He could see it in the way their eyes dulled and their hands went stiff in their laps, in the nervous edge to their voices, in the way their gazes flickered like candles in a storm.
He knew his father had secretly bought his mother a chocolate birthday cake that she had never gotten to eat. He knew his mother was not really from Chicago like she’d told his father,but he could never ask her the truth. He knew his father loved him but did not like him, and he knew his mother did not love his father. He knew that his father had—for some reason—just lied about why he had come to Japan.
The Benadryl was starting to set in, blurring the edges of Lee’s vision. He set his mug on the table so he wouldn’t spill it. As a fog crept through his mind, he cared less and less about why his father had lied. People lied all the time for silly reasons—embarrassment, forgetfulness, nervousness. Lies didn’t always mean that the truth was important.
“Is the jet lag starting to set in?” his father said with a knowing smile.
Lee’s eyes snapped open. He’d been falling asleep sitting up.
“Apparently,” Lee lied, taking a scalding sip of coffee. He’d overdone it—he wasn’t supposed to be quite this sedated in front of his father, and he was lucky he had jet lag as an excuse. The only thing worse than acting like a freak was acting like a stoner.
“Take a nap,” his father said, clearing both their coffee cups. “I’ll wake you up in half an hour so it doesn’t ruin your sleep schedule.”
“Okay,” Lee said, tugging a pillow under his head and lying down across the couch. His father ruffled his hair and Lee thanked a god he didn’t believe in that he hadn’t messed up worse than this.
His body went numb, and he sank swiftly into unconsciousness. The sedatives had a way of dragging him into half sleep, where he could still sense his father’s footsteps in the hall and the sword ferns whispering across the windows but his body was made of cement and he couldn’t move at all. It was the only time he truly felt fine—when he was suspended between worlds. He knew that probably made him a drug addict, but there were worse things he could have been—like a murderer.
The sedatives were his grandmother’s fault.
She’d come to stay with Lee and his father after Lee’s mother disappeared. Lee hadn’t slept in a week, certain that if he stared at the open porch door for long enough, his mother would return. His grandmother took one look at his sallow skin and bloodshot eyes and gave him some Benadryl. Twenty minutes later, for the first time in Lee Turner’s life, his mind fell quiet.
He remembered cicadas outside his window. They had always been there, screaming into the night, but he had never noticed them until that day. He’d held a rainstorm inside his head for so long.
The next morning, he slipped the blister pack from his grandmother’s purse and took another Benadryl with breakfast, and a blanket of snow fell over his mind once more. He decided this was where he wanted to live—out in the snow, where he couldn’t feel his fingers or toes.
That was the night his father slept on the floor beside his bed, petted his hair until he thought Lee was asleep, and told him he was a good boy for the first time Lee could remember. Lee pretended he was asleep, and his dad cried for a long time, then kissed Lee’s forehead and went to his own room.
The next day, Lee asked his dad for more Benadryl, said it was the only way he could sleep. His father bought him as much as he wanted because Lee was better and everyone could see it. He no longer told truths that no one wanted to hear. He no longer stayed up late reading books backward just so he could taste the words differently. He no longer stared at cracks in the ceiling and imagined them expanding, mapping his own doom above his head every night. He was normal. A good boy. Soon after, he discovered melatonin, then valerian root, then Unisom, then Ativan.
It was never supposed to be a forever plan, but that just became another anomaly—Lee was scared to stop taking the pills but could no longer remember what he was scared of.
His father shook his shoulder, warm hands gently extracting him from the tangled web of dreams. Lee opened his eyes and squinted in the sunlight, then his gaze shifted to his father, who was smiling fondly down at him. He liked Lee when he was asleep, when he couldn’t say the wrong thing. His father’s heartbeat echoed through his hand on Lee’s shoulder, warm and slow and steady. He was fine, they were fine, and Lee was still sedated enough that it was easy to pretend James was nothing more than a dream.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” his father said, ruffling his hair. Lee leaned into the touch and his father laughed. “What are you, a dog?” he said kindly.
“Woof,” Lee said, forcing himself to sit up. The sound of his father’s heartbeat fell in sync with his own—still slow from sleep.
Even though the world felt like watercolors melting across a canvas, Lee knew from his father’s smile that this was for the best. Lee Turner might have been a freak, a murderer, and a junkie, but he swore he would not be the one to break his father’s heart.
Lee opened his laptop and began his search.
NYU student murder
NYU student found dead October 2026
New York University crimes
New York missing student
James Baldridge
Lee Turner
But no matter how many iterations he searched, there was no front-page spread in theNew York Timesabout an NYU student found dead in his dorm, his roommate mysteriously missing.Still, it had only been three days—probably too soon for any of James’s friends or teachers to file a missing persons report. No one had found a body. Not yet.
Perhaps it wasn’t smart to type those things into his own laptop, but if worst came to worst, he’d smash the hard drive and drop it into the well outside. If the police actually got to the point of apprehending him and taking his computer, he was already screwed. Lee cleared the browser history just in case, then closed the laptop.
There was still a problem. One single thought that itched beneath his skin, a question so troublesome that even the Ativan couldn’t blur it away.
