, she has Hannah. I look to the girls now, Hannah, Olivia, and Sarah Lynn, over in the corner, wrapping power cords over their arms. I was all wrong about Sarah Lynn. The three of them now, heads shaved, necks long, and chins held a little higher, look like they’re lighter without all that hair weighing them down. It was an act of friendship, of reckless boldness that comes from being together. I think of Cat standing up for me in the cafeteria. I think of the time we jumped from that high boulder into the well of The Hollow. Me, scared to leap. Cat, grabbing my hand. The two of us free-falling and the cool, thrilling reward of the water swallowing us whole.
I was never as brave as those three girls were, stepping onto that stage, heads bare and not a flinch from any of them.
But I do feel braver today than I ever have. It’s a scary thing, thinking about the past, dredging it up, speaking any part of it outloud. It still fills me with such an awful shame. Everyone has been so sweet to me, though, fussing over me. I’m not comfortable with all the attention, to be honest.
I find Iggy stacking up chairs in the storage closet.