then Tessa’s expression softens. “Linds, you don’t know what it’s like to have to stop your best friend from killing herself. It made me realize you’re really fucking good at not letting on when you’ve hit rock bottom.” She sets her fork down on the plate. “I just didn’t want that to happen again. I’m sorry if that feels like an invasion of privacy, but I didn’t know what else to do. I can’t always be here to keep an eye on you, and…” She spreads her palm over her belly. “I mean, soon it’s gonna be kind of hard to see each other at all.”
I blink at her, then nod. We eat in silence for a few more seconds.
“There’s something else,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I know you’re Jenna.”
She swallows, blinks. “Who’s Jenna?”
“I remember you now.”
Another silence, both of us frozen, and then, from inside my room, the sound of my phone ringing. We both turn to look at it as the hollow buzz starts again.
Then we’re both moving, a race, and the dishes explode on the floor as I dash into my bedroom, yanking my phone off the nightstand just in time to see that it’s a missed call from Damien. I’d thought Tessa was running for the same thing, but I look up and she’s in the doorway with a knife from the sink, sticky with fruit juice.
“Give me the phone,” she says, a hand outstretched.
“Tessa…”
“Give me the fucking phone. Don’t test me.”
I stare at her, then look down and begin frantically swiping. Home button, emergency call, 9—
She snatches it out of my hands and glares at me as it begins ringing again. She holds down a button to turn it off, then slips it into her back pocket.
“Okay, let’s calm down,” I say, lifting my palms. “Think this through. You don’t want to hurt me.”
“None of this was supposed to happen,” she says as her eyes fill with tears. “I thought you’d just make peace with what you’d done.”
“Tessa, put that down.” I back farther into the bedroom and she follows, the knife tip shaking.
“I’m sorry, I can’t, you can’t know.”
“Think this through. This isn’t gonna save you. It’ll only make everything worse.”
She shakes her head. “I have to do it,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
The moment slows and I have time to take it all in: the knife quivering in her left hand, the tear that tumbles down her cheek, the sudden step forward with her left foot, and then—graceful, slow-motion—the right hand swooping out and closing around my wrist.
I jerk back and yank at her fingers with my other hand, and the knife darts forward, slices my knuckles. I scream and keep twisting, then shift my weight and land a kick to her gut. She shrieks and releases my arm, doubling over.
“I’m pregnant!” she screams, as if I’m the reckless one. “How could you!”
I scramble onto the bed and tumble off it behind her, shooting through the hallway and toward the front door. I hear her pounding up after me, and I’m a few feet from the door when she lands a tackle. My temple hits the hardwood floor and I see stars, millions of them, a dazzling image of the night sky.
She drops the knife with a clang and clasps both of my arms behind my back. A crash near my head as she pulls my lamp off the side table and then she’s wrapping the cord around my wrists, again and again and again. A pile of slick photos topples from the end table, too, fluttering through a few feet of air together, and one lands upside down, tipped up against the table leg: Edie and me, pale in the camera’s flash, on any one of a million anonymous nights.
This is it, then. I wonder what Tessa’s planning next: a bottle of force-fed whiskey, perhaps, followed by a few handfuls of antidepressants crammed down my throat. No, of course: a gunshot to the head, my fingerprints on the trigger, and a suicide note on my phone. I love you, I’m sorry, goodbye. Lucky for her, I never did delete any of the files that point to my obsessive research, my potential guilt—the case files, the Flip cam videos. The email from Edie. Her old diary, now trapped inside my phone.
Tessa climbs off me, and I take the opportunity to roll onto my back and sit up. She comes back with a gun in her hand—a decent one, I observe blandly, a Ruger 9mm. I