Chapter 3
Shiloh stripped the bracelet off her wrist. “We were friends,” she said, extending it to me across the water.
I didn’t take the bracelet. Didn’t move.
My ears began to ring again, and things slowed after that.
Or maybe I just departed. I had the disorienting sensation of being pulled backward out of my own body.
Everyone else seemed to shrink away, becoming small and indistinct, their voices soft and distant.
I vaguely registered Skye placing a hand on my shoulder. “Roslyn—”
I might’ve shaken her off. I don’t know. I looked to Shiloh again, my eyes so full of tears that I could barely see her. When I finally spoke, my voice sounded strange and stilted, like the recording of a recording. “What do you mean by friends?”
Which was to say, What do you know? What are you keeping from me about the person I thought I knew better than anyone else?
A few feet away, feet that felt like miles, Naomi gingerly took the frog from Skye’s cupped hands, placed it on the edge of the pool, and wiped her hands together as if she were cleaning them instead of just smearing frog goop between them.
“Shiloh.” She was the only girl who said the name with anything less than reverence. “Be gentle with her.”
Shiloh tried. I could tell because she softened her tone just a bit. “We met last summer. She traveled with us.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Let’s talk,” she said, and slipped her feet from the pool, stood up, and made for the house.
Cold and chattering, I trailed Shiloh through the living room and into the kitchen.
Shiloh stepped outside the house again, walked down the driveway, and ducked through the door of the soup-can RV parked on the street.
It looked like a dollhouse on the inside.
There were couches on either side of the space draped with quilts and cowhides and the great webworks of what appeared to be finger-knit blankets, a few of them only half-finished and affixed, as if with an umbilical cord, to spools of yarn the size of toddlers.
I tripped over them as I stepped inside and drew the door shut.
On every available surface—windowsills and fold-down tables, the tops of cabinets and the countertops in the kitchenette—were melted candles, fused where they stood in hardened puddles of wax.
The entire place smelled like a vintage store or the inside of an old leather purse.
Shiloh stood in the cramped kitchenette, hunched over the countertop, staring at a nothing spot on the cabinet in front of her as if she intended to bore a hole through the laminate with the power of her gaze alone.
Like Adeline, Shiloh had the eyes of someone who’d looked upon what shouldn’t be seen.
I could call it despair, and in Adeline perhaps it was that, especially in those last days before the end.
But in this girl it was something different entirely.
“So how do you know my sister?” I said, and I had the stark and sudden feeling that this was the most important question I had ever asked.
“We met up north.”
I faltered, realizing after a long beat who she was, who they all were.
Those strange and faceless friends my mom had, defying all logic, allowed Adeline to spend the bulk of her summer with.
I hadn’t been able to find any trace of them in her call logs or old text messages, or in any of those emails I’d combed through.
When I’d grilled my aunt, she hadn’t even known their names.
All I’d had to go on were those two strange words: good influences.
But one look at Shiloh and it was obvious she was far from that.
“What did you say to get my aunt to let Adeline spend so much time with you?” I asked, because it made no sense to me.
That these girls had been the ones who’d whisked my sister away, that they were the ones who had changed her so drastically, watching—or maybe even responsible for—that horrible metamorphosis she’d undergone between the start of that summer and its tragic end.
Shiloh was looking at the floor now, frowning. Instead of an answer to my question, she gave me this: “There’s a place for you here, with us, if you want one. We’ll be leaving town in the morning, and I think you should come with us.”
“Come with you and go where? What do you guys even do?”
“This and that,” said Shiloh, intentionally cryptic. “A lot of it’s just travel. You know, seeing the world through new eyes. It’s kind of hard to explain, but I know Adeline would want you to experience it.”
“What do you know about what Adeline wanted?” I snapped, angry at this stranger who was speaking to me as if she could possibly know Adeline better than me.
“More than you know.”
I wanted to challenge that, to tell her she had no idea what my sister would’ve wanted.
But a part of me wondered if perhaps she was right about me and what Adeline would’ve wanted.
There were gaps in the story of her last months on earth, parts of herself she hadn’t shared with me, ways she’d changed without my knowing.
Looking at Shiloh standing there in the kitchen, I saw that there was something kindred about the two of them, as if my sister had been dragged up from the grave and brought to me in the form of the girl who stood before me.
It hurt that she seemed to know my sister—or if not that, then some part of her—better than I did.
But the pain made me feel closer to my sister than I had since she’d gone missing.
I’d never felt as haunted by her as I did in that moment in the RV with Shiloh.
I realized that she was what I had been waiting for—the letter I’d never received from Adeline, the person who could tell me what had happened to her that summer before her death, the answer to all the questions that had plagued me through my grief.
This was my chance to uncover the truth.
Maybe the only one that I would ever get.
“I know a fair bit about Adeline,” said Shiloh gently, like she was trying to break some bad news. “Maybe more than I should.”
I believed her and hated her for it.
“We leave at eight in the morning.” Shiloh stepped past me on her way out of the RV. “Don’t be late.”