Bailey’s Uncle Charlie. They usually talk on Friday evenings—and every Tuesday evening when her cousins are with him. But a call early on a weekday morning isn’t entirely unusual. Sometimes he calls on his way to work. Sometimes he calls just to say hello. Sometimes, Bailey knows, Charlie just calls to make up for the times he couldn’t.
So she is smiling when she picks up his call. She is smiling until she hears the sound of her uncle’s voice—desperate and clipped—jumping in before she even has a chance to say hello to him.
“Are you with Hannah?” he asks.
“What?”
“Is Hannah with you?”
“No. Is she supposed to be? It’s eight in the morning.”
“Bailey, is Justin out front?”
Justin is the bodyguard her grandfather hired to keep eyes on Bailey. The same way Charlie’s twins, Bailey’s cousins, have bodyguards to watch over them.
Bailey looks out the window. On a workday, she can often makeout Justin’s Jeep diagonally across the street, near the sunglass store. Near the fruit stand with the fresh watermelon juice.
But sometimes Justin is somewhere else entirely. This morning he must be somewhere else.
She scans her corner of Abbott Kinney, unable to spot him at first glance. It is starting to get busier with early morning traffic, folks lining up at the coffee shop downstairs, two SoCalGas repairmen standing by her building’s front door.
“I don’t see him.”
“You don’t see him?” Charlie sounds frantic. He isn’t trying to hide it. “Shouldn’t he be there?”
“He probably is. Charlie, you’re freaking me out. What’s going on?”
“You need to get to Hannah and you need to go.”
“Go where?”
“Call me back when you are somewhere safe and I’ll fill you in.”
“Is it Nicholas?”
She doesn’t refer to Nicholas as Grandpa, not all the time. At that moment, for some reason, it’s Nicholas. Nicholas who was diagnosed with heart failure last year. He’d had a pacemaker put in to buy him more time. He’d been fine at Easter. He’d been fine when he flew out for her birthday. He wasjust fine, he promised Bailey, again and again.
But Bailey would put her hand on his heart, to feel the beating, like a certain kind of proof. Now she held her hand on her own heart, waiting for Charlie’s answer.
“Charlie, is this about Nicholas? Is he okay?”
“Nothing’s okay,” Charlie says.
And Bailey starts to move.
You Can’t Go Home and You Can’t Stay Here
I clutch the flash drive in my hand, turning quickly.
My staircase is visible from the windows by the front door, so there’s no going out that way. There’s no going out from any of the first-floor exits and not running into the man (whoever he is) pretending there’s a gas leak, pretending in that SoCalGas uniform.
Instead, I race back to my bedroom and grab the backpack from under the bed, putting the flash drive in my front pocket. I take the ladder up to the attic and pop open the back window. There is a trellis crawling down the back of the house, into the soft landing of my small backyard. This is why I chose this house. This trellis.
I climb down it, the easy ladder-rungs, and drop to the grass.
I race to the back gate and let myself out into the small alleyway that separates me from the Blauners’ house. I close the gate behind myself, locking it—when a loud crack startles me. Is it coming from inside my house? A window breaking? My bay window? The front door being kicked in?
Is it unrelated?
