“Sara—”

She walked over to him, because she always had to do everything. She put her hands on his shoulders. Looked him in the eye. “We can either talk about all the things that we’re not talking about, or we can go to the bedroom.”

His jaw tightened, but he looked persuadable.

“Will.” Sara brushed back his hair. His skin was hot. She could smell the light scent of his aftershave, which meant that even though he was mad at her, he had still shaved for her because he knew that Sara preferred his face to be smooth.

She kissed him lightly on the lips. When he didn’t resist, she kissed him again, this time making it clear that there were other things she could do with her mouth.

Will seemed game until he wasn’t. He broke away. He stared down at her. She could see all of the things that they were both afraid to talk about bubbling to the surface.

Sara would not survive another argument. She kissed him again. Her hands slipped inside his shirt. She let her fingers trail along the ripple of muscles. She whispered in his ear, “Come sixty-nine with me.”

His breath caught. His heartbeat doubled. She felt his response pressing against her leg.

“Sara—” his voice was thick in his throat. “Should we—”

Her lips brushed his ear. She kissed his neck, started to unbutton her shirt. She could still feel his reluctance even as he cupped his hand on her breast. Her mouth went back to his ear. Instead of kissing it, she clenched his earlobe between her teeth.

Will’s breath caught again.

She told him, “Let’s get a little rough.”

This time, when she kissed him, he kissed back harder. He grabbed her by the waist. He backed her into the cabinet. Her body crushed against his. His hand squeezed her breast. She felt the blissful release of her senses flooding with desire.

But then Will stepped away.

He held her at arm’s length. “I’m sorry. This is my limit.”

She shook her head. “What?”

“You’ve hit my limit, Sara. This is it.”

“What are you—” She said the words to his back, because he was walking away from her. “Will.”

The door closed behind him.

Sara looked around the kitchen, trying to replay in her head what had just happened.

What limit?

What did this is it mean?

She tried to button her shirt. Her fingers were clumsy. Will was screwing with her, playing some kind of game. He was probably waiting on the other side of the door, expecting her to chase after him. They had danced to this song once before, back when Sara had reached her own limit. She had been livid with Will for hiding things, lying to her face. She had told him to leave and he had left, but when she’d opened the door, he was sitting in the hallway waiting for her. He had said—

I don’t have a lot of quit in me.

Sara rubbed her face with her hands. She wasn’t about to quit Will, either. She couldn’t be untethered right now. She would have to fix this no matter what. If that meant apologizing to a sulking grown man, then she was going to apologize to a sulking grown man.

Sara walked to the door. She threw it open.

The hallway was empty.

Grant County—Wednesday

12

Jeffrey sat across from Kayleigh Pierce inside the dorm she shared with Rebecca Caterino. He didn’t have time to kick himself for not listening to his instincts. The Caterino case had gone from a DOA to an accident to an attempted murder and possible sexual assault within the span of twenty-four hours. What he needed now were facts. Everything they had done so far had been going through the motions. Now he knew the hard truth.

Caterino had been targeted by her attacker. You didn’t just walk around with a hammer unless you had plans to use it. The girl had either been followed off campus or followed into the woods by someone who intended to commit an act of violence.

And now, Leslie Truong, the witness that his own damn team had let walk away, was missing, possibly abducted.

The only path open to Jeffrey was to start over from the beginning.

“I don’t know what I can say?” Kayleigh had a habit of letting her voice go up at the end of every other sentence, as if she was asking a question instead of answering one.

He said, “I know you already talked to one of my officers. Just take me through the events of yesterday morning. Anything you can remember would be helpful.”

She picked at a piece of loose skin on the sole of her foot. The girl was wearing blue silk pajamas. Chinese characters were tattooed on the inside of her wrist. Her short blonde hair had worked its way into a spiral while she’d slept.

“Like I said, I was asleep?”

Jeffrey looked down at his notebook. He silently debated whether or not to tell Kayleigh that her friend had been attacked. He went with his gut, which was telling him that the second she found out, her usefulness as a witness would take a nose-dive. The girl tended to turn everything back around on herself. Which wasn’t unexpected. She was still at that age where you could only see the world through your own lens.

He told Kayleigh, “Go on.”

“Becks was really mad at us? All of us? She just started screaming like a crazy person, knocking stuff over, throwing things?”

The kitchen was a mess, but Jeffrey could tell the garbage can had been kicked. The plastic was dented. The trash on the floor had created a slime trail. The only item that seemed to have been spared was a tan leather backpack beside the fridge.

He asked, “Why was Beckey mad?”

“Who knows?” Kayleigh shrugged, but Jeffrey could guess that she not only knew what her friend had been angry about, but with whom she was angry. “She kicked open my door? And she yells, ‘you bitches’ like she hates us? Then I follow her to her bedroom to see what her deal is? Only, she won’t tell me?”

“Beckey’s room is at the end of the hall?”

“Yes.” She finally managed to phrase a proper answer. “When we first got here, everybody saw the room was the smallest, and we were all bracing for a fight or something, but Becks goes, ‘I’ll take the small one,’ and like that, we were all best friends.”

“Was she seeing anyone?”

“She broke up with her girlfriend over the summer? But there’s been nobody since then. Not even a date. There’s a lot of assholes on campus?”

“Was anyone fixated on her?”

“No way. Becks didn’t even go to bars or have fun or anything?” She shook her head hard enough to make her hair fly. “If someone was, like, fixated, I would’ve gone straight to the cops. The for reals cops, not the mall cops on campus.”

Jeffrey was glad she knew there was a difference. “Did Beckey ever tell you she felt unsafe? Or like someone was watching her?”

“Oh my God, was someone watching her?” She looked at the kitchen, the door, the hallway. “Should I be worried? Am I, like, in danger?”

“These are routine questions. It’s the same thing I would ask in any other interview.” Jeffrey watched the anxiety tease in and out of her features. Within an hour, every woman on campus would probably be asking if she should be worried. “Kayleigh, let’s concentrate on yesterday morning. Did Beckey say anything to you when you followed her back to her bedroom?”

“She was, like, putting on her running clothes? Which, okay, she likes to run but it was super early? And then Vanessa goes, ‘Don’t go out at rape o’clock,’ which was funny at the time, only, now we’re all just so worried because she’s in the hospital? And her dad, Gerald, called this morning and he was crying, which is hard because I’ve never heard my own dad cry, so hearing him cry made me really sad?” Kayleigh rubbed her fingers into her eyes, but there were no tears. “I had to tell my teachers I need to skip classes for the rest of the week. It’s just so random? Becks going for a run, then she hits her head and her life is—her life is, I don’t know? But it’s so sad. I can barely get out of bed because what if it had been me? I like to run, too.”

Jeffrey paged back through his notebook. “Deneshia told me that Beckey spent the previous night at the library.”

“She did that a lot. She was, like, terrified of losing her scholarship?” Kayleigh took a handful of tissues from the box on the table. “I mean, she talked about money a lot. A lot? Like, not the way you talk about money, because you just don’t?”

Jeffrey was familiar with the paradigm. Growing up in Sylacauga, he had known that he was poor, but he hadn’t realized until his first day at Auburn what the opposite of poor really looked like.

He asked, “Is that her backpack?”

Kayleigh looked over at the kitchen. “Yeah?”