Prologue PROLOGUE
I knew how easily a story could shift. How quickly the public could turn. I’d seen it happen, twenty years earlier. A game sliding into a crime. A tradition twisting into a nightmare.

I watched as an arc slowly emerged from the series of headlines and police bulletins, until the story had a shape, the truth a sharp end point.

Structure Fire at Perimeter of Wyatt College Burns Through Night

Two Local Men Deceased in Steam Tunnels Under Campus

Police Seek Public’s Assistance in Locating Missing Student, Adalyn Vale

Person of Interest Named in Fire Deaths of Two Men

Wanted for questioning: Adalyn Vale

Wanted for murder: Adalyn Vale

In the days that followed, I’d felt a shift happening inside of me, too.

Confusion. She’d been my roommate for nearly four years—had been my closest friend in those earliest years of adulthood.

Denial. Thinking that the witnesses were mistaken. That she hadn’t meant to do it. It must’ve been an accident—flames in the wind, catching and spreading.

Anger. Because she had fled without a word. And in her absence, I was the only one left to answer for her.

And finally: Fear.

Fear that she’d done exactly what they claimed and I hadn’t known her at all.

Fear because the police thought I was protecting her. And now they kept coming back to me.

Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
Wednesday, August 13

5:00 p.m.

For the moment, nothing outside moved. Not the tall grass lining the highway, encroaching on the edges of the asphalt; not the haze in the sky, hovering over the mountains; and not the sinuous curve of brake lights disappearing into the landscape in front of us.

Only Delilah fidgeting in the seat beside me, checking the time on her phone yet again.

“We’re going to be late,” she said, her leg bouncing from either nerves or excitement. With her, sometimes, it was hard to tell. She was a theater kid, functioning at all extremes, with conviction. But the nuances were harder to discern.

“It’s just dinner,” I said. Which was only partially true. Tonight it was dinner at my parents’ house in town. But tomorrow it was dorm move-in. It was the start of my daughter’s first semester. It was time to say goodbye.

I didn’t understand how we had gotten here so quickly. The previous eighteen years had stretched into a lifetime, and suddenly time was catapulting, leapfrogging.

Over the past year, I’d often been caught off guard by the race of time, missing deadlines, receiving follow-up emails from the high school’s commencement coordinator: Did you order the graduation regalia? Reserve your tickets? It seemed I wasn’t quite ready to face it, so some primitive part of my brain was blocking out key facts.

You’ll be ready when it’s time, my friends who had crossed this milestone before me would say. Trust me, they’d say with a secret look, a knowing grin. Wait until you see what an eighteen-year-old brings into your home.

But she’d turned eighteen in the spring, and I still wasn’t ready.

I was never ready.

Not for the first high fever or the first broken bone—my first failure to keep her safe. I wasn’t ready for the first time I lost her in a store, calling her name frantically down the aisles. The first time she slammed her bedroom door (I’d never felt an echo in my heart like that before). The first secret.

I’d been trying to prepare myself for the feeling of an empty house. A new rhythm, a new routine—but I couldn’t slip it into focus. I felt stranded somewhere in time, with no anchor.

It’s not that Delilah never left. On the contrary, she was fiercely independent—a particular point of pride for both of us. She spent a month with her father each summer. A long weekend here and there with my parents. She went on trips with the school and had sleepovers with friends, got home late (she was always late), made plans and forgot to share them, intentional or not.

But these things were all so temporary, bookended by her presence.

Now she rested her forehead against the window and groaned—as if I could do anything about the standstill traffic on the single route through the Virginia mountains.

I wanted to say: We can turn around. It’s not too late.

I wanted to say: We shouldn’t even be here.

Up until the spring, I’d thought we had a different plan: Two acceptances to in-state schools. A partial scholarship tilting the balance toward one. Easy driving distances.

But somehow we were here instead, on this winding mountain road, driving the four—now six—hours back to the one place I’d tried so hard to leave behind.

I could still feel that jolt of surprise and betrayal when the decision letter arrived—the familiar W of the emblem, sharp as a knife. The realization that she’d applied without telling me.

There were other people I’d tried to blame first: my parents, for still living in Wyatt Valley, just beyond the edge of campus, even after retiring from the faculty. I imagined the stories they must’ve told my daughter, poisoning her with promise. Not to mention the view I knew Delilah had out my old bedroom window on her visits, of the gray stone buildings climbing up the hillside in the distance, like a secret idyll.

The admissions committee, for accepting her in the first place and then making it impossible to say no by offering her a fully covered Presidential Scholarship. If they cared—if they really cared—they would’ve rejected her, in a disguised act of kindness.

I found myself blaming Delilah, even, who had probably marked on the application that she was a legacy, even though that wasn’t technically true. I’d left midway through my senior year, transferred my credits, and finished abroad at a sister school, so my diploma carried the name of a different college.

But I knew the fault was mostly mine. I’d wanted to keep the past from her, pretend it never existed. And in doing so, I had only managed to push her closer, like a magnet. Shouldn’t I have known better by now? It was the singular truth of the teenage years, binding us all across time—a yearning for the forbidden.

Even as she’d sent back her acceptance, I’d imagined all the things I could’ve done to prevent this moment, tracing my missteps all the way back to the start.

I shouldn’t have been so determined to give her my last name instead of her father’s—which would have provided her a layer of removal, making her surname unrecognizable to the town. Delilah Bowery… daughter of Beckett? Granddaughter of the professors Bowery? I should’ve invited my parents to visit us in Charlotte more often so they wouldn’t insist on having Delilah in Wyatt Valley, so close to campus. I should’ve paid more attention during her senior year, asked the obvious question: Are you planning to apply anywhere else? So I could say: Don’t you know what happened there? Don’t you know why I left? Why I had to?

Two men had died. My roommate, the prime suspect, had fled without a trace. And in her absence, I had briefly become a person of interest. Someone the police thought might have more answers than I gave them. Someone the town thought might have been complicit, might have helped the guilty party disappear.

But that was twenty years ago now. Delilah had no fears, and that was purely my fault.

Because I should have told her the truth. Or at least the parts that mattered. The reasons I’d spent so many years avoiding this place.

The town has a long memory.

Not everyone has forgiven.

I should have begged: Please, I can’t go back.

The distance had turned me dangerously complacent. Foolishly confident.

I’d thought I knew my daughter better. I’d thought I knew how best to keep her safe.

But by the time she opened the acceptance letter, it was already too late.

There was no one left to blame but me.

And now here we were, with a trunk full of luggage, backseat piled high with crates and bedding and decor—though I couldn’t imagine it all fitting in her dorm room. My own move-in day: a cinder-block double with narrow beds and a single closet. The memory was crisp and shimmery, even after all these years.

Time had been working like that recently, with moments from the past coming into sharp clarity from nowhere. But the present skewing out of focus, slipping behind me too fast, like the way the fog swept out of the valley with a sharp gust of wind in the fall.

“Mom,” Delilah said, gesturing to the open space of road in front of us, just as the car behind us laid on the horn.

“Finally,” I said, tightening my grip on the wheel.

I knew we were getting closer by the feeling in my chest: that familiar sense of claustrophobia and the way the mountains seemed visible no matter which way we turned—always in the distance, a blue haze hanging in the summer sky.

If I closed my eyes, I could still picture the campus so clearly: The worn gray steps emerging from the hillside, our footsteps racing the hourly chime of the bell. The curved stone walls of the main building and their cool, gritty texture as I dragged my fingertips across them.

In the silence, I could hear the echo of my name in the long hall, laughter in the dark.

On a deep breath in, I could still smell the smoke.

Now Delilah wore a T-shirt with the school’s insignia, a walking advertisement of all I’d hoped to leave in the past. Her dark wavy hair held back with oversize sunglasses, a sparkling phone case in her hand—her name written in loopy cursive with a neon gel pen—and suddenly I was desperate to hold on to it all. Terrified that this place would strip her of the things that made her.

“Doc says the blue is an illusion…” Delilah said, as if she could feel me watching her from the corner of my vision.

“Is that what she says,” I responded, sounding like my mother now, too. My mother, a professor of psychology, never answered questions directly, just led you to the answer she wanted you to find for yourself.

“I’m sure she’s right,” I added. She’d probably read studies about the importance of being honest with children of all ages, as a way to establish trust.

Delilah turned sideways. Her mouth had stretched wide into that beguiling smile that could throw anyone off kilter—even me.

“You know what else Doc told me?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” The motivations of my mother remained one of life’s great mysteries to me. I pressed my lips together.

“She said that you were a total wild child.”

A bark of laughter escaped. My mother was not a fan of idioms, found them lazy or, worse, more revealing of the person who used them than what they were describing. “I just didn’t turn out like she expected, I think.”

“Apparently, by comparison, I’m a breath of fresh air,” she continued, grinning. “I don’t think this is appreciated enough in our household.”

“She did not use that term,” I said, laughing.

“That might’ve been Hal.”

“Somehow I find that equally unlikely.”

Delilah had taken to calling my parents Doc and Hal. I wasn’t sure if it was their idea, but knowing my mother, she would’ve found this charming, delightful. Precocious. A breath of fresh air. Maybe she missed being known as Doc by all her students now that she was retired. When I was growing up, there had been a rotating group of upperclassmen who’d come over for family-style dinners on Friday nights, with a new topic of conversation each week. Even when I was young, I was encouraged to participate. If nothing else, my parents had taught me to develop strong opinions and prepare to defend them. I had learned to hold my own, regardless of my age. I had also honed a stubbornness early; seen conversations as something to win.

“There it is,” Delilah said, just as the sign for Wyatt Valley came into view.

I tried to focus on the things I loved about this place—because once upon a time, I did. I loved this place fiercely. The town was set in the foothills, tucked against the Blue Ridge, where the haze drifted down into the valley and hovered over the trees. It was hard not to appreciate the clarity of the view, the distinct ridgeline in the distance. Something I could trace like my own heartbeat.

I could feel Delilah’s gaze on me instead of the road. I wondered if she had ever clocked the view herself, noticed the way it matched the tattoo on my wrist, hidden under the wide strap of my watch—the number of peaks like a barcode transporting you to this one place, from this one view.

But she was just looking at my grip on the steering wheel, white knuckles and blanched fingertips.

Her fingers drummed against her knee, as if my nerves were transferring to her. As if she could feel it, too—a sense of dread with no apparent cause.

Maybe it was the unnatural stillness of the place. The silence. The way the flags hung down from the front porches and the leaves on the trees seemed eerily static, like you were moving through a movie set.

I lowered the windows, just for a sense of movement, felt the hot rush of humidity pushing in, sensed a wavering of air over the tar-black pavement—an illusion in the stillness.

There are two states of being in Wyatt Valley: the stillness, when the fog settles like a cocoon, and the tree branches hang slack, and nothing stirs; and the howling, when the wind funnels down from the mountain like a cry in the night, first the leaves spiraling, then the snow swirling in eddies up and down the terrain.

In town, we used to await the first howling, welcome it like a ritual. For us, it marked the unofficial turn of the season, ushering in the fall. The stillness always made me antsy, like I was slowly being suffocated. Even the arrival of a new batch of students each year couldn’t shake things up on its own.

There were just over a thousand undergrads on campus, and they stayed largely behind the iron gates up on the hill. When they spilled out, they generally kept to the first perimeter, with the places that had been built and dedicated to them. But the town sprawled downward through the valley.

We drove past the fixtures that hadn’t changed in all the time I’d been gone: the town square, with its maze of streets and restaurants in a grid; and the old sign for Cryer’s Quarry, now with a chain hung across an unpaved access road, though I knew there was a shortcut by foot—a hiking path branching off from the parking lot behind the deli.

Instead of pointing these out to Delilah, I felt the sharpness of twenty years prior.

On the hill in the distance, I saw the campus where I’d spent so much of my youth, and thought: The spot where the smoke rose over the trees, ash falling over fresh snow.

I pulled onto my parents’ street, two blocks from campus, and thought: The corner where Adalyn Vale was last tracked before disappearing, never to be seen again.

I was lost in my own memories, so I hadn’t noticed at first how Delilah had leaned forward until her hands were on the dashboard.

I followed her gaze to the end of the block, where my parents’ street intersected with College Lane—which had once been Fraternity Row, before a series of incidents in the nineties led to their systematic shutdown. The properties had since been annexed back to the town, where they typically housed a rotating assortment of employees and their families.

Now there was a noticeable gap in the row of homes, an empty plot at the T intersection—so that we could see straight through to the edge of campus.

“What happened?” Delilah asked.

“I have no idea,” I said, feeling the unease that came whenever my memory did not line up with reality. “Renovation?” There was always construction happening around campus, and I could see a dumpster beside a heap of wood. But there were people lingering on the other side of the gap, staring.

I pulled up to the curb in front of my parents’ home, half a block from the empty plot. The sun was setting behind the mountains, the sky turning a golden hue, dusk falling.

I heard the distant chime of the bell tower marking the hour, and thought, like I had long ago: Run.

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