Without thinking, I reach for the abandoned toy.
I lift the bear. It’s covered in grime, coating my fingers in dust.
If the musty air and undisturbed dust weren’t enough indication, this abandoned bear only rams the point home. Even if someone was here, they aren’t anymore.
“Damn it,” I curse, knees buckling. I drop low, pulling the bear into my chest like it’ll tell me how to find its owner.
“What?” Nora calls.
“There’s nothing here,” I say, not even trying to hide the anguish that’s coursing through me, slamming into me over and over like a wave breaking against the shore.
I don’t realize Nora has moved until she’s standing at my side. I straighten and hold out the bear. Nora takes it, turning it over, reading the name written in permanent marker. More permanent than its owner.
“Jo,” Nora says softly. Her hand grazes my arm, and I yank it back, shaking my head.
“They’re gone,” I say.
Jasper. Finn. Sloane. Aisha. Ingrid. Vincent. Jerome McCaffrey.
Harper.
They’re all gone, and they’re not coming back. I’d deluded myself into thinking I could solve a decades-old mystery, used it as a shield against the prospect of losing someone else, but now, standing in this dark, dusty building, I feel as if I’m watching the last shreds of hope slip through my fingers, collecting in the grime at my feet.
“Jo, we should get out of here. We’ll figure something else out.”
“There is nothing else,” I say, barely registering her words. I lift my chin, but I can scarcely see through my tears. “They’re gone.”
Nora’s chin quivers. A single tear rolls down her cheek before she slips her arms around me, pulling me tight against her.
“I know,” she murmurs. “I know.” And I think she might be crying, too, both our shoulders shaking, voices breaking.
For a while we stand there, like walking away means admitting we’ve lost. And when we do leave, I bring the teddy bear with me, clutching it to me the way I wish I could Jasper. But Jasper is somewhere else, lost, alone, damned to the same fate as Aisha, Sloane, Finn, and all the others.
An endless rotation of loss I’m powerless to stop.
Thirty-Five
No one speaks all theway back to Nora’s house. She offers to drop Margot and me off at home, but neither of us is all that excited to walk back into that den of hopelessness, certainly not hauling our own disappointment back with us. Going home early would mean attention and questions I don’t have the energy for.
So we make our defeated return and end up spread out across the couches in Nora’s living room, drowning our sorrows in store-bought cookies and movies from when we were kids. But even with cartoon animals singing on the screen and our fingers covered in sugary icing, there’s no mistaking this for what it is. A full-blown pity party.
Margot passes out first, curled up under a throw blanket on the armchair, and Nora is close behind her, but as hard as I chase sleep, it skitters out of my reach.
The clock on the wall reads four in the morning when I finally give in to my restlessness. I peel myself off the couch and out fromunder my blanket cavern, heading down the hall in search of a bathroom to splash water on my face.
I enter the first room on my right but make the same mistake I did last time I was here, entering not a bathroom but a bedroom. I flick the lights on and find a modest guest room. A bed, a dresser, and an empty nightstand.
The only other things in the room are the boxes sitting on the made bed. Three of them, the cardboard straining against its seams, two taped shut, one open. Scrawled across each box in Nora’s handwriting is a name.
Finn.
Nausea creeps through my gut. I’m on autopilot as I approach the bed, tentatively opening the untaped box.
Inside are folded clothes. Dark jeans, dark T-shirts. A faded gray-and-black-tie-dyed hoodie. A pair of beat-up Converse.
Nora told me they never got rid of his stuff. Before they moved, after their mom got remarried, Finn’s old bedroom was left untouched, like it was waiting for his return. And even after they moved out, Nora and her mom couldn’t bear to throw out his things.
And so here they are, still waiting for him to come back. His whole life stuffed into three cardboard boxes. The only physical remnants of Finn Shipman.
