I definitely didn’t want to show him the end of the video, the part where I stumbled into SAKE. Because I didn’t want him to suspect me. Ten years later, an unsolved death hanging in the balance, and I cared most about his esteem.
“So you don’t remember deleting it?”
I shook my head, then looked at him slowly. Who’s to say I deleted it, really? Couldn’t it have been someone else, perhaps the other person in the room, alarmed to discover a recording device jangling around in my bag?
“So this is why you had so many questions. About Lloyd. And Edie’s mom.”
I nodded. “I can’t shake this hunch that it wasn’t a suicide. That something happened to Edie.”
He didn’t reply and I pressed my forehead against my knees. “My friends think I’m obsessed,” I murmured, “like this is taking over my life. But you get it, right? Why we need to figure it out?”
“Of course. That doesn’t make you obsessed. It just makes you a good friend. Hey, don’t cry.”
I turned away. Why had I shown him the video? Tessa, Damien, and now Alex: Everyone promised to help. And then they dug a little deeper and told me to back away.
“Just let me know if you think of anything else, okay?” I said. “I tried to track Greg down, but he’s out on paternity leave. Oh, I want to talk to Lloyd—do you have his contact information?”
“Not anymore, no. Maybe you can find it online?”
I shook my head and stood up. “Don’t worry about it. You should probably be getting home, right?”
He stayed planted. “So you haven’t said anything to Sarah?”
I shook my head again. “I’ve been trying to sort of pursue this on my own. Back when we had dinner, she had a lot of conviction that her whole Edie-was-killed theory was stupid.”
He propped his elbows on his knees, his chin on his knuckles. “But it might not be. Let’s talk to her. She might not know what she knows.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Good point. She did follow the same thread, albeit ten years ago.” Never mind that I was a little afraid of shining a spotlight on her memories: Alex and me screaming our hexes on Edie from the rooftop, the little tiff before she headed to the concert.
“Ask her to lunch, something casual,” he said. “I’ll be a surprise. We won’t say it’s to grill her, obviously—just a little reunion. Maybe it’ll knock some memories loose.”
“I’m on it,” I told him. It was nice, having someone else plan the next move—someone decisive and confident, too. In fact, it was hot.
He glanced back at the laptop. “We don’t need to mention the video. Do you want to send it to me? I can check if I recognize anyone else in it or anything.”
The nausea boomeranged back. “I just don’t really want it, you know, in the cloud.” Never mind that Damien and Tessa had copies already. God, if anyone else found it…
“Isn’t it already in an app?”
“Just a filtering app.”
He frowned. “Tomorrow I’ll send you an invite for a file-sharing method. Encrypted. You probably shouldn’t be keeping that on your hard drive, just in case…”
“In case what?” Suddenly I was crying again.
“Aw, Bach. It’ll be okay.” He rose and leaned forward, and I let him wrap his arms around me, my tears streaming into the warmth of his collar. I leaned back and he kissed my forehead; then I turned up my chin and suddenly we were kissing, urgently, his warm soft mouth on mine.
I yanked away first and froze, his face an exact mirror of my shock. Finally I shook my head and wiped the tears off my cheeks dramatically, with the backs of my hands, the way little girls do.
“I’m sorry,” he half whispered, and then he was gone.
I returned to my computer, trancelike, clicked on the folder of Flip cam videos, and opened one from early June. I’d thought it was one of the gang at Rockaway Beach, one where Alex and Edie couldn’t keep their hands off each other, where they embraced in the chest-high water, laughing and kissing and bobbing like a single buoy. Self-flagellation, something to make me feel extra terrible after what I’d done.
But I mistook the date and what popped up instead was a dark scene in a bar. With a little effort, the lens focused on Sarah and Kevin, playing Jenga and sipping beer. Why did we play so much Jenga? Everyone waved languidly at the camera and