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Mrs. Cross offers to take my jacket, but I keep it on, feeling like there’s a chance I could need to make a quick getaway. She leads me to the living room and sits me down on a flawless white sofa with big, puffy cushions. Like the rest of the house, the living room has a quaint, cozy appearance. I can just imagine sitting here in the middle of winter with the fireplace blazing and a cup of hot cocoa in my hand.

Whitney’s mother sits across from me on a matching love seat, keeping her eyes pinned on my face. When she speaks, her tone is measured, her true feelings only revealed by the slightest tremor in her voice. “You’re living with Whitney,” she acknowledges.

“Yes,” I say.

She looks down at her lap, carefully smoothing out a crease on her beige skirt. “I thought she might be dead. I should have known better.”

It’s shocking to hear a woman comment so cavalierly on the death of her own daughter. But now that I know Whitney, it’s not all that surprising.

“I need help,” I say. “She’s ruining my life, and I don’t even know why.”

“That sounds like Whitney.” She gives me a humorless smile. “But if she has decided to ruin your life, she has a reason. There is always a reason.”

I can’t think of what the reason could be. I’d never met Whitney before the day she showed up looking for a place to live. Yes, I was rude to her at the diner, but it doesn’t seem like enough. She must have some other reason.

“Let me tell you a little story about my daughter,” Mrs. Cross says, sitting up straighter. “I have a younger son. When he was four years old and she was seven, he accidentally broke one of her toys. It wasn’t intentional—he was four . The next day, I took the two of them to the playground, and she waited until they were at the highest point on the jungle gym, and she shoved him off. Joey told me what happened when they were setting his arm in the emergency room.” She crosses her legs. “When I asked Whitney about it later, all she said was, ‘That’s what happens to you if you’re not careful.’ I put her in therapy after that, but she didn’t like it, so she made it stop.”

“Made it stop?”

A haunted look fills her eyes. “She would steal things from me—items that I treasured like my grandmother’s diamond necklace or an old letter from my late father. And she would destroy them, leaving the remnants in a place she knew I’d find them.”

“Jesus.”

“I learned to be very careful around my daughter, Mr. Porter. And believe me when I say that isn’t the worst thing she has done. Not even close.”

I swallow. If only I had known some of this—any of this—before I let Whitney move in with us. Now I suspect I have opened a door that can’t be closed. “I heard about Jordan Gallo.”

She flinches. “Yes, that was a terrible situation.”

“Did she… I mean, do you think she was the one who…”

“Did she kill him?” There is a flicker of amusement in Mrs. Cross’s eyes, and for a moment, I wonder if the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. “Only Whitney knows the answer to that question. Well, Whitney and Jordan. If I had to guess, I’d say yes, I think she pushed him off the roof. But I can’t be sure. Whitney has a way of making you so miserable, suicide suddenly seems like a viable option.”

Her words rattle me down to my soul when I think about the last couple of months. “Yes.”

“My husband would still be here if not for her.” Her eyes drop. “He couldn’t take it. He had a heart attack one month after she disappeared.”

“When she disappeared,” I say, “where did she go?”

“I didn’t know at first,” Mrs. Cross says. “I still don’t know for certain. The Gallos were making a lot of trouble for her, so I don’t blame her for wanting to get away. We reported her missing, but the police considered her a runaway, and since there was no warrant for her arrest, they didn’t spend much time looking.” She cocks her head thoughtfully. “She definitely left the country at some point. Three years after she vanished, she sent us a postcard from Braga, Portugal.”

Braga, Portugal. Like the name Telmont, it sets off little bells in the back of my head. Why can’t I remember? It’s so frustrating.

“But I knew she was back in the States,” she adds.

“How? Did she contact you?”

“No.” Mrs. Cross leans forward as if to tell me a secret. “Because six years later, the girl that Jordan left Whitney for was found murdered.”

It takes me a second to wrap my head around this. Whitney’s high school boyfriend cheated on her with another girl, and she killed him right away, waited six years , and then killed the girl too. Over a stupid high school infidelity.

That takes a special kind of insanity.

“So you have to understand, Mr. Porter,” she says, “if you have done something to Whitney, she will never let it go. Not a year later—not ten years later. No matter how long it takes, she will make sure you pay the price.”

I bury my face in my hands. I don’t understand. I never even met her before she moved in, much less committed some unforgivable crime against her. Why is she doing this to me? Why?

“Are you okay?” Mrs. Cross asks me gently. “Can I get you something? Some water?”

I raise my head and nod. “Water would be great. Thank you.”

A deep depression sets in. I had hoped coming here might solve all my problems, but it hasn’t solved anything. Mrs. Cross doesn’t know how to handle her daughter any better than I do. And I still don’t understand why Whitney has targeted me.

Mrs. Cross leaves me alone in the living room while she disappears into the kitchen. I stand up to stretch my legs and wander over to the fireplace, where several framed photos are positioned on the mantel. There is one of Mrs. Cross and a man who I assume is her late husband. Then another of a man in his twenties—presumably her son.

She has one family photo, which looks like it was taken a long time ago. Mrs. Cross looks at least fifteen years younger than she does right now. Positioned between the parents are their two teenage children—a much younger version of the man in the other photo and a teenage girl. I stare at the photo for a second as a sick feeling mounts in my stomach.

What the hell is going on here?

Mrs. Cross returns with a glass of water in her hand. I rip my eyes away from the family photo and turn to look at her. I jab at the picture frame with my index finger. “Who is that ?”

“That’s a family picture,” she says defensively. “Just because my daughter has done something terrible, that doesn’t mean I have to forget her entirely.”

“But…” I shake my head. “Who is that girl in the photo?”

She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “That’s Whitney. My daughter.”

“But…that’s not…”

I turn to examine the photo again, making sure I’m not imagining it. Then I look over at Mrs. Cross. And now I see it—the resemblance.

“Mr. Porter?” Mrs. Cross crinkles her brow. “Are you all right, young man?”

No, I am not all right. I am so far from all right, it’s not even funny.

Because the teenage girl in that photo is not the woman who has been living in our guest bedroom, the one who’s been tormenting me. The one who calls herself Whitney Cross. No, the teenage girl in the photograph is somebody entirely different.

It’s Krista .