She’d already turned away and started off, the bag jouncing against her back.

“Can I carry that at least?” he asked, jogging to catch her.

She stared at him, eyes widening in surprise, and then rage contorted her features. Furious tears rose in her eyes. She dashed them away one-handed, chest heaving with savage breaths as she worked to calm herself. When she finally got herself enough under control to speak, her eyes went blank and dull. She spoke in a fast monotone.

“Do you have any cash? I can’t go home. My mom . . . my mom will . . .” She flushed an ugly red. “I want to go stay with my cousin Angela in Memphis. I think she’s in Memphis. I need money for the bus.”

He pulled out everything he had in his wallet and passed it over without counting, his face as red as hers.

“Thanks,” she said, clipped and unironic, and then she turned and left him there.

He still wanted to carry her bag. Drive her to the bus station. Buy her a ticket on his Visa. But he could not make himself follow her.

He went home and started grunt-pumping beer, belly and reform be damned. At some point Spence found him, and when he caught Spence up on everything that had happened—Ansel, the pictures, Lexie’s exit—Spence started drinking, too, silent and sorry.

The whole day was lost inside a blackout drunk, but apparently at sunset Trey showed up at Maura’s sorority house with a ring he did not remember buying, holding up a boom box that was blasting Peter Gabriel. The next morning he was hungover and engaged.

He mostly felt relieved. His life was back on track. Maura had a path mapped out, tidy and morally upright. He’d stepped off it, and everything had gone weird and wrong.

Their law-school acceptances came in. For the most part, it was yes across the board. The one exception was that Trey and Maura got into Stanford and Spence didn’t.

Trey had a strong, immediate intuition that Stanford was the school for him. Period. He didn’t say Lexie Pine’s name as he made this decision. He didn’t even really think it. But perhaps he felt the ghost of her pushing him west. It was a prestigious choice, so Maura was an easy sell. She was thrilled he’d consider it after Spence got his no.

He worried Spence would fight him on it or be angry. He couldn’t let it get ugly. Spence was family, and they would one day work at the same firm. He framed Stanford as what Maura wanted, and Spence was surprisingly cool. Maybe he wanted a break from Trey, too. He’d felt something for Lexie, and he had failed her. Trey was part of that.

“I’ll miss you, cuz, but I get it. You have to follow the pussy,” he said. “I’m going to stay at UVA, I think. I’ll see you back at home.”

That was that. Trey and Maura got married after graduation and spent the summer roaming Europe, exactly as she’d wanted. He didn’t think about Lexie often, and when he did, the accompanying shame made him shove it away. He never considered what had become of her, or at least not realistically. He was young, and he had grown up wealthy; he didn’t have the context. In his head she’d faced the consequences he would have had to face. Embarrassment. An angry parent. A different, maybe less impressive school. He was not from a place where people got only one shot or were allowed only one mistake. In his world there were infinite chances.

He finished law school. He came home to Georgia and passed the bar. He started his job, working crazy hours to earn his partnership. He realized Maura had meant it the thousand times she’d said she never wanted kids, and they began letting go of each other, working toward an amicable split. By the time he met me in the High Museum, Lexie Pine was a lost night that had happened more than a decade in his past.

He left her there, and there she stayed. Until right now. He set the whole story down before me, every detail, bleak and ugly. Then he looked at me, ashamed and sorry, afraid and defensive, to see if I still loved him after this.

17

On the way back to Atlanta, with Bree driving, Marshall began calling in markers and burning stored-up favors. Before he was done, he might be in favor debt. But this was Bree. This was her baby. No regrets.

The first thing he did was call his old partner on the ATL PD to give him Lexie Pine’s name and approximate age. He asked him for any and all information, as fast as possible. Then he called Gabrielle to update her so she wouldn’t waste more time on Trey and Spencer’s old case files. She moved to tracking down the family that had owned Funtime, back when it was open. The Dentons. She agreed with Marshall that the mother had picked Funtime for a reason. The Dentons might know her, even have good guesses about where she’d go to ground.

“If you find them, tell them you’re a lawyer and you’re looking for her with news about an inheritance,” he said.

“But I am a lawyer. Which means I probably don’t need help coming up with a good story,” she shot back, tart.

“Of course not,” he said. “Sorry.”

She blew all her breath out, slow. “No, I am. It’s a good idea. I’m just . . .”

Tired, probably, and stressed out and horrified.

“Me, too,” he assured her, and they got off the phone.

By then his partner had sent back an email with several files attached. Lexie Pine’s prison and arrest records. She’d gone off parole seven months ago. That was a disappointment. He did have her last known address, though, plus a list of known associates and family.

Father, Preston Early Pine, deceased. And then her mother. Now he had the enemy’s real name. Coral Lee Pine, age seventy-two, address unknown.

Marshall’s investigator’s license gave him access to some powerful search engines, but they couldn’t provide everything he needed. Not legally. He had a contact number for a pair of computer “researchers” who were willing to operate outside those constraints. James and Tiana Weaver. He’d never used them. Marshall was a straight shooter, and the Weavers’ brand of back-channel info was seldom admissible in court. But he’d heard that they could find out almost anything.

With a faint shock of irony, he remembered that Spence had given him the number. The connection was a sour taste in his mouth.

Favors weren’t their currency, but Bree had Venmo. Marshall called James, offering twice their normal rate for answers on a timer. James seemed hesitant until Marshall mentioned that he had worked for Spencer Shaw. He said that even though Spence, as they might have heard, had passed away quite suddenly, his cases went on.