None of us knew that Noah Landry had come. None of us remembered seeing him. All we knew was that the door to the first-floor bedroom stayed closed for hours after Lucy Vale had entered to sleep it off, and none of us could get our coats.
Later Peyton Neely and Sofia Young saw Lucy Vale stumbling through the snow, flanked by some of the swimmers, who were practicallycarrying her toward a waiting car. What car, they couldn’t say. But Akash was positive that Bailey Lawrence had told him that Lucy Vale was going home with Noah.
Of all of us, Akash was the most concerned about Lucy’s drinking. Even though he and Lucy barely spoke anymore, he still couldn’t quite shake her. He’d noticed she was missing at the party for a while. He’d heard, like the rest of us, that she was lying down in a bedroom.
Around eleven o’clock, he’d worked up the courage to ask Bailey whether Lucy needed a ride home. Bailey had told him that Lucy was fine, and Noah Landry had come to get her.
So Akash left to drive the Courtlands home and thought nothing more about it. What was he supposed to do?
If Lucy wanted to go home with her ex-boyfriend, she wanted to go home with her ex-boyfriend.
Six
Rachel
Later Rachel would obsessively replay the night in her mind, wondering where she had been, what she’d been doing when her daughter was staggering into a downstairs bedroom, leaning on her ex-boyfriend’s best friend. Trusting him. What had Rachel been doing when Lucy woke up in flashes, in brief snapshots, to find Noah on top of her and his friends watching them from the corner, egging him on? Had she been brushing her teeth or on the phone with her cousin while Lucy was slipping in and out of consciousness?
Where was she at the exact moment that her daughter was being raped?
For some reason this felt important—critical even—in the brutal early days of the new year. If she could only think her way back to the precise moment when her daughter’s life was slipping off its tracks, shoved in an entirely new direction, she might somehow avert it, might rivet Lucy back to herself as she puttered obliviously around the house, enjoying one of the few New Year’s Eves she’d ever spent at home as a single woman. Rachel was sick afterward, remembering how much she’d enjoyed herself—how pleased she’d been, even, that Lucy had had plans with her friends.
A sleepover at Mia’s house, Lucy had told her. Just the girls.
And Rachel had believed her.
Idiot.
She had suspected something was wrong, something was off, when Lucy had texted at eleven o’clock to say that she was going to bed as soon as she and her friends were done watching a movie. The message was full of typos; Rachel had asked point-blank whether she was drinking and then demanded that Lucy call.
Lucy wouldn’t. But her subsequent texts seemed more lucid, and she’d promised to call as soon as the movie was over. Rachel suspected now that one of Lucy’s friends had taken her phone, concerned that Lucy might tip off her mother about the party.
Lucy herself didn’t remember; she didn’t remember texting her mother at all. Whole portions of the night, she said, were missing as if they’d been removed with a gigantic ice-cream scoop. Instead she had only fragments. Feelings.
A sore throat, raw feeling, possibly from throwing up. Mysterious bruises on her arms and thighs.
Pain between her legs.
And Rachel had been—where? Surfing Netflix, trying to decide on a movie to watch. Texting with friends from graduate school. Spooning ice cream into the little glass cups she and Lucy had found at a yard sale over the summer and wondering why pharmacies had once doubled as soda shops, what the connection was. She had stayed up to watch the ball drop in Times Square, counting down with the crowd and blowing a kiss to the TV screen at midnight.Goodbye and hello.
She texted Lucy again.Are you asleep?And then:Be honest. Have you been drinking?
She checked the last message she’d sent to Bailey.Can you please have Lucy call me?No response. But she still wasn’t too worried about it. Mia’s parents weren’t her favorite people—country-club types, disengaged—and she couldn’t imagine that they would have stayed home to supervise the girls on New Year’s Eve. But even if Lucy and her friendswere drinking, Rachel had no reason to think they were in danger—not with the four of them together, not at a girls’ sleepover.
So she turned off the lights. She treated herself to a face mask, a Korean clay treatment that Lucy had insisted they buy after hearing about it on TikTok. She thought she would read for a bit—one of her old colleagues fromVicehad written a new book about the Murdaugh case—and she was just preparing to climb in bed when her phone lit up. She lurched for it, assuming it was her daughter at last.
She felt her first real pull of anxiety when she saw Noah Landry’s number.
“Noah? Is everything okay?” Right away she could tell that Noah was in a car. She checked the time: 12:35 a.m. As far as she knew, Noah had a strict curfew. Something must have gone wrong.
“Um, I think so?” Noah’s voice—so familiar, so casual—was instantly reassuring. “But, um, Lucy’s pretty wasted ...”
“Where is she? Where are you?”
“I have her in the car. I’m on my way to your house right now. I just thought you should know. She keeps saying she has to puke ...”
“But where was she? Where’s Bailey?”
Noah hesitated. “They’re still at Ryan’s house,” Noah said finally.
