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“Truth and story—doesn’t matter which comes first as long as you get where you need to be at the end. As long as you end at the truth, all’s fair.��

That’s how Leah Stevens lived, and that’s why she had to leave town in a hurry. She knew the truth, directed attention to it, and it had fatal consequences that affected an old friend. She found support in the shape of Emmy Grey, her roommate after college whom she hadn’t seen for eight years. Emmy is a bit of a loose cannon, to say the least.

Leah tells us her story, sharing a bit about her family, a bit about her career, and gradually more about why she had to leave.

When she and Emmy parted company in the past, Emmy had said she was going overseas with the Peace Corps. Fancy running into her in a pub just when Leah was looking for a way to leave town. It was not unlike how she met Emmy the first time, when she was looking for a flat to move into after college. Emmy was fun, impulsive. Emmy drank a lot of vodka (with Leah). Emmy had peculiar values. Leah quotes Emmy.

��'All relationships fall into three categories. Three. That’s it.' She’d tipped her head to the side, her hair spilled out around her, to check if I was listening, whether I was awake. I liked moments like this, staying silent and letting her spin a tale. She’d looked back to the ceiling. 'Okay, here’s the hypothetical. Take anyone you know. Anyone. Let’s say you know they’ve killed someone. They call you and they confess. Do you either, A, call the police.' She held up her thumb. 'B, do nothing.' Her pointer finger. 'Or C, help them bury the body.' Her third finger went up, and she held them over her face, waiting.��

The girls move from Boston to Pennsylvania, where Leah has lined up a high school teaching job and hopes to start a new life. It’s certainly not Boston.

“Just yesterday one of the other teachers said there was a bear in his yard. Just that: a bear in his yard. Like it was a thing one might or might not notice in passing. Graffiti on the overpass, a burnt-out streetlight. Just a bear.��

The teachers are nice, the kids are pretty much normally troublesome, and life is ticking along until a young woman is found badly injured and unconscious by the lake. This young woman looks surprisingly like Leah. Could she have been mistaken for Leah? Was Leah really the target, and if so, why?

Meanwhile, Leah has had some strange phone calls and emails. She suspects the school coach, and he’s locked up for a while, which quiets things down. When he’s released, it starts up again.

Kyle Donovan is the handsome young cop who investigates and gets a bit more embroiled with Leah than he intended. But he hasn’t met Emmy. Funny thing, that. Nobody’s seen Emmy for several days. In fact, Leah has trouble finding anyone who has EVER seen Emmy, and she has no idea how to prove she really does exist.

Talk about your three kinds of people! How do you classify people who just up and disappear? Is she going to turn up as another victim at the lake?

The author does a fine job of keeping up the suspense while getting on with the story, and she never falters. Leah and Emmy are believable characters (even as we wonder whether Emmy is a creation of Leah’s imagination), and Leah’s journalistic transgression is explained, to my great satisfaction.

It’s a well-told mystery with a wee bit of romance, which, although unnecessary, does serve to explain why Leah and Kyle might share some confidences they wouldn’t otherwise.

Leah is a lot braver than I would ever be, and Emmy is as clever as all get-out, as we used to say. It’s fun watching Leah use her journalistic skills to track every tiny lead.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted (at my peril), so quotes may have changed. . . but I like to give a sense of the author’s style.