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My heartbeat pounded in my ears. There was something deep inside of me that told me I needed to listen.

“I don’t understand why you’re spending your fortune on this stupid little town. Or why you’re fighting us.” Toby scoffed. “Is it that important to you?”

My world tilted as I waited for the answer. “It is.”

“You’ve spent years doing this. I looked up this grant. The second you had money, you started it.”

“And it’s not ending. Even if I’m gone, I’ll find a way to save that spring. And you should let go of it before it gets messy.”

“It’s not going to. Someone will give in.”

Gabriel laughed. “That’s one of my favorite things about Strawberry Springs. They never give up.”

At the most shocking words I’d ever heard in my life, I fell over. A clang echoed down the hallway and their conversation paused. I crab walked toward the front door, still staying out of sight, and then ran back to my apartment.

I was heaving by the time I shut and locked my door.

Everything he’d said hit me all at once.

Everything he’d done hit me too.

I had to take in air as I tried to make sense of what I’d just realized.

All my conclusions before were circumstances I’d tied together. I wanted my suspicions to be true. I wanted to know who it was.

This was different. This was a cold, hard truth hitting me like a pile of bricks.

The Post-it note sat in front of me on my desk as well as the note to Grace.

I looked at the handwriting again, heart kicking into high gear. It had been years since I’d seen Gabriel’s handwriting, and I never gave it a second thought. Now that it was on my mind, though, he always had written certain letters oddly. He capitalized his A’s and D’s, and I always used to joke that his handwriting was like an old man’s.

I tore through my shelves until I found my yearbook. Gabriel had left me a note in there a long time ago. The book was buried under mountains of things that I needed to go through. But when I found it, I opened it up to the front page.

There it was. The capitalized D. The weird A. I look from my sticky note to Grace’s note to this one.

That was the same fucking handwriting.

None of this made sense. He didn’t like the town. Why would he go so above and beyond to do things?

He’d paid for a cruise for Marjorie and Henrietta.

He’d never met Cain, yet paid for his lawyer fees.

He’d helped Grace too.

If he did all of that, then that meant . . .

I shook my head, still unable to wrap my mind around it.

“The group.” I was barely able to say it. “He’s not in the group, right?”

That was the one last thing that I didn’t understand. With shaky hands, I pulled out my phone.

I navigated to the Facebook group, looking through every single person in it.

There was only one that made sense.

G Singh.