This wasn’t just a walk, and we both knew it.
“The Black Wood is enormous. Finding anything there will be impossible if we don’t know what we’re looking for.” Jameson matched his stride, slow and steady, to mine. “The brook is easier. It runs most of the length of the property, but if I know my grandfather, we’re not looking for something in the water. We’re looking for something on—or under—the bridge.”
“What bridge?” I asked. I caught sight of movement out of the corner of my eye. Oren. He stayed in the shadows, but he was there.
“The bridge,” Jameson replied, “where my grandfather proposed to my grandmother. It’s near Wayback Cottage. Back in the day, that was all my grandfather owned. As his empire grew, he bought up the surrounding land. He built the House but always kept up the cottage.”
“The Laughlins live there now,” I said, picturing the cottage on the map. “Emily’s grandparents.” I felt guilty even saying her name, but that didn’t stop me from watching his response. Did you love her? How did she die? Why does Thea blame your family?
Jameson’s mouth twisted. “Xander said you’d had a little chat with Rebecca,” he said finally.
“No one at school talks to her,” I murmured.
“Correction,” Jameson replied. “Rebecca doesn’t talk to anyone at school. She hasn’t for months.” He was quiet for a moment, the sound of our footsteps drowning out all else. “Rebecca was always the shy one. The responsible one. The one their parents expected to make good decisions.”
“Not Emily.” I filled in the blank.
“Emily…” Jameson sounded different when he said her name. “Emily just wanted to have fun. She had a heart condition, congenital. Her parents were ridiculously overprotective. They never let her do anything as a kid.
She got a transplant when she was thirteen, and after that, she just wanted to
live.”
Not survive. Not just make it through. Live. I thought of the way she’d laughed into the camera, wild and free and a little too canny, like she’d known when that picture was taken that we’d all be looking at it later. At her.
I thought about the way that Skye had described Jameson. Hungry.
“Did you take her driving?” I asked. If I could have taken the question back, I would have, but it hung in the air between us.
“There is nothing that Emily and I didn’t do.” Jameson spoke like the words had been ripped out of him. “We were the same,” he told me, and then he corrected himself. “I thought that we were the same.”
I thought about Grayson, telling me that Jameson was a sensation seeker.
Fear. Pain. Joy. Which of those had Emily been—for him?
“What happened to her?” I asked. My internet search hadn’t yielded any answers. Thea had made it sound like the Hawthornes were somehow to blame, like Emily had died because she spent time at Hawthorne House. “Did she live at the cottage?”
Jameson ignored my second question and answered the first. “Grayson happened to her.”
I’d known, from the moment I’d said Emily’s name in Grayson’s presence, that she had mattered to him. But Jameson seemed pretty clear on the fact that he’d been the one involved with her. There is nothing that Emily and I didn’t do.
“What do you mean, Grayson happened to her?” I asked Jameson. I glanced back, but I couldn’t see Oren anymore.
“Let’s play a game,” Jameson said darkly, his pace ticking up a notch as we hit a hill. “I’ll give you one truth about my life and two lies, and it’s up to you to decide which is which.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be two truths and one lie?” I asked. I may not have gone to many parties back home, but I hadn’t grown up under a rock.
“What fun is it,” Jameson returned, “playing by other people’s rules?” He was looking at me like he expected me to understand that.
Understand him.
“Fact the first,” he rattled off. “I knew what was in my grandfather’s will long before you showed up here. Fact the second: I’m the one who sent
Grayson to fetch you.”
We reached the top of the hill, and I could see a building in the distance.
A cottage—and between us and it, a bridge.
“Fact the third,” Jameson said, standing statue-still for the span of a heartbeat. “I watched Emily Laughlin die.”
