THEN

The media obsession with Flora Banning was stifling. The world loves a pretty dead girl. Wesleyan, a place where people were always protesting something, became an angry mob gunning for Kevin, faces hidden behind JUSTICE FOR FLORA signs. The Butts C girls kept up a vigil in front of our old room, flowers and teddy bears and candles that were perpetually unlit.

The argument: Kevin was guilty. He hadn’t physically done it, but he had emotionally manipulated a girl into doing something completely out of character. Without the text messages he’d sent, Flora would still have been alive.

But Kevin’s family hired a defense lawyer who had a different argument. Jon Diamond had a cocky smile and a square jaw and hair that must have left grease stains on his pillow. Jon Diamond, whose services apparently came at a hefty cost, argued that Flora was mentally unbalanced and had obviously been dealing with undiagnosed depression. He twisted what her parents, sister, and friends had said, along with the anonymous testimonies of “classmates” who didn’t want to be named. Flora was a young woman who was sick on the inside, according to Jon Diamond, and invisible illnesses are among the most deadly.

“Think about this,” he told the press after Kevin’s hearing. “Think of all the times you’ve said the wrong thing to your girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife. All the times when you maybe weren’t thinking clearly because you were upset yourself. Are you responsible if that person does something to themselves? Most of you are going to say no, you’re not, the blame lies with them, because we can’t make anyone do anything they weren’t going to do already.”

Online, groups of Kevin supporters sprouted up, mostly girls who thought he deserved better. They believed it was Flora’s fault. Sometimes I agreed with them. Flora had never felt like she needed any armor. The world had rolled her on its tongue, so careful not to bite into her delicate flesh.

We weren’t careful. She was chewy when our teeth went in.

I obsessed over every news update, every nasty comment under the articles. I knew my escalating paranoia had become boring to Sully, but I couldn’t stop fixating on Flora. On the part I’d played. “Somebody’s going to find out,” I repeated, ignoring her eye rolls. “They’re not done with us yet.”

I wasn’t wrong. Because eventually, they searched Kevin’s computer and found our emails, and Felty was able to prove that I’d lied to him about Dartmouth.

“Miss Wellington,” he said when I found myself at the Middletown Police Department again. “Or do you go by Amb? That’s what Kevin called you, right? In your emails.”

I was going to pass out—I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten. Some people, the ones who hadn’t been paying attention to the growing rumors, might have assumed I was dealing with grief over my roommate’s suicide. In reality, my fear took up too much space. The fear that I would end up exactly where I was that day, with Felty across from me, smug in his uniform.

“It sounds like you and Kevin had a very friendly relationship. A real love story for our time. Is that what you believed? You had such a connection.”

I was incapable of speaking. I would never make it as an actress if I couldn’t deliver even a basic line.

“It seemed like you both wanted the same thing: Flora out of the way. How far did you go to make that happen?”

I squeaked out seven words, a sequence I had heard in the movies, on TV, happening to people who weren’t real. “I want to speak to a lawyer.”

In the end, I didn’t need one. The emails didn’t prove anything. They were Felty’s attempt to break me. All the emails showed was that Kevin McArthur was an asshole who lied to his girlfriend, and I was the bitch who went along with it. His inbox and text history were a treasure trove to the prosecutors, who smeared him in the media as a serial cheater who didn’t care about Flora’s well-being.

Felty’s last words to me were permanently stamped inside my head. The truth has a way of catching up, eventually.

Which meant I had to run fast.

After Felty reluctantly let me go, I knocked on Sully’s door. I needed her. I needed everything to go back to how it was. We ended up at a WestCo party, where a bump of cocaine and one drink sent me into a fevered tailspin. My demons weren’t gone. They were still attached to me, hanging by thorny tails. The pair of guys Sully wanted us to hook up with found an excuse to disappear when I vomited into a plastic cup.

“It was the scariest moment of my life,” I slurred on our walk back to the Butts, grabbing Sully’s arm, which she quickly pulled away. “You have no idea what went through my head. Felty isn’t giving up. He knows. Did I tell you about his sister?”

“You told me,” she said. Her hair was tucked up under a slouchy knit beanie and I couldn’t read her face.

“Kevin wasn’t that drunk,” I said. “He’s going to put it together. What would you do? I mean, he must know we were the only people who could have taken his phone. It’s not like he believes he sent her the messages.”

“How do you know?” Sully shoved her hands in her jacket pockets—it wasn’t even her jacket, but one she had stolen from some guy—and didn’t look at me. “A guilty conscience makes people believe all sorts of things. When you don’t want to deal with what you actually did, your brain can convince you that you’re somebody you’re not.”

We weren’t talking about Kevin anymore. It was the distance hovering there, the breadth of a hair multiplying into inches.

“What if he’s protecting us?” I had never said it out loud before.

Sully sucked in a breath, swallowed part of the 2 a.m. sky. “There is no us.”

She said it so quietly that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her. “What?”

She stopped and crossed her arms. “There is no us, Amb. You were the one who sent those texts. Yeah, I took the phone. But only as a joke. You’re the one who did the rest.”

You’re the one. There it was, yawning between us. She was cutting her losses. I was her losses.

I had no argument, because what she said was true. I was the one who’d typed those messages and hit send. She hadn’t been whispering in my ear, telling me what to say, and the truth of that was like a block of ice lodged somewhere between my throat and my stomach that would never melt. I had to believe somebody else was the bad influence so I could live with myself.

But it was me all along.