The Lying Game

Chapter 32 THE BITTER TRUTH

In the car, Ethan was still gazing intently at Emma. “What’s going on?” he asked again.

“I’m Sutton,” Emma answered, trembling. “I swear.”

“You’re not.” A sad smile appeared on Ethan’s face. “Just tell me the truth.”

Emma stared at his glowing teeth in the darkness. She glanced around at the dark desert before them. A terrible thought crackled through her head like a lightning bolt: He sounded so sure. But how could he be positive, unless . . . “Did . . . did you kill her? Is that how you know?”

Ethan jolted back. He triple blinked, his face turning gray. “Kill her? Sutton’s . . . dead?”

Emma bit hard on her lip. Ethan looked shattered. “She was murdered,” she admitted in a tiny voice. “I think someone strangled her. Someone she knows. I saw it on a video.”

Ethan frowned. “Strangled?”

“With this necklace.” She lifted the locket from under her dress to show him. “In the woods. Her friends caught it all on tape. They even posted it online.”

Ethan’s gaze shifted to the right. A horrified look of understanding swept over his face. “Oh. Oh.”

“What?”

Ethan sank back into the seat and covered his face with his hands. “Was she blindfolded in this video?”

“Yes . . .”

Ethan took a deep breath and looked at her again. “I was there that night.”

Emma blinked hard. “You were there?”

“I was riding my bike when I saw this familiar car whip past,” he explained. “I recognized it by the SWAN LAKE MAFIA sticker on the back window—Madeline and I had assigned parking spots next to each other last year. It stuck in my head.”

Emma gulped.

“I don’t know why, but something made me follow them down this hill into a clearing,” Ethan went on. “By the time I got there, the camera had been set up and they’d just started strangling Sutton. I didn’t know what was going on or why they were doing it, but it seriously looked like they’d killed her.”

Emma sat completely still as Ethan explained what had happened: Just as Sutton had lost consciousness, he’d run into the clearing. The girls screamed and hid, knocking the camera off its tripod. He ran to Sutton and worked to untie her hands. “Sutton was still breathing,” he told Emma. “She came around.”

Emma stared out the dark windshield. “So . . . you were that person at the end of the video who took the blindfold off her? You saved her?”

Ethan shrugged. “I guess.”

He cleared his throat and went on. “But see, after that night, I didn’t hear anything from Sutton. Not that I thought she owed me anything, but it would’ve been nice to get . . . I don’t know. A real thank-you, maybe. So when you approached me outside Nisha’s party, I figured that’s what was about to happen. Something seemed off that night though. Different. The way you talked about Bitch Stars . . . your sense of humor. And every time I saw you after that, I kept getting that same nagging feeling. You were . . . sweet. And funny. And interesting. And . . . remorseful. The Sutton I knew—everyone knew—wouldn’t have felt bad about anything, ever. So I started to wonder if she had multiple personalities. Or had had, like, a spiritual awakening that made her not so . . . hard.” He pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets. “Whatever happened, I started to kind of fall for her.”

“That was me,” Emma said quietly, staring at her lap. “I was that girl at Nisha’s party. And every time after that. Not Sutton.”

Ethan ran his tongue over his teeth, nodding slowly. “So . . . who are you?”

A firecracker boomed in the distance. After it finished crackling, Emma took a breath. “I’m Sutton’s twin. Well, long-lost twin. We never knew each other. I didn’t even get to meet her once.”

Ethan stared at her without blinking. “Hold up. Long-lost twin? Like, for real?” He shook his head. “Start from the beginning.”

And then the whole story exploded from inside Emma, desperate to get out. “I tried to leave,” she explained when she got through explaining the SUTTON’S DEAD note. “I didn’t want to be stuck in her life. But her killer saw me at the bus station, I guess. And they cornered me in Charlotte’s house and said they’d kill me if I tried to leave again.” She shut her eyes, the feeling of the locket against her neck was as fresh and vivid as though it had happened just moments ago. “Sutton’s friends and her sister were the only people who knew I’d tried to leave. And Charlotte’s house is locked up like a fortress. It must have been someone who was already inside—one of Sutton’s friends. They tried to strangle me just like they strangled Sutton that night in the woods. The night they killed her.”

Ethan shook his head vehemently. “I’m not saying her friends didn’t kill Sutton, but if they did, it wasn’t the night the video was made. That happened two weeks before you got here. And everyone left after I stopped it. Sutton included. She was fine.”

“She left with them?” Emma asked, shocked.

A conflicted look crossed Ethan’s face. “Sutton and her friends pull crap like that all the time.”

“I know.” Emma rubbed her temples. “I never realized they got that dangerous though.”

All at once, it began to rain. The drops on the windshield sounded like tiny bombs going off. Emma looked at Ethan. “I have to get out of here.”

Ethan frowned. “Where will you go?”

“Anywhere.” Fresh, terrified tears cascaded down Emma’s cheeks. “I’ll get on the first bus that comes along. I can’t stay. This is insane.”

Ethan sat back in the seat, the leather making a crinkling noise. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“What do you mean?”

He turned toward her, biting hard on his thumb. “It’s just . . . you tried to leave once already, and that didn’t work out. Who’s to say this time will go any better?”

“But . . .” Emma stared frantically out the window at the tall cacti silhouettes. “It’s my only chance.”

They were both silent for a moment. A police car whipped past on a road in the distance. Its blue and red lights punctuated the otherwise coal-black night. “But . . .” Ethan began, tentatively. “What if leaving is what the killer wants you to do?”

“No.” Emma crossed her arms over her chest. “The killer wants me to stay here and be her.”

“Hear me out. If Sutton’s really . . . dead, maybe whoever did this is trying to frame you for her murder. They know you’re a foster kid. They know your life was probably hard. It won’t be rocket science to prove. If you leave, everyone will know Sutton is missing. Don’t you think whoever did this will tip off the cops that you’ve been impersonating her for two weeks? And don’t you think you’ll be the person the cops will immediately suspect of killing Sutton?”

Emma let her hands fall limply to her lap. Would they?

“It’s just, Sutton had a really charmed life,” Ethan said quietly, gazing out the window at the crescent moon. “She’s popular, she’s well-off, she gets everything she wants. And from everything you’ve said . . . you’re not. While Sutton got a nice house in Scottsdale, you ended up in foster care. It’s seriously not fair, Emma. Lots of people in your position would do anything to switch places with their twin sister.”

Emma’s mouth fell open. “I’d never kill her!”

Ethan waved his hands in surrender. “I know you wouldn’t. But . . . some people are awful. Some people automatically assume the worst. They might make judgments about you without looking into who you really are.”

Emma blinked. The walls of the car began to close in on her. She certainly knew about the awful people in this world making judgments. Look at Clarice—she’d assumed Emma had stolen her money over her thuggish son, simply because she thought that was what foster kids always did.

“Oh my God,” Emma whispered, covering her head with her arms. Ethan was right. He leaned in and, after a moment, pulled her into a hug. He squeezed hard and buried his head into the crook of her neck. Sobs shook Emma’s body.

I watched as they stayed that way for minutes, clinging to each other. I wished I was Emma so badly. I wanted to hug someone—maybe Ethan—right now, too.

Then Ethan sat back and gazed at Emma. His light eyes crinkled with concern. The corners of his pink, kissable lips arced up in a compassionate smile. He had a sooty splotch on his cheek that Emma wanted to reach out and wipe away. “God,” he whispered. “You look exactly like her.”

“That’s how it works with identical twins,” Emma said softly. Her mouth wobbled into a smile, but then a new sob rushed in.

Ethan touched her chin. “Stay. If Sutton really was killed, we’ll find who did it.”

“I don’t know,” Emma murmured.

“You can’t let whoever did this get away with it,” Ethan insisted. “I’ll help you. I promise. And when we have proof, we can go back to the cops and they’ll have to believe you.”

The rain abruptly stopped. Far in the distance, a coyote howled. Emma felt like she’d been holding her breath for hours.

She gazed into Ethan’s endless blue eyes. “Okay,” she whispered. “I’ll stay.”

“Good.” Ethan leaned forward and squeezed her shoulder. Emma shut her eyes, the touch of his hands on her bare skin sending sparks down her back. She hoped this was the right decision. She hoped she hadn’t just made an enormous mistake.

I hoped so, too.