No. The answer was no.

And yet, a tiny part of me held the offer close, hugging it to my chest like a child with a teddy bear. He still wants me.

After everything. Even knowing I was an informant. Mark had left me for less.

The fact that Donovan was still willing to have me around was a testament to his love for Tilda, but that stubborn piece of me liked to pretend it was love for me.

He still undressed you in front of a camera to lord you over his brother.

Yes, he had. And that was why the answer was no. I would rather be alone than humiliated.

Right?

A knock at the door saved me from second-guessing what was clearly, objectively, the correct answer. I didn't even have to wonder who it was. Ciar wasn't showing up here anytime soon, Donovan had just left, and Clarissa was due to reappear any moment.

Besides, it was her knock. Prim and proper and refined, just like her. Ciar's words rang in my ears. Tilda's complete opposite. I could never figure out how they knew each other.

I got up from the table, my chair scraping loudly across the floor, and answered the door. Sure enough, she stood there, arms folded over her stomach as she stared down at me like I was a challenging pet she couldn't quite figure out.

"Who were those women?" she asked without preamble.

"I don't know." I let go of the door and walked back into the kitchen, figuring she'd follow when she was ready. "That's why I gave them to you."

"But where did you find them?" Her heels echoed on the fake wood, and when I turned around she stood beside the refrigerator. "How did you know to go looking for them?"

"Who are they?" I returned.

"I'm still running their faces. Why do you think I'll find anything?"

I traced my tongue over the inside of my cheek as I considered how much to tell her. Then I shrugged. She already knew most of it anyway. "Someone sent it to my printer."

Her mouth twitched. "Someone?"

It was only one word, but so carefully enunciated that it said much, much more. God help me, Maisye, if you don't tell me everything right this second I will wring it out of you.

"I don't know. I was printing something else"—best not to mention that I may have given the game up to Ciar—"and the next thing I knew, that came out, too."

"From your computer?" she asked, lunging for it.

"I don't know," I said again, feeling stupid as I watched her yank it open. I hadn't even thought to check.

She spun it around so I could enter my password, then took control again, punching keys with alarming speed. "Was there anyone in the apartment?"

"I don't think so. I never know anymore. I don't know what's real and what's in my head."

And I really didn't, not after first Ciar and then Donovan had questioned it. I didn't have a great track record when it came to mental stability, and hallucinating someone's presence didn't feel like much of a stretch after going four rounds with one Cosgrave or another and only remembering one of them.

Clarissa's keystrokes had stopped, and their absence deafened me. I couldn't meet her eyes, afraid she'd be able to dig the answers out of mine without even asking.

"Maisye..." To my surprise, she shut the laptop, leaned her elbows on either side of it, and dropped her head into her hands. With a giant sigh, she asked, "What am I going to do with you?"

I stared. Had she finally realized what a mistake it had been to recruit me? She didn't even know half of the shit I'd done. Would she take me off the case, send me back to Laurel Valley? Back to California?

"Everyone told me not to bring you into this," she said, and when she looked up, her eyes were unfocused, as faraway as her voice. "They took one look at your history and backed away. Like you were radioactive. But you were her sister."

Dark skin, dark hair, an endless supply of pantsuits...I could never figure out how they knew each other. I eyed her, wondering how far I could push.

"How did you know her?"

My question pulled her back to the present, a startled, almost cornered flicker lighting her dark eyes.

"Ciar told me," I said.

"Ciar was—"

She caught herself, biting back whatever bitter remark sought release. Her face settled back into professional impassivity, and she tugged at the hem of her blazer as if she could blame a wrinkle in her outfit for the crack in her facade.

"Tillie and I were roommates in college," she finally said, each syllable carefully measured to mean nothing. "UMass. She dropped out. I went into the FBI. After a while she went dark. Stopped returning my texts and calls. You know the story."

She hadn't looked at me. Not even a sideways glance. She stared at the window over the kitchen sink, at the sky beginning to fade into pastel pink beyond.

"Donovan Cosgrave crossed my desk a few years after I shed the rookie label. He was just a target. Until I started watching him and found her."

She closed her eyes, rubbing circles into her temples with her index fingers. "And I was stupid. I made contact. I should have stayed away from her, but I missed her. I wanted to know why she stopped talking to me."

"Did she tell you why?" I asked, partly for her and partly for myself. I remembered my own sleepless nights, cut off from the only family I had left. I wanted answers that Tilda couldn't give anymore.

Clarissa shook her head. "She never gave me a reason, only made it clear that she wasn't happy to see me. I tried a few more times before I gave up. But what if Donovan saw me with her? What if he put two and two together, thought she was snitching on him and...?"

I understood.

"He didn't kill her," I said quietly, clasping my hands on the table and staring at them.

She straightened, and I felt her gaze burning into the side of my face.

I swallowed. "Ciar saw her jump. She killed herself."

"He's covering it up," she began immediately.

"He's not."

Nothing moved. I heard her breaths, for the first time uneven. Her broken composure unnerved me, more than anything else I'd seen during this investigation.

"How do you know?" she asked.

I finally looked up. "I just do. He wasn't lying."

I watched something drain from her eyes. Hope? Vengeance? Perhaps a twisted combination of the two?

"Fuck!" She slammed her fist against the table, making me jump. Her chair screeched as she stood, pacing to the door and back. Her heels slammed into the wood with every step.

I pressed my lips together just short of telling her that Donovan did know about my involvement. That would only make her pull me out, and I wanted in.

"They were right," she said. "I shouldn't have brought you into this."

I sprang to my feet, too. "I wanted to know what happened. I still do want to know about those other women."

"I can't..." She stopped in her tracks, sighing. "I didn't even come here to discuss the case with you, Maisye. I came here to pull you off."

My heart stopped. "What? Why? You can't—if it's about the break-ins, I can handle that. I don't even know if it's real. I mean"—I cursed myself as I realized how that sounded—"I'm not crazy. But I can be paranoid. I can do this."

"I'm not questioning your commitment. I just can't have your name anywhere near the evidence, at least not any closer than it already is."

"Why?" I demanded. "I wore that hair clip for you, I—"

I got banged on tape for that data.

And you enjoyed it, a snide voice whispered in my ear.

"Maisye, I need you to be honest with me." She reached into the inside pocket of her blazer, pulling out a glossy square of photo paper. "What were you doing on the Tobin Bridge the night Nero was murdered?"

"What are you talking about?" I snatched the paper from her and froze.

My face, slightly blurry from the distance but still distinctly me, stared back at me.

"Traffic cam caught you. Carrying something heavy."

I heard the unsaid words. Something like a body.

"What were you doing?"

"Do the police have this?" I whispered.

Her silence told me all I needed to know.

"I can't protect you forever," she finally said. "Sometimes it's better to come clean and accept the consequences."

I gaped as she turned to go, and by the time I had formed a reply, the door had already swung shut behind her.

Alone once again, I sank back into my chair, my breath catching as tears collected rapidly in my eyes. When I tried to blink them away, they just fell like stubborn bastards.

I killed Nero.

It didn't matter what Ciar said. I still believed him that I'd slept with him. But I clearly hadn't stayed with him all night. The actual act wouldn't have stopped me from slipping out afterwards, or stopping by the Tobin Bridge with a body on my way there.

I stared at the incriminating evidence until it started to blur, turning my face into something passable as a stranger's. Just someone I didn't recognize, on a road I didn't recognize, black hoodie I didn't recognize pulled up over my head—

Wait.

I brought the paper closer to my face, squinting through the tears. I swiped angrily at my eyes and examined that hoodie. The same hoodie, I realized, as the one in the mysterious picture of myself upstairs. Only from this angle, it was clearly a piece of clothing I didn't own.

Clarissa bought you a ton of things, I tried to tame my hopes. Donovan dropped off a bunch of Tilda's clothes. You don't know what you own anymore.

I flew to the closet, pulling back hanger after hanger. Then I rifled through the bag of Tilda's clothes. I checked the hamper, the space under the bed, even the crannies in the back of the closet. All I found was my abandoned camera.

I tossed it on the bed, ran upstairs, and pounded back down with one of those mysterious prints in my hand.

It wasn't me. I'd never been so sure of anything in my life. Unless my Tilda-personality hid her clothes somewhere I couldn't find, unless she had a completely separate life from mine—

Unless she was a completely separate person.

But she looked exactly like me.

Giddy adrenaline rushed to my head along with a crazy thought. My heart pounded, muffling my ears. I stared at the outline of myself, the picture I didn't remember posing for.

What if I was the one behind the camera? What if I'd accidentally caught her that night when I was wandering the town drunk?

The more I stared, the more I believed it. She had always been more poised, more beautiful. Her hair fell in waves, her lips parted slightly, and if I looked closely enough, I thought I could make out the shadow of a bruise under her eye.

What if she was still alive?

I pulled my laptop closer. Surely Clarissa would be back for it later, but in her haste she hadn't told me not to use it. So I opened it up and started googling.

The height of the Tobin Bridge? A hundred feet.

The highest jump a human had survived into water?

Over two hundred.

I stared at the computer, the echoes of my own breaths magnified in my ears. The rest of the world vanished in a whirl of pixels spelling out those numbers.

People had survived jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, well over two hundred feet high. It was rare, but rare wasn't impossible. One man had jumped almost two hundred feet off a cliff for fun. 192 feet, to be exact, and maybe he had the proper equipment, but it was still possible.

She's alive.

I'd never been so sure of anything in my life. As I stared at the screen, it started to dim. My breath came in gasps, the air far too thin, but by the time I noticed the blackness creeping into the corners of my vision, it was too late.