Chapter One: Three Hours

I wake up with my shoes on.

That’s the first thing. Not the cold, not the light coming through the blinds in flat gray bars, not the taste in my mouth like I’ve been chewing pennies. My shoes. Laced. Double-knotted, the way I do them when I’m going somewhere I might have to run.

I don’t remember tying them.

I lie very still and run the checklist, because that’s what you do. Criminology 104, Professor Lowell, week two: the body is a scene. Process it like one. Start at the perimeter and work inward. Don’t touch anything until you’ve looked at it.

Perimeter: my bed, made. I slept on top of the comforter, still in my coat. There’s mud on the duvet in a smear the shape of a heel, dried to the color of old blood. Callie is going to lose her mind.

Inward: my hands. Dirt packed black under four fingernails on the right, clean on the left. Pine needles caught in the cuff of my sleeve. A long shallow scratch across the back of my wrist that stops where my watch strap starts, which means I was wearing the watch when it happened, which means it happened after 8:40 p.m., because I remember checking the time at 8:40 p.m. while Callie tried to convince me that a party is a social obligation and not a controlled environment for the exchange of poor decisions.

Inward: my forearm. Four bruises. Spaced like fingers.

I look at them for a long time. Long enough that the light changes. Then I roll my sleeve down over them, because there’s a difference between processing a scene and standing in the middle of one.

My hair smells like gasoline.

Across the room, Callie’s bed is a disaster in the specific way it’s a disaster every morning — comforter half on the floor, three pillows, a hoodie thrown over the desk chair with one sleeve inside out. Her side of the room looks like a small weather event. Mine looks like a hotel room somebody checked out of.

She came home. She’s not here now, which means she’s gone for coffee, which means I have somewhere between nine and twenty minutes depending on the line.

I sit with that for a second, and the relief that goes through me is so total it frightens me, because I hadn’t consciously known I was checking.

Here’s what I have.

8:40 p.m. Ardsley Hall, Callie in my doorway holding two pairs of earrings up beside her face like she’s asking me to choose a personality.

“Crescents or the little gold bars.”

“They’re earrings, Callie.”

“They’re a thesis statement, Sloane.” She turned her head to model them, which is a thing she does, which I have stopped pointing out. “Bars say I have a five-year plan. Crescents say I have a secret.”

“I don’t have a secret.”

“You are made of secrets, you’re like a Russian doll of not telling me things.” She dropped the crescents into my palm. “Wear these and let a boy be intimidated by you. It’s good for the local ecosystem.”

That’s the last completely ordinary thing that happened to me.

9:15 p.m. The house on Route 9. Not a frat house — one of the rentals out past the county line, the kind with a porch that sags and a landlord nobody’s ever met. Music through the walls. Mara Quinn on the stairs in somebody else’s jacket, looking at me the way you look at a word you’re trying to remember.

11:52 p.m. I know it’s 11:52 because I sent Callie a text: ten more minutes. She never answered. She was three rooms away and she never answered, which is not like her, which I file and do not open.

And then.

And then nothing. Not darkness — darkness would be something. Darkness has an edge you can feel your way along. This is nothing. This is a page torn out so cleanly you’d never know the book was ever longer.

The next thing is 3:20 a.m., and I’m standing at the gate of Ardsley Hall, and my hands are shaking so hard I can’t get my ID out of my pocket, and there are taillights going away down the hill.

Three hours and twenty-eight minutes. Gone.

It’s happened before. Twice this year, both times small — twenty minutes in the library, forty in the laundry room. Dr. Lowell has a word for it and a folder for it and a soft voice she uses when she says both. Sloane, this is your brain protecting you. Sure. Great. Fantastic protection. Very thorough.

Three and a half hours is not twenty minutes.

I sit up. The room tilts and settles. I put my hand in my coat pocket for my phone. The fabric is damp against my wrists, heavy and stiff with dried grime — a subtle reminder that I collapsed here without even taking it off.

There are two phones in my coat pocket.

Mine is the one on the left, cracked across the corner, 12% battery, seventeen notifications I’m not going to look at yet.

The other one is not mine.

It’s newer. Heavier. There’s a chip of green polish on the case where somebody picked at it, and I know that green, I have seen that green across a lecture hall on a hand raised to ask a question that made Professor Halloway stop talking for four full seconds.

I press the side button.

The screen lights up on a photo of Mara Quinn at the lake, squinting, laughing at whoever’s holding the camera. 6:04 a.m. Two percent battery. And under the time, one notification, undismissed, sitting there since the middle of the night like something left on a doorstep:

Messages — S

2:47 a.m.

you came. good girl.

I don’t move.

I want to be clear about what happens in my head in the next four seconds, because I’ve read every book about this and none of them are honest about the order. The order is not fear, then thought. The order is:

One. That message was sent from Mara’s phone to someone saved as S.

Two. It was sent at 2:47 a.m., during my nothing.

Three. My name starts with S.

Four. The phone that received it is in my other pocket, and I am afraid to look.

I look.

My messages are empty. No unknown numbers. No 2:47. Nothing.

What there is instead is seventeen notifications, and eleven of them are from the person whose bed is four feet from mine.

Callie 12:41 a.m. — where’d you go

Callie 12:58 a.m. — ok not funny, did you leave with someone

Callie 1:20 a.m. — I got a ride back with Priya. text me when you’re in

Callie 1:47 a.m. — Sloane

Callie 2:06 a.m. — im going to sleep. wake me up when you get here, I mean it, I don’t care what time

I read them twice.

I did not wake her up.

I don’t know what I did instead, and the not-knowing is a physical thing, a pressure behind the eyes, and I put the phone face-down on the desk because there is a limit to how much of this I can process before eight in the morning.

Which should be a relief, and isn’t, because there are exactly two ways a message gets sent and not received. Either the recipient isn’t me.

Or the recipient is me, and I deleted it.

I’m still holding both phones when someone knocks.

Not Callie’s knock — Callie kicks the bottom of the door with her heel because her hands are always full. This is three knocks, evenly spaced, patient. The knock of somebody who’s already decided how long they’re willing to wait.

I put Mara’s phone under my pillow. I take off my coat and put it on the hook, mud-side to the wall. I look at my reflection in the black rectangle of my dead laptop screen and I do the thing I do, which is arrange my face into something that has never had a bad night in its life.

I open the door.

Theo Vance is standing in my hallway with his hands in his pockets and rain still in his hair, and he takes exactly one second to look past me at the mud on my duvet before his eyes come back to mine.

I’ve never spoken to him. I’ve catalogued him — everyone at Whitlock has, it’s practically the freshman orientation activity. Chief Vance’s son. Two years of stories, all of them ending with somebody dropping the charges. He has the particular stillness of people who have never once in their lives had to hurry, and up close it isn’t attractive so much as it is information, and I hate that my pulse doesn’t seem to know the difference.

“Sloane Beckett,” he says. Not a question.

“That’s the working theory.”

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The place a smile would go.

“You should sit down.”

“I should do a lot of things.” I don’t move out of the doorway. “It’s seven in the morning. I don’t know you. You have about nine seconds.”

He looks at me for six of them. It’s the longest anyone has looked at me in two years and I feel it in the back of my neck, low and unwelcome, like a hand on a door I’d checked twice.

Then he says, “Mara Quinn didn’t come home last night.”

The floor stays where it is. I have to give it credit.

“So call your father,” I say. “That’s what he’s for.”

“Yeah.” He takes one hand out of his pocket. There’s something in it. “I thought about that.”

He holds it up between two fingers, at my eye level, close enough that I can see the little dent where the post was bent.

An earring. Silver, small, shaped like a crescent.

Callie held it up beside her face at 8:40 last night and told me it was the one that made me look like I had a secret.

“I found this on Route 9 at three in the morning,” Theo Vance says, very quietly, “about forty feet from where I found you.”

My hand is already at my ear.

There’s nothing there.

Author’s Note

Welcome to Chapter 1! 🩸🔎 Sloane’s memory is entirely blacked out for three and a half hours, she has a missing girl’s phone in her pocket, and Theo Vance just showed up with her crescent earring from the scene.

What do you think happened on Route 9 between 11:52 p.m. and 3:20 a.m.? Is Sloane being framed, or is her mind hiding something far more dangerous?

Drop your initial theories in the comments, hit Vote/Heart to support the story, and Add to Library so you don’t miss Chapter 2! 🖤📌