pauses a second to free her ponytail, yank it back into place.
Martina’s mind travels to the olive branch she extended to Aster tonight when she invited her to come along. Things have been frosty verging on arctic between the two girls since Martina aired her interview with Anna three weeks ago. There was a momentary thaw when it looked like Max Adler might be a real suspect—a new arrest to give the Spanos family hope while Anna’s story disintegrated between their fingers—but with no arrest made and Max’s role crystalizing in the public eye (an asshole, for sure, but not a killer), the glares Aster shoots Martina at school have become pure ice again.
Aster walks ten steps ahead of Martina, her pace quick and sure-footed. Martina has barely extracted herself from the privacy hedge, but Aster is halfway down the drive, veering right to skirt the porch, her body swallowed by shadow as she rounds the side of the estate.
Martina picks up her pace. Her friend knows the Windermere grounds well, has spent afternoons here with Zoe and Caden, others babysitting Paisley. But this place—made even more gothic, more ghostly in the cold October moonlight—is uncharted ground for Martina. She stops a moment to tip her head back, straight up to the third-floor balcony that has loomed with infamy in her mind’s eye since August. It juts out against the sky, a stone jaw missing a few teeth at the rails. No bird-boned girl could survive a fall from such a height. But no, Martina reminds herself, pressing on down the drive, after Aster, no one fell from Windermere.
To sort story from reality. Fact from fabrication. That’s why Martina is here tonight, at least she hopes. She’s here for Anna, mostly. She’s spent weeks torn between Anna’s potential guilt and innocence, but now Martina is sure. Anna didn’t kill Zoe, accidentally or otherwise. But someone did. She hurries quietly around the side of the estate, into the backyard where the weeds reach up to snag her tights like bony fingers in the moonlight. She shivers.
Aster is already at the back of the property, feet planted in the soot where the stable doors used to be. Their destination. The ruined ground the keeper of Zoe’s secrets. Because after Max left Zoe alone that night, something happened. Her story continued, then ended somewhere between the Windermere stable and Parrish Lake. The rational part of Martina’s brain says it’s too late to find anything here, that the police missed their chance at answers when Caden threw away the empties he found, when Max failed to report his story back when it could have been of any use, before the stable burned to the ground three months ago.
But a small, insistent tug in her gut says she has to look for herself. For Anna. And that bringing Aster with her tonight, including her in this longest of long-shot attempts at finding something, anything police missed in the ruins of the Windermere stable, might be the only chance she has of winning her friend’s forgiveness. Because if they find something tonight—a scrap of information, a shred of a clue—maybe, just maybe, Aster will begin to thaw the hard wall of ice she’s raised between them.
Martina steals one glance back at Windermere, eyes traveling up to the second floor. The windows are dark. Caden is all the way across the Long Island Sound, in New Haven, but Mrs. Talbot is inside, hopefully sleeping deeply. Martina feels bad about snooping around out here without permission, but she knows enough about Caden’s mom’s desire for privacy to know that asking would have gotten her nowhere. So.
“See anything?” she stage-whispers to Aster as she steps across a charred beam, into the soot.
Aster stays where she is. She hooks her thumbs into her jeans pockets and shrugs. “What’s to see?” she asks, not even attempting to whisper. Martina flinches, but they’re far enough out on the property that there’s no way Mrs. Talbot could hear them through closed windows. Hopefully.
“It’s just a bunch of burned-up wood and charred metal,” Aster continues. “If there was ever anything to find, it burned with the stable.”
Martina presses her lips between her teeth. Aster’s not wrong, probably, but she had been hoping that once they got here, Aster would get into the spirit of the search. Instead, her resentment toward Martina is as steely as ever.
“I’m going to start looking around.” Martina tugs on a pair of latex gloves and holds another out toward