She got a job teaching English at the prep school right after she’d earned her master’s, still staying with her dad, to save. That was the same year Aidan finished his postdoc.
That was also when he left me, in a sudden, jarring blindside—so fast and unexpected that the anger first masked the heartbreak, and even now I wasn’t sure whether I was more upset about the loss of the relationship or the way it had happened.
He was leaving for a better opportunity, he said, and maybe it’s time we stopped pretending this was working. This could be an opportunity for both of us. And when I argued, tried to understand where this was coming from, he threw his arms out to the sides and said, My God, Harper, I just have to get out of here.
Like some switch had been flipped and he was seeing this place with fresh eyes—the four walls limiting him, the neighborhood roads circling back around, and me, always the thing he was coming back to.
As if I were something that required escaping.
There was nothing secret about our breakup—it was a casualty of the summer, and there was nothing better to do than watch the unraveling. There was a moving truck, because he took half the furniture. I demanded the cat in a moment of insanity. Aidan held a going-away party with the guys in the neighborhood—Javier Cora, Mac and Preston Seaver, Chase Colby—and they all pretended this was a normal thing to do. No one mentioned how I supported him through his education, and then the second he was done, he left me.
Even my dad was unsympathetic when I told him. He’d never been a fan of Aidan, had tallied his shortcomings on both hands when I told him we were moving here together; said it was in my nature to want to see only the potential in people—like it was some great character flaw.
Aidan and I had bought the house together, in theory. But it was only my name on the mortgage because Aidan had terrible credit and an unappealing debt-to-income ratio (one of the many warnings from my dad), so it was easier to qualify without him.
And then Ruby’s father sold their house and moved away. When Ruby asked if I could use a roommate, I was still recovering from Aidan’s blindside, still caught off guard at the end of each day by the silence here. The unsettling emptiness that seemed to have its own presence.
I gave her Aidan’s office, on the second floor, across the loft from the master suite. She piled her things in her car and drove it the two blocks to my place, and I scooped up her clothes from the backseat, laughing. I was twenty-eight, she was twenty-three, and I wasn’t sure which of us was doing the other a favor right then.
Now, at thirty and twenty-five, the gap between us felt smaller.
Eventually, Margo made a production of leaving the pool, saying to no one in particular that it sounded like nap time, as if she needed a polite excuse to make her exit. She swooped her gear into the stroller, the yellow floatie spilling over the seat, and hitched the baby onto her hip.
Preston stood next, towel slung over the distinct tan line on his upper arm, and nodded in our general direction as he headed toward the gate. I tipped my chin back, the faintest response, a force of habit. Ruby, committed to the cause, did not acknowledge him.
I checked my phone, but no one else had contacted me. Mac never responded. To be fair, I wouldn’t, either—not if I thought she might notice. I would keep my distance. Keep out of it. Hope this was temporary and we could all go back to our lives tomorrow.
No one else came to the pool, though the hours grew hotter, more stifling.
“How lucky for us,” Ruby said, reaching into the Tupperware bowl of fruit, “to have the pool all to ourselves.”
We passed the time in silence. Sun and drinks and me, always, with my eye toward the entrance.
Ruby dove into the deep end, floated on her back, and I felt myself being drawn into the past. All these things we had done before, as if we could excise the time between. The scent of sunscreen and chlorine and Ruby’s steps leaving footprints across the concrete, her hands twisting the ends of her hair, squeezing out the excess water.
She hooked her ankle around the leg of her lounger, pulling it farther away from the encroaching shade, in a sharp kick of nostalgia—so that I could almost taste the extra-sweet sangria Ruby would make, tossing in whatever fruit I happened to have in the fridge at the time, the mixture cloying at the back of my throat. The way my skin would feel on those endless days, absorbing the summer sun, before I showered off back home later, when the sting of the burn slowly revealed itself from the inside out.
And then the neighbors started passing by for a closer look: walking dogs or strolling by, on their phones. One by one, as if it were coordinated. Each one slowing, watching briefly, and then moving on.
These people who, after her arrest, always had a feeling about Ruby Fletcher, her perceived crimes expanding in retrospect. Saying, Money went missing from my wallet at the barbecue; from my living room at that New Year’s party; from my pool bag—it was Ruby. I know it. The paranoia gaining force as people searched for signs, for clues, for how we had missed the danger among us for so long.
Finally, I saw Chase. He wasn’t in uniform, but he was walking as if he were. Confident and full of authority, with his large frame and ramrod-straight posture. Stopping and staring from across the street as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Dark hair buzzed short, wide stance, arms hanging stoic at his sides. He stood there for a long time. If Ruby noticed, she didn’t let on.
We used to see Chase as our cop. We could count on him to fill us in on the cause of the sirens, or the status of the car break-in investigation, and we called on him at neighborhood meetings, plying him for information with beer at the pool. He lent a sense of security. But he became something different after Brandon and Fiona Truett.
The message board had started the same way—as a source of information: Who has the number for a good plumber? or What was that loud noise in the middle of the night? and Did you hear about the prowler in the neighborhood up the road?
Hollow’s Edge was a force, as a group, over the last five years. We caught package thieves. We saw a coyote and warned neighbors to keep their small pets inside at night. We caught Charlotte’s husband bringing another woman home when Charlotte was out. We solved mysteries. We solved problems. We crowdsourced data and posted the video feed from our security cameras. We extrapolated results.
But the board, too, had subtly morphed with time. After the deaths of Brandon and Fiona Truett were deemed suspicious, eventually, and with Chase’s guidance, we believed we had solved the case of who killed them. We pieced together Ruby’s movements, her time line, and the police came by for our evidence, our message board comments morphing into official statements.
We were more careful now. In person and on the message board. Posts were deleted as soon as people stopped responding and sometimes sooner.
Ruby picked up her purple insulated cup and raised it toward the iron gates where Chase stood, in a mock salute. Of course she’d known he was there.
He finally turned back up the road, and I breathed slowly, deeply, as he disappeared from sight.
“Okay, you made your point,” I said. “I’m baking here. Let’s go.”
“All right,” she said, stretching. “Anyway, I’m famished for some real food.”
* * *
I SCANNED THE AREA for Chase as we walked back, worried he was somewhere else: waiting in the woods; waiting in front of my house. I kept an eye out for anyone at all. But no one came outside.
They were watching, though. I could feel it in the shadows behind the windows. In the way everyone remained behind the safety of their walls.
All the things that seemed so appealing when we moved to Hollow’s Edge: Its insular nature. Its privacy. That close familiarity. The safety of neighbors who would look out for one another.
All of us were held hostage by it now.
The truth was, after the deaths of Brandon and Fiona Truett, we were trapped here. We were trapped with one another and what we had each said and done.
; CHAPTER 3
I CONVINCED RUBY TO LET me order in, to relax with a pizza in the living room, Koda curled up beside her on the other end of my couch as she sat with my laptop open in front of her.
“You sure you don’t mind paying?” she asked as she quickly added an assortment of clothes to the online cart.
“No, of course not.” I’d gotten rid of her things, and now she sat beside me, still smelling faintly of chlorine, hair damp and tangled, in more of my summer clothes. She didn’t have a credit card, or employment, or a bank account.
She selected one-day rush delivery and passed the laptop my way so I could enter the payment information. “I’m good for it,” she said with a wink. I’d never seen her wink before. It was things like this—quirks I didn’t recognize—that I found most unnerving.
She scooted closer, the cushions sinking between us, so that I felt her brush against my shoulder as she watched me finish placing the order. “Hey,” she said. “Let’s see what they’re saying.”
I froze, my heart in my throat. “You want me to Google your name?” I could only imagine what things might come up—links I’d already clicked, articles I’d read, every one of them already consumed by me in private.
“No,” she said, “I mean here. The message board. What they’re saying here.”
My fingers tingled. That wasn’t any better. Ruby had never been a member of the Hollow’s Edge community page, since she wasn’t an owner herself. Charlotte was the president of the board and had established an arbitrary set of rules that dictated who could be permitted access to the message board—homeowner being the main criteria. She’d decided back then that Ruby was something between an unregistered tenant and a long-term guest.
But I couldn’t deny her now. Not when she was sitting so close, wearing my clothes because she owned nothing of her own. Not when I’d convinced her to stay in—some dark secret I might still be able to contain.
She watched as my fingers flew over the keyboard, typing the URL, my log-in already in place. The page loaded quickly, entries sorted by date. There were no new posts from today. Not a single one.
“It’s not the same anymore,” I told her. “People don’t use it as much.” Then I shut the laptop quickly, before she could scroll down, call me on my bluff.
She let out a sigh as she edged back to her side of the couch. “I’m not sure what I expected,” she said, reaching for another slice of cheese pizza. “Maybe my picture on every security camera on the street.” She smirked, then closed her eyes as she inhaled the scent of greasy pizza. I guessed this was another thing she’d missed. “Did you ever get yours fixed, Harper?”
Once upon a time, I’d had a security camera, too. Angled over the front porch—a deterrent more than anything. But it hadn’t recorded that night. Whatever service Aidan set up had long since expired.
“Never got around to it,” I said. Though the device still sat there, uselessly pointed at empty space. Those cameras, for our safety, they could just as easily be turned against you. The petty infractions they exposed; the relationships they ruined. I wasn’t sure a camera would ever keep me safe when the person convicted had a key.
After we finished eating, I took our plates to the kitchen and tossed the pizza box in the trash can inside the garage, thinking Ruby would be heading to bed soon. Thinking surely she’d be as tired as I was. The sun and the drinks, and who knew how long it had been since she’d last slept.
“Do you need anything before I go to bed?” I asked, turning off the television, hoping she would take the hint.
She shifted positions on the couch, letting Koda settle onto her lap. “I’m good. I’m just—God, it’s so quiet. I’m not used to so much silence.”
But it was only inside the walls that was quiet. Outside, the sounds of the night came alive, things encroaching from the woods and the lake. The crickets chirping and the tiny frogs bellowing, a sound I once mistook for something larger, until a frog had plastered itself to the front window—letting out a call so sharp and close, I’d thought it was a cry for help.
During the investigation, we had established an official neighborhood watch. A self-imposed curfew. The remnants of our fear carried over long after. We locked our doors and the patio gates, we pulled the curtains tight, we slept with a can of Mace beside our beds—or more. We listened to the silence. We whispered. We reimagined the noises we’d heard drifting from our neighbors’ homes. The music at three a.m. The fight. The bang. We stared at the ceilings, slept odd hours, searched through our old camera footage.
Ruby didn’t know, she had come back to someplace different.
“Good night, Harper,” she said when I hadn’t made a move to leave.
“Good night,” I said. I hated to leave her there, but I did. Didn’t want her to think that I didn’t trust her here, that I was afraid.
My room—the master—faced the front, and hers faced the back, a smaller room with a Jack-and-Jill bathroom connecting to the loft, which looked out over the stairway and entrance. Inside my bedroom, I checked my phone one last time. No one else had reached out. I’d expected more calls, more texts, more questions. But the silence said something, too. The nature of my friendships here, too fragile to withstand Ruby’s return.
The thing we learned last year, or maybe the thing we had always known, was that there were two versions of Hollow’s Edge. There was the one on the surface, where we waved to our neighbor, and passed along recommendations, and held the pool gate, smiling.
And then there was the other, simmering underneath.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d witnessed the same from the inside, growing up. With my brother, Kellen, in and out of rehab since he was sixteen, and the strain of my parents’ relationship, fracturing under the disagreements and the blame. So different from the facade we presented to the outside, glossing over reality with good posture and white lies.
Eventually, I heard Ruby coming up the stairs. I heard her in the shower. I relaxed, rolling over, eyes fixed on the door. And then I saw her shadow just outside my door. I counted to ten, and it didn’t move. I stared at the doorknob, thinking I should’ve locked it. Then wondering which was worse—Ruby coming in or Ruby realizing I was afraid?
Finally, the shadow retreated. But I heard the sound of her steps on the staircase and then the back door creaking open. I bolted upright in bed, imagining all the places she could be going. All the things she could be doing. Staring at the clock on my bedside table to mark the time—being a good witness.
Maybe there was nothing to worry about here. Maybe I was reading too much into things. Maybe she just wanted fresh air, and who could blame her, really?
But all I could think of was that other night. The one we had to keep revisiting, with the cops, with ourselves—when I’d heard that same creak of the back door and the shower running around two a.m.
It hadn’t meant anything to me then. Not even after we’d found them.
No one was afraid at first. Shocked, yes. Upset, of course. But not afraid. Or at least not afraid of anything more than ourselves, what we might’ve missed. Because when Brandon and Fiona were discovered deceased, we didn’t yet know it was a crime—well, nothing further than a domestic crime of murder-suicide (and we could make a case for it going either way). A crime that was self-contained.
But slowly, in the days that followed, the scene shifted.
The carbon monoxide detector—the same model in every home—was no longer in its place, or in the house at all.
The police started coming door-to-door, asking where we were that night, what we’d heard, what we’d noticed. And finally, we understood: Someone else had been in that house with Brandon and Fiona Truett.
Someone who had killed them.
SUNDAY, JUNE 30
HOLLOW’S EDGE COMMUNITY PAGE
Subject: REMINDER! Hollow’s Edge Fourth of July Pool Party
Posted: 8:47 a.m.
Javier Cora: Come watch the Fourth of July fireworks wi
th your neighbors on Thursday! We’ve got a great view of the lake show from our very own pool. All are welcome!
Margo Wellman: Is this such a good idea right now??
Javier Cora: Why wouldn’t it be?
* * *
Subject: Neighborhood Watch
Posted: 9:02 a.m.
Margo Wellman: Can we please get this going again?
Preston Seaver: Yeah, we kinda let it drop over the winter. I’d be in to start the rotation again.
Margo Wellman: Chase?? Didn’t you help organize this last time?
Charlotte Brock: Chase is no longer a member of this group.
CHAPTER 4
WHEN I CAME DOWN the stairs just after ten a.m., Ruby was cooking breakfast—toast and eggs, and leftover watermelon cubes in an open Tupperware container. I’d been waiting things out in my room, showering in my attached bathroom, checking the neighborhood message board, peering out my front window for any sign of activity—unsure how to approach another day with Ruby in this house.
“Morning!” she called, two mugs of coffee already on the counter, Koda eating from a fresh bowl of food at her feet. From her bright tone and easy smile, I didn’t think it was her first cup. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts and gym shorts, bare face and hair pulled back tightly. Her skin had bronzed slightly from the sun, except where it had turned pink high across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
“Ouch,” she said, reaching out to the base of my neck, two cold fingers pressing into my skin. “You burned.”
I’d felt it in the shower, hot and painful under the water pressure. “How long have you been up?” I asked, taking the mug she offered me with an outstretched hand. Old habits. Old roles.
“A while. I think my body is so accustomed to the routine, it doesn’t know what to do with itself.” Head tilted to the side, as if waiting for me to ask a follow-up question.
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