"You've nearly warmed this cold, cold heart of mine."

Fairy tales are for suckers.

I had the fairytale once — the happy family, the perfect boyfriend the beyond-cool best friend, a place with the "in" crowd at high school. It was a façade, crushed as efficiently as an ashtray crushed Lilly Kane's skull and as brutally as waking up after a party with no memory and your underwear on the floor. It took a while, but I unmasked Lilly's real killer and I found a truth about the night of Shelley Pomroy's party that I could live with.

But life sucks beyond the telling of it. You'd think I'd know by now, and that it shouldn't have hit me in the gut when expensive lawyers ensured that Lilly's killer walked free, but it did — almost as much as finding out that there was more than one boy who took advantage of my involuntarily drugged state the night I lost my virginity.

There's some good. I've got my dad and, despite the odd hiccup, he's "good people." He used to be sheriff in this town, but Kane influence put an end to that career. He became a private investigator, and I helped him sometimes. What he's taught me has enabled me to make a decent living of my own. Now that the guy that replaced him is dead, Dad's back in office. I don't know what will become of our business, or of our status in this crummy town. I just know that I want out of this place, out of Neptune with its corruption and its memories, but my mom's parting gift was to steal the money that would have made that possible. For now, I'm stuck here, but at least Hearst College isn't high school.

I'm a lot more careful now about whom I call friend. Wallace befriended me when no one else would, although I tease him that it's because he didn't know any better. Cutting him down from a flagpole was maybe the best thing I ever did, and he's my rock. There's Mac too. She's cool and there whenever I need her mad computer skillz. She knows what a screwed-up world this is. Weevil is a friend, I think, although I'm not sure he'd say so after I accused him of robbery. I'm not so quick to forget that he was the leader of a biker gang with questionable morals.

Then there's Logan. He was Lilly's boyfriend. Before everything went pear-shaped, we were friends. After Lilly died, he hated me for standing by Dad's suspicion of the Kanes with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. The feeling was mutual, as he led the 09ers — the rich kids — who made my life Hell. We both thawed after his mother jumped off the Coronado Bridge, and then it got crazy. I love Logan and I know he loves me, but some of the stuff he does I just can't...

Does that make me a bitch? Maybe it does. I'm harder and less forgiving than I used to be. Don't expect me to apologize for it.