“Why?” Pip asked again when Naomi had stared wordlessly down at her feet long enough.
“Someone made us,” she sniffed. “Someone made us do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“We—me, Max, Jake, and Millie—we all got a text on that Monday night. From an anonymous number. It told us we had to delete every picture of Sal taken on the night Andie disappeared and to upload the rest as normal. It told us that at school on Tuesday, we had to ask the principal to call in the police so we could make a statement. And we had to tell them that Sal actually left Max’s at ten-thirty and that he’d asked us to lie before.”
“But why would you do that?” asked Pip.
“Because”—Naomi’s face cracked—“whoever it was knew something about us. About something bad we’d done.”
She slapped her hands to her face and bawled into them, the cries strangled against her fingers. Cara jumped up from her seat and ran over, wrapping her arms around her sister’s waist. She looked over at Pip as she held the quaking Naomi, her face pale with fear.
“Max?” Pip said.
Max cleared his throat, his eyes down on his fiddling hands. “We, um…Something bad happened on New Year’s Eve 2013. Something we did.”
“W-we?” Naomi spluttered. “We, Max? It happened because of you. You got us into it, and you’re the one that made us leave him there.”
“You’re lying. We all agreed at the time,” he said.
“I was scared.”
“Naomi?” Pip said.
“We…um, we went out to this party out in Stamford,” she said. “And we all had a lot to drink. When the party got shut down, it was impossible to find a ride; we couldn’t get a taxi, and it was freezing outside. So Max, who’d driven us there, said that actually he hadn’t drunk that much and was OK to drive. And he convinced me, Millie, and Jake to get in the car with him. It was so stupid. Oh god, if I could go back and change one thing in my life, it would be that moment….” She trailed off.
“Sal wasn’t there?” Pip asked.
“No,” she said. “I wish he had been because he’d never let us be that stupid. He was with his brother that night. So Max, who was just as drunk as the rest of us, was driving too fast up the highway. It was like four a.m. and there were no other cars on the road. And then”—the tears came again—“and then…”
“This man comes out of nowhere,” Max said.
“No, he didn’t. He was standing well back on the shoulder, Max. You lost control of the car.”
“Well, then, we remember very differently,” Max snapped. “We hit him and spun. When we came to a stop, I pulled off the road and we went to see what had happened.”
“Oh god, there was so much blood,” Naomi cried. “And his legs were bent all wrong.”
“He looked dead, OK?” Max said. “We checked to see if he was breathing, and we thought he wasn’t. We decided it was too late for him, too late to call an ambulance. And we’d all been drinking, so we knew how much trouble we’d be in. Criminal charges, prison. So we all agreed and we left.”
“You made us,” Naomi said. “You got inside our heads and scared us into agreeing, because you knew you were the one really in trouble.”
“We all agreed, Naomi!” Max shouted, a red flush creeping to the surface of his face. “We drove back to my house ’cause my parents were in Dubai. We cleaned off the car and then crashed it again into the tree just before my driveway. My parents never suspected a thing and got me a new one a few weeks later.”
Cara was now crying too. Wiping the tears before Naomi could see them.
“Did the man die?” Pip said.
Naomi shook her head. “He was in a coma for a few weeks; he pulled through. But…but…” Her face creased in agony. “He’s paraplegic. He’s in a wheelchair. We did that to him. We should never have left him.”
They all listened as Naomi cried, struggling to suck in air between the tears.
“Somehow,” Max eventually said, “someone knew what we’d done. They said that if we didn’t do everything they asked, they would tell the police. So we did it. We deleted the pictures and we lied to the police.”
“But how did someone find out about the hit-and-run?” asked Pip.
“We don’t know,” Naomi said. “We all swore to never tell anyone, ever. And I never did.”
“Me neither,” Max said.
Naomi looked over at him with a weepy scoff.
“What?” He stared back at her.
“Me, Jake, and Millie always thought you were the one that let it slip.”
“Oh, really?” he spat.
“Well, you’re the one that got completely plastered like every night.”
“I never told anyone,” he said, turning back to Pip now. “I have no idea how someone found out.”
“You have a pattern of letting things slip,” said Pip. “Naomi, Max accidentally told me you were MIA for a while the night Andie disappeared. Where were you? The truth.”
“I was with Sal,” she said. “He wanted to talk to me upstairs, alone. About Andie. He was angry at her about something she’d done; he wouldn’t say what. He told me she was a different person when it was just the two of them, but he could no longer ignore the way she treated other people. He decided that night he was going to end things with her. And he seemed…almost relieved when he came to that decision.”
“So just to be clear,” Pip said. “Sal was with you all at Max’s until twelve-fifteen the night Andie disappeared. On the Monday someone threatens you; makes you go to the police, say he left at ten-thirty, and to delete all trace of him from that night. The next day Sal disappears and is found dead in the woods. You know what this means, don’t you?”
Max looked down, picking at the skin around his thumbs. Naomi covered her face again.
“Sal was innocent.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Max said.
“Sal was innocent. Someone killed Andie, and then they killed Sal, after making sure he’d look guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Your best friend was innocent, and you’ve all known it for over five years.”
“I’m sorry.” Naomi wept. “I’m so, so sorry. We didn’t know what else to do. We were in too deep. I never thought that Sal would end up dead. I thought if we just played along, the police would catch whoever had hurt Andie, Sal would be cleared, and we’d all be OK. We told ourselves it was just a small lie at the time.”
“Sal died because of your small lie.” Pip’s stomach twisted with a rage tempered by sadness.
“What are you going to do with the photo?” Max asked quietly.
Pip looked over at Naomi, whose red puffy face was etched with pain. Cara was holding her hand, staring at Pip with silent tears.
“Max,” Pip said. “Did you kill Andie?”
“What?” He stood up, scraping the messy hair out of his face. “No, I was at my house the whole night.”
“You could have left when Naomi and Millie went to bed.”
“Well, I didn’t, OK?”
“Do you know what happened to Andie?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Pip,” Cara spoke up now. “Please don’t go to the police with that photo. Please. I can’t have my sister taken away as well as Mom.” Her bottom lip trembled, and she scrunched her face to fight back the sobs. Naomi wrapped her arms around her.
Pip ached with a helpless feeling, watching them both like this. What should she do? What could she do? She didn’t know whether the police would take this photo seriously anyway. But if they did, Cara would be left all alone, and it would be Pip’s fault. She couldn’t do that to her best friend. But what about Ravi? Sal was innocent, and there was no question of her abandoning him now. Her heart fell away to her stomach; there was only one way through this, she realized.
“I won’t go to the police,” she said.
Max heaved a sigh and Pip eyed him, disgusted, as he tried to hide a faint smile crossing his mouth.
“Not for you, Max,” she said. “For Naomi. For what your mistakes have done to her.”
“They’re my mistakes too,” Naomi said quietly. “I did this too.”
Cara walked over to Pip and hugged her from the side, tears soaking into her shirt.
Max left then, without another word. He packed up his laptop and notes, swung his bag on his shoulder, and took off toward the front door.
Cara went to splash her face in the sink and filled up a glass of water for her sister. Naomi was the first to break the silence.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I know,” Pip said, still grappling with the decision. “I won’t go to the police with the photo.” She paused. “Because I don’t need Sal’s alibi to prove his innocence. There’s another way.”
“What do you mean?” Naomi sniffed.
“You’re asking me to cover for you, and I will. But I can’t cover up the truth about Sal.” She swallowed and it grated all the way down her throat. “I’m going to find who really did this, who killed Andie and Sal. That’s the only way to clear Sal’s name and protect you at the same time.”
Naomi hugged her, burying her face into Pip’s shoulder. “Please do,” she said quietly. “He’s innocent, and it’s killed me every day since.”
Pip stroked Naomi’s hair and looked over at Cara—her best friend, her sister—as a weight settled onto her shoulders. The world heavier than it had ever been before.