Kate Alice Marshall

Liv and Cass had been afraid that if people found out about Persephone, they wouldn’t believe us about Stahl. They would think that we were liars.

I was afraid they would find out that I was one. Because Persephone wasn’t the only secret I’d been keeping all this time. I’d lied to the police. I’d lied on the stand. I’d lied to myself, told myself I’d seen Alan Michael Stahl in those woods—and maybe there was even a time I’d believed it.

But the truth was, I hadn’t seen him that day.

I hadn’t seen anything at all.

All I caught was the hint of a figure—human. I wasn’t alone out here.

She was looking at me sidelong. “I know you never liked Oscar.”

“I guess,” I said dismissively. As if he’d never done anything to me. As if I’d never let him.

The past wasn’t the past anymore. It was lying in front of us, and we were eleven years old again, and we were still playing the game.

She lay curled on her side. Her hands were curved in toward her chest, like she’d been cold, but the skull faced upward—toward the single shaft of light that fell from above, as if in the moments before her death she had turned her face to seek the sun.

Her flesh had long since rotted away, her clothes been reduced to rags. They had clung to her until our clever fingers plucked them away from her arched ribs, from the long, pale bones of her legs. Our whispers still seemed to fill this space, caught echoing between its walls.

Trinkets and treasures lay scattered around her. Our offerings. Beads and coins and jewelry, a crystal ballerina three inches tall, a river stone with a hole worn through it. We’d laid them down around these bones, to worship and to claim her.

There, around the skeleton’s wrist, was a loop of nylon, threaded through cheap plastic beads with letters stamped on them. It was hard to read in the dim light, the letters mostly worn away. But you could still make it out enough to figure out what it said.

Persephone.

Everyone dies alone.

“Unless I wasn’t a target,” I said. “I was a witness. He wasn’t there for me at all.”

“He was there to visit a body,” Ethan said.

Not just a body.

Persephone.

There was a black Toyota Camry parked across the street. It had been there yesterday, too. And the day before.

It was just a car. Nothing weird.

You and me are meant to be