The three of us clean as a family.

Even Josh gets into it. He hates cleaning his room, but this is more of a cleaning adventure. You have no idea what disgusting nugget you’re going to find around every corner. For example, in an empty garbage can in the kitchen, we find a frozen rat. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen, but Josh gets a real kick out of it. And Shane gets a kick out of him getting a kick out of it.

“Please get rid of that rat,” I mutter to Shane. “I don’t want him trying to take it home to show his friends.”

Shane laughs. “You definitely understand the mindset of the ten-year- old boy.”

Unfortunately, after about two hours of cleaning, we have released a fair amount of dust into the air, and Josh can’t stop sneezing. His nose turns red and his eyes are watering.

“I think you need to go outside,” I tell him. “Get some fresh air.” “Actually,” Shane says, “we could take a walk. The woods right

around here are really cool during the winter. We could even build a snowman. What do you say, Josh?”

“Sure,” Josh agrees.

I shake my head. “It’s too cold. I don’t want to wander around in the woods.”

Shane glances over at Josh and then looks back at me. “Well, I could take him myself if you want to stay behind.”

An alarm bell goes off in my head. Don’t let him do this. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

Shane looks at me for a moment, his eyes darkening. “Why not?” “Because it’s not safe.”

“It’s perfectly safe.” He frowns. “I used to go through these woods all the time when I was his age. By myself. And I’ll be with him—I’ll look out for him.”

“I know but—”

“I’ll keep him safe.” Shane’s face turns slightly pink. “Don’t you trust me?”

Do I?

I was the one who made sure Shane got released from prison. I invited him back into our lives. He’s my son’s father. He’s our chance at being a family again, and if I can’t trust him, I have much bigger problems than the two of them taking a walk together in broad daylight.

Josh tugs on my arm. “I want to go, Mom.”

Even Josh wants to go. The two of them are finally bonding. It would be cruel to keep it from happening.

Shane reaches into his pocket and pulls out his flip phone I bought him. He shakes it in the air. “I’ve got my phone. You can reach me if you need to. And I’ve got your number if I need you.”

“Fine,” I say. “Just be careful.”

Shane lays a hand on his chest. “I swear, I will protect him with my life.”

I believe him.

I make sure Josh puts on his hat and gloves, and Shane does the same. I walk them to the door, and I watch them step into the small wooded area next to the farmhouse. At one point, Josh slips on a patch of ice, but Shane reaches out and steadies him.

It will be fine. Shane is Josh’s father. He won’t let anything happen to

him.

I go back into the farmhouse, closing the door behind me. It is getting

cold out there, definitely below freezing. I bet that after ten minutes, Josh will start complaining and want to go back inside. Although he isn’t as bothered by the cold as I am. I always have had to struggle to get him to put his coat on for school, as if there’s any chance I would let him go to school in just a sweatshirt when it’s twenty degrees out. I wonder if Shane was the same way when he was a kid.

My back aches slightly from all the cleaning, so I take a minute to sit on one of the chairs we cleaned off. I dig my phone out of my coat pocket

—it’s just barely getting a signal. One bar for the cell service, but I guess that’s enough. I bring up the Internet browser and hesitate for a moment before typing: Timothy Reese.

I don’t know why I keep looking him up. Nothing changes day to day, now that it’s been two months since his arrest. Right after, his name was plastered in every single newspaper. It was a big story—a mild-mannered assistant principal who killed a former girlfriend and might have been responsible for multiple murders years earlier.

Tim has had the gall to plead innocent—I almost feel like he’s doing it to torture me. A woman’s body was found in his basement. Does he really think there’s any chance he is walking out of prison after something like that? I’ve already been told that I will be testifying at his trial. I’m dreading it, but that’s what I have to do. It’s my fault he didn’t go to prison ten years earlier. He had me completely fooled.

I’m not going to waste any more time thinking about him. I delete his name from my search engine.

Instead, I bring up the local news site on my phone. I’ll browse a few stories while I’m waiting for Shane and Josh to build their snowman or for Josh to get cold and want to come back, whichever comes first. It takes forever for the news site to load up. The text pops up first, with the pictures still loading on the screen. This is probably going to drain my battery. While I’m waiting, I look at the first story:

Local Prison Guard Found Murdered

I stare at the headline, my heart sinking into my stomach. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t.

I try to click on the headline. Nothing happens. Why does the Internet have to be so bad out here? The picture next to the headline is filling in practically pixel by pixel. The beginning of a bald skull materializes on the screen.

It can’t be Marcus Hunt. It can’t.

And then the picture fills in a bit more. Just enough so that I can see his eyes.

Oh God. It’s him. It’s Hunt. He was found dead—possibly today. I tap on the article again, but the screen has completely frozen. I’m not going to get to read this story. I don’t know when this happened or how, but somehow, Marcus Hunt has been murdered.

This is breaking news. Which means they must have just found him recently. Was he killed overnight? I have no idea.

But I do know that this morning, my car keys were in a different place than I left them when I came home yesterday. And I also know that after everything that happened at Raker Penitentiary, Shane must despise Marcus Hunt with a burning passion.

My head is spinning. I jump out of the chair, pacing around the room as if it might give me some clue about what went on last night. But of course, the room is completely silent. No clues. Just a lot of dust.

I freeze when I get to the foot of the stairs. I rest my hand briefly on the banister. Like everything else, it’s dusty.

This is exactly where I was standing when Tim tried to strangle me. I had just come down the stairs, running out of Chelsea’s room because, for some crazy reason, I got it in my head that she might have stabbed Brandon and Kayla. Little did I know, she would be dead herself soon after, and my decision to leave the room cost my best friend her life.

I close my eyes, trying not to think about that night, but that only seems to make it worse. The more I try not to think about it, the more vivid it all seems. In the last few years, the memories had almost faded. But now that I’m standing in this farmhouse again, it seems like it all happened yesterday.

I ran out of Shane’s bedroom. I raced down the stairs as quickly as I could, then I tripped. And then quick as a flash, Tim was on top of me, tightening that necklace around my neck as the smell of sandalwood filled my nostrils. Then there was a crack of thunder, masking another sound I couldn’t quite make out.

I can almost feel the weight of his body crushing me. The air being cut off from my lungs. And I try to scream:

Shane, no!

My eyes fly open again. I back away from the stairwell, my heart pounding in my chest. As the years went by, I started to doubt myself. I never saw his face, so it could’ve been anyone that night. Except it wasn’t anyone. I knew who it was that night. And I know who it was now.

It was Shane.

I had been dating him for months. I knew his body. I knew it was him on top of me. It wasn’t Tim, who was skinnier and lankier. It was Shane.

Shane was the one who tried to strangle me, and he was probably the one who murdered Hunt last night. How could I have ever deluded myself otherwise?

Hunt was right. Shane is manipulative. He really made me believe… My whole body is trembling. I can almost feel that crack of thunder

that shook the house all those years ago. And the sound that it almost masked. The missing piece of the puzzle. I can almost hear it. It was…

A muffled scream.

While Shane was strangling me on the floor of the living room, Chelsea was screaming in the upstairs bedroom. She wasn’t screaming because she saw what Shane was doing to me though—because the door to the bedroom was closed. She was screaming because somebody was coming at her with a knife.

Except it wasn’t Shane. It couldn’t have been.

There was another killer in the house that night. Out of the three survivors, there was only one other person it could have been.

Oh my God.

Tim and Shane did it together.