“You weren’t mean. You weren’t bad.” He wasn’t anything. He made me laugh, and he gave me a roof over my head and food in the kitchen, and he never raised a hand to me, or his voice. For a lot of people, that would make him good. A good father. A good man.

He leaned across the table, took my hand again. “Are you happy, Nic?”

“Yes,” I said. I had everything I wanted waiting for me in Philadelphia. A whole life there.

“Good, good.”

I squeezed his hand. “You don’t deserve this,” I said. “Any of this.”

He started drumming his fingers again, double time, leaned toward me, and lowered his voice to a raspy whisper. “Nic, listen to me. I have to pay. I have to.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” I said. “Don’t talk about it anymore. Nothing. Not a word. To anyone. Got it?”

“Got it,” he said.

But I knew it would last only an hour or so. “I need you to focus. I need you to remember this.”

“I’ll remember, Nic.” He lifted his face to mine, his eyes like a child’s, waiting for me to explain.

I looked down at my hand over his, at the age spots speckling the back of his hand, the freckles on my own. “Dad, they want to bring you down to the station. You have to stop talking. Please.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I held up my hand to stop him. Over Dad’s shoulder, I saw Everett standing just inside the cafeteria entrance, his eyes quickly finding me. I raised my hand, and Dad followed my line of vision. “Dad, I want you to meet someone. This is Everett,” I said as he approached. Remember who Everett is. Please.

He looked at Everett, then at my bare hand, and smiled. “Sure, sure. Nice to meet you, Everett.”

Everett shook my dad’s hand. “Same to you, Patrick. Sorry Christmas didn’t work out.” We were supposed to fly in and out for a Christmas Eve visit before returning to spend the rest of the holiday with Everett’s family, but a snowstorm had derailed our plans, and we’d never rebooked. But this was a detail too hard for Dad to pull from his memory. He made a noncommittal noise that to Everett probably sounded like displeasure.

Everett turned to me. “Everything’s all set here, unless you want to stay for dinner?”

All at once I felt like I was seventeen again, sitting in the kitchen, with my dad asking if I was staying or going. Going, I’d say. Always going. Had my foot out the door as soon as I stopped trying to convince myself my mother might live.

“I’ve got a lot to do,” I said. “But I’ll see you later, Dad.”

Everett placed his card on the table. “I told the director and the nurses up front, but if anyone comes to talk to you—anyone at all—you give me a call.”

Dad raised an eyebrow at me as I walked away. When I looked over my shoulder, he was still watching. I shook my head once, praying he would remember.

I excused myself to the bathroom while Everett chatted with the woman behind the front desk. I closed the door to the stall and dialed Tyler, unease coursing through my veins. “Pick up, damnit,” I mumbled, but of course he didn’t.

I considered calling information and getting the number for Kelly’s to see if he was there. But from outside the restroom, I heard the faint echo of Everett’s voice: “What, exactly, was Patrick Farrell saying?”

I raced out of the room. “Everett?” I called, watching him slowly pull back from the reception desk. “Ready?”

* * *

GOSSIP. THE MOST DANGEROUS part of an investigation. Infectious and inescapable. This was something I was all too familiar with, even before my job as school counselor.

There’s a danger to it, because it grows out of something real, a seed in the earth, giving life on its own. It’s all tangled together—the truth, the fiction—and sometimes it’s hard to pick apart. Sometimes it’s hard to remember which parts truly exist.

When Corinne disappeared and we ran out of places to search, people to question, leads to track down, the only thing left for people was the talk.

About Corinne and Bailey and me. Reckless and drunk on life, never thinking of the consequences. How we passed around a bottle in the clearing outside the caverns and invited boys inside. How we lifted candy bars from the convenience store (on a dare, always a dare) and didn’t respect property or authority. How we had no boundaries with each other, a tangle of limbs and hair and sun-kissed skin—They swapped boyfriends, even, you know.

Because look at the evidence sitting neatly in the box: Jackson kissing Bailey; Corinne hitting on Tyler as I watched. The three of us spinning, blurring, like ghosts in a field of sunflowers. And me, on the outside of the Ferris wheel, watching death rushing by. We lived too close—too close to each other, too close to some mysterious edge, too reckless and invincible, too naive to our own mortalities, just too. The talk: that maybe we brought it on ourselves.

Maybe we did.

And on the other side of the talk: Daniel and Jackson and maybe Tyler, the ones to watch with a wary eye. The ones who circled us, watching, waiting. The ones who let their anger break free, who acted. Who broke up with us, who pushed us away when they were displeased and then came back for more.

Who was really surprised, looking from the outside in?

After all the talk, I didn’t understand how any of them stayed.

* * *

I DROVE SLOWLY BECAUSE of the glare coming from the sun, nearly setting, and the roads that wind gradually and then sharply with no warning. And the deer that could be standing there, frozen on the double-yellow line. And because Everett was plowing through his emails and we were about to lose service around that next bend.

I waited for him to start cursing at his phone. “Want to stop at the library again?”

“No,” he said, leaning his head against the window. “It can wait until tomorrow.”

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Famished.”

“Good. I know a place.” I cast a quick glance at him. “All I have at home right now are microwave dinners. We can hit the store tomorrow.”

“You need to eat better,” he said. “You look like you’ve lost weight.”

To judge from the way my pants were fitting, I probably had. I’d been busy, skipping meals, filling my gut with coffee and soda until I could feel the acid churning and rising. Everything else tasted either metallic or stale.

I parked in the lot behind Kelly’s Pub because the front streets were already lined with cars, and because that was where the residents parked. Tyler’s truck wasn’t there, but Jackson’s bike was in the corner slot.