Taylor, now trembling, shook her head. “I’m not. I swear it.”

Beth refused to waver.

“Whatever,” she said. “I don’t know if I can forgive you. I’m going through lots of stuff right now. And I guess I’m going to have to do it alone. Thanks for nothing, Taylor.”

“I didn’t tell Starla anything,” Taylor repeated. “Sit down. Let’s talk about this. There has to be some other explanation.”

“I’m not talking. I’m not staying.”

“Please,” Taylor said, now almost ready to cry herself.

Beth shook her head. “Here,” she said, pulling a frayed bracelet from her wrist. Her hand trembled a little as she held it out to Taylor.

Taylor knew what it was and what it meant immediately. She, Hayley, and Beth had made matching friendship bracelets out of embroidery floss and seed beads. They’d promised never to take them off. Hayley’s and Taylor’s fell off a month or two after they’d made them. Not Beth’s. Beth had worn hers every day since seventh grade. Until today.

“I don’t want that,” Taylor said.

“Neither do I.” Beth dropped the bracelet on the bedroom floor. She turned around and ran down the stairs.

The front door slammed so hard it rattled the dishes in the china hutch. Kevin looked up from his computer screen. A second later, Taylor’s door slammed shut. Kevin knew that it wasn’t his place to intercede. Teenage girls take no prisoners. No dad ever wanted to be caught in the middle.

The place in the middle was filled with quicksand.

BACK IN HER OWN BEDROOM, Beth Lee pulled down the window shades and ignored the texts from Taylor, a series of which had started to bombard her as she walked home from the Ryans:

TAYLOR: WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

TAYLOR: I DIDN’T TELL HER!

TAYLOR: WE ARE BFFS.

TAYLOR: TALK TO ME.

Beth flopped on her bed and buried her face in her favorite squishy pillow. She wanted to shut out everything that had to do with Olivia Grant just then, but she couldn’t. She felt such guilt, such deep shame, over what she had said to Olivia the day she died. Trying to make it go away only served to push it more in the forefront of her thoughts. It ran over and over in her mind even as she desperately sought to erase it forever. Right after she had snapped the Polaroid, before she opened the door for Drew, Beth had begged Olivia not to go to the party without her.

“Don’t be so bloody needy, Beth,” Olivia had said, running her fingers through her long red hair. “You’re so intense about everything. Everything is so important. I mean, costume shopping with you was fun, but now I need to get out of here.”

“Don’t go! Let’s just stay here and have our own Halloween party,” Beth had thrown out in desperation.

“Are you kidding? That’s crazy. I wish I’d been assigned to another family. Cheers,” she said and slipped out the door.

At the time, Beth had considered jamming out Olivia’s eyes with the chopsticks in her hair, but the idea was only a thought, not a plan. As the front door closed, in an undertone so very low, Beth let out her final thought: “I wish you would drop dead.”

The memory sent a pool of acid to her stomach, and Beth fought the urge to throw up. Saying something so ugly to another person wasn’t who Beth was or wanted to be.

Yet she’d done it once before. She hated thinking about it, but that horrible memory came back so, so clearly.

The night before the Daisies’ crash a decade before, her sister, Christina, refused to let her use the periwinkle-blue crayon. Beth had wanted it for some flowers she was drawing, but Christina was using it to color a Disney princess and refused to hand it over.

“It’s the wrong blue,” Beth had said, trying to give her sister a better color.

“No,” Christina had said firmly. “Mine. You use another.”

Beth had shoved the box from the tabletop to the floor. A rainbow of crayons scattered. She pushed back from the kitchen table and started for her room.

“I wish you were dead,” she had said, stomping away. “If you were dead I’d use any color I want any time I want. You’d never boss me around again. You’re such a brat!”

“You’re mean!” Christina had cried.

By the middle of the next day, rain pouring down, wind howling across the Hood Canal Bridge, Christina and four others had perished in the choppy, cold water. For two years the Disney princess coloring book page hung on the Lee refrigerator. It was the last thing that Christina Lee had made.

Every day Beth had looked at it and wanted to tear it into confetti and flush it down the toilet, because she’d never get a chance to unsay the awful thing she’d said.

Now, Beth had done it again. She had wished Olivia Grant dead. And she was.

Beth rolled onto her back and looked at the web of tiny cracks in the plaster ceiling. She didn’t believe in the supernatural, but she did believe in coincidence and karma. Two people were dead, and Beth tossed and turned on her bed wondering, Did I have something to do with it?

She got up and went for her sketching supplies. She fished through the pile and found just the right pencil. She drew water, sky, and an island in the center of it all. Her movement across the page was fast and furious. Somewhere between art and therapy, a picture emerged.

All in periwinkle blue.

Christina, I miss you. If Olivia is with you, tell her I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.

Chapter 17

IT WAS LIKELY ONE OF THE SADDEST homecomings ever. The British Airways flight from Seattle to London carried the entire Grant family home. Edward and Winnie were ensconced in business class, while their daughter was stacked among the luggage in the cargo hold. The dead sixteen-year-old’s body, released from the Kitsap County morgue the day before its departure home for burial, had been sealed in a wooden box and then in a box marked with red and black biohazard stickers and a notation that the coffin contained human remains. Down in the belly of the 747, the air was cold and the sound of the aircraft was nearly deafening. It was no place for the living. And aside from the animals being shipped overseas, it wasn’t.

Inside the passenger section of the aircraft, Edward and Winnie tried to pass the time watching movies, but neither could focus on anything. Edward, in particular, was having a hard time of it. He wondered over and over if there was something he could have done that would have changed what happened to his only child. If he’d let her go to Malta with friends the previous summer, maybe she would have met a boy. Maybe she would have never come home, and while that would have been far less than ideal, it would have been better than going to America and being killed. Everything would have been different. The ramblings of his mind were ludicrous and he knew it, but he’d lost his baby and the hurt of that loss was deeper than he could have imagined.

People had tried to make Edward feel better. They told him that time heals all wounds. Even those who had lost a child of their own offered words of comfort. But what was meant as a gesture of support came across as glib. Edward Grant was coming to the realization that there was no loss greater than the loss of one’s child. And even with all his money, status, and power, there was not a single thing he could do about it.

If Olivia in her shipping-crate coffin could have commented on her current accommodations, she would have been mortified that she was now considered a biohazard. It seemed like a mean designation to put on a girl. She also might have taken some delight in her traveling companions in cargo. Olivia’s body was stored next to a series of crates containing four miniature poodles and a golden retriever. Olivia loved animals. She really did. She also would have told her father that she loved him if she had had one more chance. Winnie, not so much.