There was a pause. Ethan sighed. “Yeah. I was driving around, and I saw Madeline’s car in your driveway. Can you come out?”
Emma wasn’t sure how to feel about Ethan sitting outside the Mercers’ house in the middle of the night. If it had been anyone else, she would’ve thought it was slightly stalkerish. At least he’d used the phone this time, instead of pebbles. “It’s three A.M.,” she said frostily.
“Please?”
Emma ran her finger around the lip of a bowl on the hal table. “I don’t know. . . .”
“Please, Emma?”
The area around Emma’s temples began to ache. Her muscles were stiff from squeezing into the cave. She had no energy to play hard to get right now. “Fine.”
The lights on Ethan’s car died as Emma padded across the yard. “Why didn’t you answer my cal s?” he asked when she stepped off the curb.
Emma peered at Sutton’s iPhone. Sure enough, there were six messages and missed cal s from Ethan. She hadn’t noticed them before—she’d been having too much fun with Sutton’s friends, giving Gabby and Lili makeovers, drinking Kahlua shots, playing Dance Dance Revolution, and, of course, inducting Gabby and Lili into the Lying Game.
“I was busy,” she answered, a hard edge to her voice. “I figured you were busy, too.”
Ethan squared his shoulders and opened his mouth, but Emma held up her hand to stop him. “Before you say anything, it’s not Gabby or Lili. They aren’t who I thought they were.” She was careful to use I instead of we, like it was her investigation only, not both of theirs. Ethan frowned. “What happened?”
Emma took a breath and told him about the night. “It was just a prank,” she concluded. “I mean, Gabby and Lili were definitely mad about the seizure thing, but they aren’t Sutton’s kil ers. Al they wanted was to be part of the Lying Game.”
Ethan leaned against the door of the car. A few houses down, a dog let out a lonely howl.
“They didn’t drop that light on my head either,” Emma went on, a shiver trailing along her spine. “I think Sutton’s real kil er did.”
“But Gabby and Lili made so much sense. You said yourself Lili went back upstairs to retrieve her phone just before the light fel .”
Emma shrugged. “Maybe the kil er noticed that, too, hoping I’d suspect Gabby and Lili because of what Sutton did to them.” She winced, thinking how she’d taken the bait. Even if Gabby had only fake-fal en, even if it was al a ruse, Emma had stil lashed out in anger. What if things had gone wrong and the force of Emma’s push had real y kil ed her?
She’d never felt so out of control.
Ethan shifted his weight and coughed into his fist. “The reason I’ve been trying to get ahold of you is that Sam told me something real y . . . strange. At the end of the night, she got kind of fed up and asked what I was doing hanging out with someone like Sutton. She was like, ‘I heard Sutton Mercer hit someone with her car and almost kil ed them.’”
“What?” Emma shot up. “Who?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say. Or maybe she didn’t know.”
Emma squinted. “Had you heard anything like this before?”
Ethan shrugged. “Maybe it’s not true.”
Emma’s heart pounded. Who could Sutton have almost kil ed with her car—and when? How could she not have known something so huge? “Maybe it is true,” she said hesitantly. “I went to the impound to pick up Sutton’s car earlier this week . . . but it wasn’t there. Sutton signed it out . . . on the thirty-first.”
“The night she died?” Ethan’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously.
“Yes. Not a single one of Sutton’s friends knew she’d picked up the car.” Emma tied her hair in a tight knot. “What if she had a reason not to tel anyone she picked it up?
Maybe this rumor about her almost kil ing someone with her car is true. Maybe she tried to run someone down on the thirty-first.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Ethan waved his hands across each other. “You’re jumping to conclusions. Sutton wasn’t always nice, but she wasn’t a kil er.”
“Yeah,” I wanted to add. Now Emma thought I was a hitand-run kind of girl?
Emma took a deep breath. Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her. “Stil ,” she said. “We need to find Sutton’s car. We need to figure this out.”
“So it’s we again, is it?” Ethan asked, smiling. “I’m al owed to be part of the investigation after al ?”
Emma stared into the distance over his shoulder. “I guess.” But embarrassment and rejection stil pulsed inside her. This was what scared her about getting too close to someone: al the mixed signals, al the misinterpreted gestures, al the emotions that became overamplified because something big was on the line. It was so much easier to steer clear of al that. It prevented so much potential pain.
“I’m sorry about Sam,” Ethan said, reading her thoughts.
“But she real y is just a friend.”
“I don’t care,” Emma said quickly, trying to look like she meant it.
“Wel , I want you to care.” Ethan’s voice cracked. “I mean, I want you to care that we’re not together.”
“You can go out with her if you want. It’s obvious she likes you.”
An amused laugh escaped from Ethan. “I highly doubt she likes me after tonight. I spent the whole time asking questions about you, avoiding you, coming to talk to you in the parking lot, or obsessing over whether or not you were okay.”