CLAIRE

NOW

The bedroom door opens, making my heart ricochet from my chest to my throat. Amos wanders in, a bottle of Jack Daniels tucked under his arm. He’s put on some weight in the past six months and lost some of his tan.

“Where’s Kat?” I ask.

“In the shower,” Amos says. “Washing away the shame of getting her ass kicked.”

“I didn’t kick her ass,” I mutter.

Amos twists the cap off his Jack. “Oh, you totally did. It almost made me pop a boner.”

My cheeks fill with heat. Amos takes a swig from the bottle and offers it to me.

If it weren’t for the gun in his other hand, I would grab the bottle and break it over his head. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Amos shrugs. “A combination of poor parenting and generational entitlement.”

I wish it had been his face I’d slammed into the dresser. Amos sits on the squat wooden chest in the corner of the room, eyeing me over his bottle of Jack.

“All of that shit at the lake house—you being decent to me,” I say. “You just wanted to find out what I knew. What I remembered.”

Amos stands. I recoil as he steps toward me; he grabs a pillow from the bed and settles back onto the chest against the wall, stuffing the pillow behind his back. “Gotta hand it to you. It’s impressive you found this place. I don’t know why Kat thinks you’re so stupid.”

I swallow the sting of rage. “You were there. On the mountain.”

“So you remember, then,” Amos says, considering the label of his bottle. “That’s impressive. I thought for sure you were done when Mike yeeted you into that tree.”

I consider my options; if I tell the truth, that I still don’t remember everything that happened, Amos might view me as less of a threat.

But pretending that I do remember might be my only chance at finding out, after all this time, what really went down on that mountain. And something tells me that no matter what, Amos is not going to let me leave this house.

I command my head into a weak nod. “Why did they want me there?” I ask.

“They wanted a witness.” Amos wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “If you told everyone a man with a gun took Kat away in the middle of the night, Marian might be more inclined to fork over the money to get her back. See, my grandmother may be a bitch, but she’s as smart as she is cheap. We needed her to think from the beginning something bad had happened and Kat and Jesse hadn’t just run away.”

“You said take Kat away. What was supposed to happen to Jesse?”

“Jesse was going to be shot and thrown over the mountain during the kidnapping for trying to intercede,” Amos says. “At least, you and your boyfriend were supposed to think that’s what happened. Mike was gonna wave his gun around and demand you all stay in your tents. Jesse, of course, would ignore him and go to save Kat and then bang.” Amos makes a gun out of his fingers.

I stare at Amos. “And you thought I would just believe all of it was real?”

Amos shrugs, his expression dark. “You’d know the gunshot was real.”

A creak on the floorboards outside the bedroom makes Amos lower the bottle from his mouth. Jesse steps into the room.

“Get out, Amos,” he says.

“Uh, no, Jeremy,” Amos says.

Jesse sits at the edge of the bed. There’s something different about him—beyond the short haircut and the bulk he’s added to his arms. There’s a forcefulness in his voice I’ve never heard before.

“I’ve got first watch,” Amos says.

Jesse’s face turns scarlet. “I’m not leaving you alone with her.”

“Well, I’d be stupid to leave you alone with her,” Amos says.

“Guess neither one of us is leaving, then,” Jesse answers.

“Guess so.”

Jesse and I stare at each other for a bit before I say, “I hate your haircut.”

“I like yours,” he says back.

I glare at him. “Why the hell did he call you Jeremy?”

Jesse’s face flushes. Oh. That’s the name he’s been going by.

I turn on my side and draw the comforter up over me. Stare at the wall.

“Claire,” Jesse says softly. “Please talk to me.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“Then think of something. Even if it’s telling me how much you hate me.”

I raise myself up just enough to support my weight on my elbow. “You really want to know what I’d like to say to you?”

Jesse swallows. “I’m sure I deserve whatever it is.”

“I think your mother would be disgusted with you.”

Jesse’s jaw goes rigid. In the corner, Amos lets out a seal bark of a laugh and says, “Shit, that was cold.”

I roll onto my other side, facing the wall, my heartbeat quadrupling in pace.

Jesse’s voice is quiet when he finally speaks. “I’m sorry. For everything.”

I yank the bedspread up to my chin, breathing through my mouth to avoid its musty smell. “Mike could have killed me.”

“You weren’t supposed to get hurt,” Jesse says. “You weren’t supposed to be there, on the trail, on the way down. We thought you made it back to the lake house.”

I clench my jaw so tight it feels like my molars might shatter. “So it’s my fault?”

“No—that’s not what I meant, obviously.” Jesse shifts on the bed next to me. “I don’t know what Kat and Amos have told you, but we didn’t do it for the money.”

“I don’t care why you did it,” I say, even though it’s a lie. I just want to use every tool I have to hurt Jesse.

“Her dad was abusive,” Jesse finally says. “It got to a breaking point, and when Kat asked her grandma for help, she told her she wouldn’t pay for her to go to BC unless she broke up with me.”

The pounding between my eyes reaches a crescendo. I don’t know if I’d be able to process what Jesse’s saying even if Amos hadn’t beamed me in the head with a shovel. “Back up,” I say. “Her dad abused her?”

It’s Amos who responds. “You really didn’t have any idea?”

When I turn to face him, he’s frowning, the Jack Daniels bottle wedged between his legs. The look on his face makes my mouth go dry.

“How did he abuse her?” I ask. “Like…sexually?”

“You watch too much TV,” Amos says.

“Then what did he do to her?” I catch Jesse’s eyes. I wonder if any answer will be good enough for me; if there’s anything Kat’s father could have done to her to justify any of this.

Jesse breaks my gaze. In the corner, Amos fiddles with something from his pocket: a cigarette lighter.

“Why wouldn’t she tell me?” I demand, when their silence becomes too infuriating to sit with anymore. “If her father was abusive, why wouldn’t she tell her best friend?”

“She never said anything to me either,” Jesse says softly. “Not until she was forced to.”

“No one had to tell me,” Amos says. “I saw for myself.”

I’m quiet as I rewind through thirteen years of memories of Mr. Marcotte. Yes, he was hard on Kat.

“Once when we were kids, we were fucking around, playing with her dad’s stuff,” Amos says, turning over the lighter in his hand. “He had this engraved cigar torch I was obsessed with. He caught me playing with it and picked me and Kat up by the backs of our shirts. Dragged us outside and held me over the deck railing. He stuck the flame right in my face. Kept saying, You want to see what fire does to the body?”

Amos sets his lighter down, looking at neither Jesse nor me.

My stomach turns over; if that’s what Mr. Marcotte was willing to do to his nephew, what was Kat’s punishment? “But if he was that bad, why didn’t she tell anyone years ago?” I ask. “We could have gotten child protective services involved—”

Amos laughs. “Do you know how hard it is to get a kid taken away from their family? Especially when it’s a family with money and everyone in it is either in denial, like my aunt Beth, or an extremely skilled liar, like my grandmother.”

“She knew?” I stare at Amos. “She knew Kat was being abused and didn’t do anything?”

Amos snorts. “My grandmother’s been covering for his ass since he was in diapers. Why do you think no one knows the real reason Johnny left the air force?”

Real reason? “I thought he retired,” I say.

“He was forced to retire. He was such a nightmare that his subordinates threatened to sue for harassment. They got rid of him quietly before it could become a whole thing.”

I glance over at Jesse for confirmation. He’s studying his hands, folded together, thumbs hugging, almost as if he’s praying. A crush of fear hits me that’s so powerful, it wipes my mind of everything: Mr. Marcotte, Marian, Kat, what they did to me.

I need to get the fuck out of here.

“What are you guys going to do with me?” I ask.

Amos lowers the bottle so it’s resting on his kneecap. “We haven’t decided yet.”

“What are you waiting for? People could be looking for me.”

“But they aren’t,” Amos says. “Not yet. I checked your phone—your parents think you’re at school.”

“Where is Kat?” I ask.

“She had to go do something,” Amos says. “She’ll be back soon.”

“Are you sure about that?” I say.

This prompts Jesse to break his silence. “What do you mean?”

I shrug. “She obviously doesn’t care who she screws over to get away.”

I turn to face the wall, pulling the blanket over my body. Before I do, I see the worry flickering in Jesse’s eyes.

---

—

They’re watching me in shifts. I don’t know what they think I’ll do if I’m left alone up here; jump thirty feet out the window onto packed snow and ice, breaking every bone in my body?

Amos, Jesse, Amos, Jesse, Amos. I get the sense he never strays far from this room.

The sky is deep indigo and shot through with gray clouds when Jesse opens the door. He’s holding a TV dinner, steam rising from the surface.

“ ’Bout time,” Amos says. “I gotta piss.”

Jesse’s gaze doesn’t move from me as Amos gets up, cracks his shoulder. He plods out of the room, across the hall, closing neither the bedroom door nor the bathroom door behind him. When Jesse finally speaks, it’s over the rushing sound of Amos peeing.

“You hungry?”

“I’m not eating that.”

“They’re actually not bad,” Jesse says. “We’ve kind of been living off them.”

“I’m not worried about the taste.”

“You think I did something to it?” Jesse gapes at me. “Come on, Claire.”

“You left me for dead on that mountain.”

“I wanted to go back for you. Make sure you were okay. Mike and Amos—” Jesse throws a glance over his shoulder. Across the hall, the toilet flushes. “He’s out of his mind.”

“You expect me to believe Amos is the ringleader here?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Kat is the only one of you who’s smart enough to pull all of this off.”

Jesse looks down at his hands. “I know that.”

I stare at him, anger rising higher in me with each second he spends staring at his goddamn hands. “You think what you did is okay, because it’s what she wanted? What you did to me is okay?”

“It’s not what she wanted—we didn’t have a choice.”

“That’s bullshit.” I sit up. “You could have waited until she turned eighteen and her family couldn’t tell her what to do anymore.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered as long as her dad was in the picture.” Jesse massages his eyelids with the heels of his hands. “Claire, you have no idea who he really was. The things he did.”

Jesse’s voice cracks. He lowers his hands, finally looks me in the eye. “He was a monster, Claire. The world is better off without him.”

“How do you know that’s not all Kat ever wanted?” I ask. “To get rid of him and have his blood on someone else’s hands?”

“That’s not what she wanted,” Jesse says.

“How do you know?”

“Because I know her.”

The implication is clear: Jesse knows Kat, and I never did. And she’s changed Jesse, or maybe I never knew him, either.

“Five years old,” I say. “She and I have been friends since we were five years old and she was willing to let me die to get what she wanted. If you think she won’t do the same to you, you’re an idiot.”

Jesse presses his fingers together, tents his hands over his mouth. Stares at the wall. “Then I guess I have to hope she never stops wanting me.”

“I’m glad that’s your answer,” I say, rolling over to face the wall.

“Why?”

“Because now I can finally get over you.”