When sixteen-year-old Angela Wong vanished without a trace, no one suspected her best friend, Georgina "Geo" Shaw. Fourteen years later, Geo is a rising pharmaceutical executive in Seattle when Angela's remains are finally discovered in the woods near Geo's childhood home — and the truth of what happened that night begins to surface.
The detective on the case is Kaiser Brody, who knew both girls in high school and never stopped wondering. What he learns forces Geo to confront the secret she has carried for half her life: her first love, Calvin James, a man whose intensity curdled into something far darker, and the role she played in a crime she has spent years trying to bury.
Jennifer Hillier's breakout thriller moves between the present-day investigation and the volatile high-school relationship that set everything in motion. As new bodies turn up bearing the same signature as Angela's murder, Geo must reckon with guilt, complicity, and how far a person will go to keep the past from catching up. Told with unflinching momentum, it is a story about first love, buried grief, and the long half-life of a lie.