Emma looked down to see a ribbon of blood trickling into her sandal from the scrape on her leg.
“Here,” Thayer said, following her gaze. He took a blue bandana from his pocket and knelt by her feet, carefully dabbing at the wound. “Don’t worry, it’s clean. I keep it on hand just so I can offer it to hot girls in distress,” he added with a grin.
As the faded piece of cloth turned dark with my twin’s blood, a memory flashed before me. I saw Thayer, his eyebrows furrowed, handing me that same bandana to wipe the tears from my eyes. I couldn’t remember what I’d been crying about, but I remembered hiding my face in the fabric’s soft folds, breathing in the warm sweet scent of Thayer’s body that lingered on it.
“Who did you say that was?” Thayer asked, tying the bandana snugly around Emma’s ankle to cover the wound.
Emma scrambled for an explanation, for yet another lie. But then she looked at the boy who’d loved her sister, his hazel eyes soft and concerned, and all that came out was the truth: “My birth mom.”
Thayer blinked hard. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“How did you know it was her? I thought you’d never met.”
“She left me a picture,” Emma said, thinking of the note Becky had left in the Horseshoe Diner.
For a few horrible days, Emma had thought that Mr. Mercer killed Sutton, in order to keep her from revealing his affair. Knowing that Sutton had seen Mr. Mercer with a woman in the canyon, Emma had searched his office and discovered he was secretly paying a woman named Raven. She’d arranged to meet with Raven at her hotel, but the mysterious woman had sent her on a scavenger hunt that ended with a note at a diner. Raven had left behind a letter and a photo of herself—only, it had been Becky’s face staring back. Raven/Becky had vanished, but Mr. Mercer had explained everything.
It was actually why Emma had asked Thayer to meet her for coffee. She’d wanted to tell him that Mr. Mercer hadn’t been the one who’d run Thayer down in Sabino Canyon the night I’d died—and that the woman Thayer had seen Mr. Mercer with was actually her biological mother.
“It was her, Thayer. I know it was,” Emma protested.
“I believe you,” he said in a low voice.
Behind them a garage door rattled open, and they stepped aside so that a freshly waxed Lexus could back out past them onto the street. They stood in silence for a moment, saying nothing.
“Are you going to be okay?” Thayer asked finally.
Emma felt her jaw tremble. “She looked … sick, didn’t she?”
“She’d have to be sick not to want to talk to you.” Thayer reached out and squeezed her arm, then pulled away cautiously, as though afraid he’d been too intimate. He nodded awkwardly back in the direction of the café. “I should probably get home. But Sutton—” He hesitated again. “If you want to talk about any of this, I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
Emma nodded, still lost in her thoughts. He was three blocks away before she realized that she still had his bandana knotted around her ankle.
I watched him go. Maybe he and Emma were right. Maybe the reason that Becky was acting strange was that she was ill. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d encountered her face before—while I was alive, before I became Emma’s silent shadow.
I wondered if it had been the last face I’d ever seen.
2
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE SEXY
Later that day, Emma parked Sutton’s vintage Volvo outside the Old Tucson Movie Studios. A rickety, old-style western saloon stood in front of her, complete with swinging wooden doors and an overpowering stench of booze. Next to that was a bank building with bullet holes in the wall, a hitching post, and even a house that must have been a brothel, judging by the overly made-up women fanning themselves on the porch. In the fifties and sixties the studio had been a real movie set for westerns, but now it was an amusement park, a Wild West Disneyland full of tourists. Ethan Landry—Emma’s boyfriend and the only person who knew her true identity—had suggested they come here instead of the municipal tennis courts, their usual meeting spot.
“Howdy, ma’am.” A man in cow-print chaps and spurs nodded his Stetson to her. Emma waved halfheartedly, not really feeling in the Wild West spirit. She wished she could—it would be reassuring to swagger confidently down the street, a gun at her hip, finally in charge of her destiny after feeling helpless for so long.
The studio sparked something in me, too. I was pretty sure I’d been here on a class trip and had laughed at the fakey-fakeness of it all with Char and Mads. We’d ditched the tour to sneak into the saloon through the outhouse in the back. Even half remembering how much fun I used to have with them filled me with longing.
After wandering for a few minutes without seeing Ethan, Emma plopped down on one of the benches facing Tucson Mountain Park and pulled out her copy of Jane Eyre, which they were reading for English. She had opened to the middle of the book when suddenly she heard gravel crunching behind her.
Ethan was passing by the general store, squinting into the afternoon sun. Her knees weakened slightly as she took in his broad shoulders, muscular legs, and dark, piercing blue eyes. He wore a pair of camouflage cargo shorts and a black sweatshirt, and his dark hair had a cute tousled look that made her want to run her fingers through it. His shadow stretched out toward her in the sunset as he approached.
“Reach for the sky, partner!” she said, jumping up and aiming her fingers at him like twin pistols.
Eyes round with mock terror, Ethan lifted his hands, then quick-drew an imaginary gun from inside an imaginary coat. “Bang!” he said.
She clutched her chest and staggered backward, sinking to her knees. Then, despite all of the drama that had unfurled that day, she started giggling. That was one of the things she liked most about Ethan—she could be herself with him, goofy Emma Paxton of Las Vegas, Nevada. The girl who wrote a secret newspaper about her life, who kept detailed lists of snarky comebacks she should have said to people who’d been rude to her, the girl who hadn’t known Marc Jacobs from Michael Kors before she stepped into Sutton’s shoes. Ethan didn’t judge her for any of that—he liked her just the way she was. No one had ever accepted her at face value before. Even back when she’d been herself, everyone had immediately made assumptions about her because she was a foster child.
Ethan strode over to her bowlegged, like a cowboy, and drew her close. Their lips met in a brief kiss. Emma felt as though her body might melt.
When they parted, she glanced around them. “I’ve never been on a movie set before.”
Ethan turned around. “I keep forgetting you didn’t grow up here. We used to come to the studio on school trips all the time.” Ethan took her hand in his, and together they strolled down the dusty street. He pointed at the saloon, where a red-faced man with a beard was wiping down a bar covered in bottles of whiskey. “They built that for Rio Bravo. And they shot a bunch of Gunsmoke and Bonanza episodes out here in the sixties.”
“On one of the signs out front it says Little House on the Prairie was filmed here,” Emma said. “I used to love that show.”
Ethan looked surprised. “I didn’t take you for the Little House type.”
Emma shrugged. “I watched reruns of it after school. I think I liked it because even though they were poor, the family was so loving and happy. Ma and Pa would do anything for their children.”
Ethan glanced at her sideways. “And what do you think about the Mercers? Are they a good family like that?”
Emma nodded slowly, knowing that Ethan was referring to her recent discovery that the Mercers were her family, for real. It was still unbelievable that Mr. and Mrs. Mercer were her grandparents—and Laurel her aunt. She felt grateful to have finally found them, but in some ways, it had made things even more complicated. The Mercers didn’t know they had two grandchildren. Nor did they know the granddaughter they’d raised as their own child was dead. What would they do if they found out? What would they say if they discovered Emma had been impersonating Sutton, that she had known Sutton was dead all this time?
It was something I thought about a lot, too. I wanted my parents to embrace Emma, I really did. I wished that I could help explain everything to them. But lies can hurt, especially a lie this huge.
“So.” Ethan took Emma’s hand, leading her to a bench across from a church. This part of the lot looked completely abandoned. “Why did you want to meet?”
Emma took a deep breath. “I saw my mom earlier,” she admitted, biting the corner of her lip. “My real mom. Becky.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Where?”
“She drove past me. I tried to run after her, but she gunned it. I guess she didn’t want to talk.”
Ethan turned Emma so that she was facing him. “Are you okay?”
She shrugged, forcing a smile. “It’s not me she’s avoiding, right? It’s Sutton she doesn’t want to talk to.”
Ethan scratched his chin. He opened his mouth like he was about to say something, and then closed it.
“What?” Emma asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
Emma cocked her head to one side. “Say it.”
He took a deep breath. “Well, you said Becky was kind of … crazy, right?”
Emma nodded slowly. She had told Ethan about how erratic her mother had seemed when Emma was just a little girl. Some days Becky would take Emma to the park, or let her have ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Other days she stayed in bed with the blinds drawn, crying into her pillow. The summer before she’d abandoned Emma, Becky had taped cardboard from cereal boxes all over the windows, certain that someone was watching them at night. Emma still cringed when she saw the Captain Crunch logo.
Ethan scuffed the edge of one Chuck Taylor against the other. “Do you have the letter she left you at the diner?”
Without speaking, Emma pulled Sutton’s wallet from the Madewell messenger bag over her shoulder and unfolded the note, wincing once more at Becky’s handwriting, which was familiar even after all these years. It didn’t say much; just I wish things had gone differently that night in the canyon, and some vague advice for Sutton not to make the same mistakes she had. Emma wished it had said more.
I did, too. It was the first note my mother ever wrote to me. I wished it said how much she loved me, how much she regretted the decision to give me up.
Emma held it out to Ethan, who studied it intensely. Finally, he looked up and handed the note back to her. “Have you noticed that this isn’t addressed to Sutton?” He turned it over. “Not on the front. Not in the greeting. Not anywhere.”
“So?” Emma asked.
“What if that letter was written to you? What if she knows you’re not Sutton?”
Emma’s body went rigid. “The only person who knows that is the murderer.”
Ethan’s expression didn’t change. Emma shook her head. “Becky’s unstable, but she’s no murderer. She sent me on treasure hunts all over our apartment complex. She helped me paint big colorful murals on the walls of one of my bedrooms. She’s my mom.”