Page 53 of You Belong Here

“There were plenty of people out on a Friday night,” she said, ignoring my horror.

“I knew the area. But I couldn’t find the phone.

All I had was the mini hiking flashlight on my key chain, and it’s not very bright.

But I thought I saw…” Her gaze drifted into the distance somewhere over our heads.

“I thought I saw something in the water.”

A body. Adalyn.

I stayed silent, entranced. Like I was out there with her. Her eyes slid back to me. “And then I heard someone else there. I called out to them for help, but they didn’t answer. They kept coming closer, but they wouldn’t say anything. I started backing away, but they were still coming. So I ran.”

It was a story I could see emerging in the gaps of her first one.

“I heard them out there, Mom. They were looking for me. I hid all night. When I got back in the morning, I was going to go to the police, but there was nothing there . There was no one in the water.”

Just a mask floating at the edge.

“Why did you lie ?” I asked.

She threw her arms out to the sides. “Who would believe me? There was nobody in the water when I got back. I panicked and spent a night in the woods because I thought someone was chasing me? It’s mortifying enough that everyone knew I was lost. I thought it was part of the tradition. Part of the hazing.”

But it wasn’t. She’d witnessed something out there. A body that had started in the quarry but ended up on campus. And someone knew Delilah had been there.

“Did you find your phone out there?” I asked, unable to reconcile the shattered phone in the dumbwaiter.

“No, I didn’t find it. If I had, I would’ve called someone.”

The tears were streaming down her face, and I couldn’t read the nuance. Whether she was afraid of what was happening or that I’d see the truth underneath.

“I didn’t put it there,” she said, gulping air. “I don’t know how it got here.”

There had been someone in the house after I’d arrived here. When I was looking for Delilah upstairs and I first went into the attic. Someone had let themselves in with a key. It hadn’t been Delilah.

And it couldn’t have been Adalyn—she was already dead.

I’d heard them below me in the kitchen—opening a cabinet.

It was possible. It was possible to believe Delilah.

But it didn’t quite add up.

“They’re going to tear this story apart,” I said, cold and clinical.

“Beckett—” Trevor said in warning.

But everything was on the line. “The campus police tracked you, Delilah. They have you on video, scanning yourself into Beckett Hall, just before midnight.” Two hours before the call dropped.

She shook her head adamantly. “That’s not possible. I was never there.”

I pulled out my phone, showed her the video I’d taken of the television screen as they replayed the Beckett Hall security feed for us at the campus police headquarters.

She looked up. “Mom, that’s not me. I swear. It’s not me.”

I zoomed in on the image, looked again, twisted the phone. Brought it close to my face. I sucked in a breath. It was grainy and choppy, and I couldn’t tell how the person moved or I would’ve known from the start.

The hood of her sweatshirt was up. All we could see clearly was a woman’s arm reaching out with Delilah’s phone—the door letting her in. Is that you, Adalyn?

“Why didn’t you say?” I asked, both relieved and horrified. “Why didn’t you just say that the first time!” I was angry now, because we didn’t have to be here.

“What should I have said: that I followed my phone to Cryer’s Quarry, and I thought I saw something in the water and got scared?

That I hid all night, but in the morning, there was nothing there?

I thought I must’ve been wrong. That it was all part of the game, and people were messing with me.

You think I was going to tell the cops that? ”

“It doesn’t matter how it sounds. You can’t lie!” I said, trying to impart something so important—how you don’t get into a stranger’s car, or touch a hot stove, or run into the street. You can’t lie to the police. You can’t change the story.

It was the first domino to fall, and nothing else you said would be believed.

You were not to be trusted.

You were an unreliable witness, an unreliable narrator.

“I didn’t think it mattered,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was dead until after.”

I looked to Trevor, waiting for him to know the next step. See clearly what to do. But he only stared back, shell-shocked.

“I’ll tell them I was scared,” she said. “I was scared.”

I didn’t know how to help her. How to tell her the truth.

I channeled my mother and just said it: “No one cares that you were scared. You’re an adult now.”

She flinched, clearly hurt.

Eighteen. It was such an arbitrary distinction. I wanted to apologize because I hadn’t prepared her—not for the things that mattered. I should’ve told her: You could stay silent, say nothing. You could disappear. But you could not lie.

She crossed her arms over her chest, looking at me very closely. “You should talk. You know what they say about you around here?”

I felt a hot rush to my cheeks. “Yes, I do.”

“It would’ve been nice to know that before I got here.” She turned to Trevor, one arm out as if presenting me for judgment. “My mother wasn’t just Adalyn’s roommate. She was suspected of helping her.”

She left the comment vague enough to be generous. So that I could pretend I had been suspected only of helping Adalyn disappear and not of helping her in a game that led to the death of two men.

I should’ve told Delilah the truth long ago. Maybe that’s where everything shifted off-kilter. Not back in August, when we arrived. Not in the spring, when she was first accepted. Maybe it was before that. To the first time I told her the story of her life and where she came from.

“You’re right,” I said. “I did something I deeply regret once, Delilah. Something I can’t ever take back. I didn’t mean to, but it happened. I got stuck in a lie. And as you can see, I’ve been stuck with it for twenty years. Which is why I know what’s going to happen next.”