“Night.” He kisses Sasha on the head. “I’m really glad you’re okay, Reg,” he says before climbing the stairs up to their room.
“Will you be okay?” Sasha asks. “I can stay up with you.”
“I’m fine. Thank you, God, so much, for everything. I think I just need a little time for my nerves to settle.”
“I’m right up there if you need anything,” she says, giving me a hug. “Night.”
“Night,” I repeat. And then the house is silent besides the sound of the ticking clock on the wall, which unnerves me because the sound of time passing always feels wrong. I sip my port and stare around the dim room. I click off the lamp and lie back, covering my legs with a fuzzy throw, and stare up at the ceiling, cupping my port. I need to calm my mind. The police will take a report, but with the assailant long gone, itwill do nothing to alleviate my fear. The security alarm wasn’t armed yet because people had just left. The person must have known that, because the alarm is always on otherwise. Should I feel safe knowing I have an alarm on every door and window moving forward? Or should I just burn the goddamn place down? Because that’s tempting right now.
Suddenly, I hear something in the quiet house. A soft tapping. Then I see that it’s a figure coming down the stairs. When he walks past a sliver of moonlight coming through the front window, I see it’s Drew. He doesn’t see me; he must not know I’m here. He very quietly opens the front door, expertly slips out, and closes and locks it with silent precision. And then he’s gone.
I sit up and stare at the door a moment and wonder if I should tell Sasha, but something makes me... hesitate. I don’t need one more thing right now, and I decide not to involve myself. Instead, I rinse my glass out in the sink, then quietly make my way upstairs to the guest room. Second door on the right. But before I go into my room, I see Drew’s door across the hall cracked open. It’s so, so very none of my business, but what other chance in a thousand years would I have access to this strange kid’s room? I know he’s gone and know he has to be hiding something, because he snuck out wearing a hoodie, looking guilty as sin as he disarmed the house alarm. That’s not normal. I push the door in with one finger and look up and down the hall.
His room looks pretty unremarkable. The glow of the computer screen is the only light, and I poke around at Drew’s desk in the semidarkness. It’s nothing other than textbooks and crumpled notebook papers. I open his bedside drawer and see some chargers, earbuds, a single sock—nothing. I feelunder his mattress, and nothing. He seems relatively normal if you only have his room to go on. I can’t see well enough to dig into the recesses of his closet, and so I decide to try one last place—a backpack slumped on a chair in the corner. It’s unzipped, so I quickly rifle through the folder inside but it’s just math homework. I’m about to give up when I feel the corner of something thicker and smaller than the rest of the papers. I pull it out to see what it is, but before I can even squint in the dim light to look closer, I hear a door down the hall open. A light is turned on. I panic. I should hide—I can’t be caught in here like some sort of unstable, I don’t even know, pervert—because why would I have reason to be in this kid’s f-ing room? Oh, my God. I decide in a split second to leap out into the hall. I shove the object under my shirt and in one quick motion, slip out the door and close it behind me, and when I turn, there is Sasha, directly in front of me. My heart is hammering in my chest. She looks confused but doesn’t say anything right away.
“I thought it was the guest room, I’m so sorry. I didn’t wake him up. Sorry. Definitely not the guest room, then,” I blather nervously, and it’s not totally a lie because I did not, in fact, wake him up. I see her face soften. She laughs.
“It’s okay. Across the hall.” She points. “There’s an extra blanket in the chest, and you can turn the fireplace on if you’re cold.” She squeezes my shoulder. “I just came out to turn up the heat.”
“Thanks,” I say, and I can feel my cheeks burning red and hot with embarrassment. I quickly slip into the guest room, close the door behind me and lock it. I sit at the edge of the cold bed and pull the square of paper out from under my shirt, but it’s not paper. It’s a photo. A photo of... Jack.
Chapter Fourteen
Sasha
Drew slouches over his phone, which he should be grounded from, and eats a piece of toast in two bites while Sasha pours a cup of coffee for Regan and then one for herself. She sits at the kitchen counter, where the girls are giggling over pancake faces—Tom is getting a thrill out of making a show of cooking for them. He has the cuffs of his dress shirt rolled up and engages fully in the impromptu game of breakfast caricatures before he’s off to meetings with a prospective new “craft vinegar supplier” so he can make their new sauce even more amazing and perfectly balanced.
Sasha always finds it funny the things he does—like sampling new beer and sauce ingredients in the middle of the day on a Tuesday—compared to most people she knows. Like poor Carson, who is in some sort of corporate sales job that has him traveling and in a constant state of stress and dreadabout his work. Free steak dinners and booze are the only things he seems to enjoy about it. Sasha’s lucky... most of the time... that she has such a cozy little life, and then she catches herself thinking,Whyis Drew trying to ruin it? Why can’t he just be happy?
She watches him stand, pull his coat from the back of his chair and say “see ya” before making his way out to his car for school... which, of course, she knows he isn’t going to because she knows he’s suspended. She notices Regan watching him exit through the front door and walk past the front window, and she has a furrowed brow—a disapproving look. Odd. But Sasha isn’t going to overthink it; Regan’s mind is probably just elsewhere.
“Okay, let’s get going,” Sasha says, hurrying the girls off for their bags and coats so she can get them dropped off and start tracking Drew’s movements. In a flurry of putting plates in the sink, grabbing bagged lunches and looking for rain boots, they are out the door and dropping Chloe and Hal off in front of the school within thirty minutes. As Sasha drives Regan home, she wants to offer to drive her to Windsor Locks to look for her dead husband, but she can’t. She has problems of her own to contend with, and she probably shouldn’t get involved. After all, everyone knows Jack is gone, and whatever Regan is going through, it feels like more trouble no matter how much Sasha sympathizes.
“You sure you’ll be okay?” Sasha asks, pulling into Regan’s lot, wondering if she’ll make the drive anyway, to hell with the doctors or concussions. She probably will, Sasha thinks. She seems fine, medically speaking... and very determined.
“Yes. Thanks. I really appreciate all you’ve done for me. I don’t know what I would have done.”
But Sasha knows Regan has tons of family she’s close to and friends. She’s deeply rooted in the community and has the empathy of just about everyone after her loss. Sasha wonders why Regan didn’t call any of them before her. Yes, the three of them—herself and Andi and Regan—have been peas in a pod since Sasha moved in, but she’s still the newbie. She can only assume this assault makes Regan think the bombing wasn’t a prank gone wrong but a very real threat to her life... and she’s not ready to make that public just yet.
“The police are coming to talk to me, so I’ll be fine,” Regan says, exiting the car and stepping into the misty gray air. Of course the police didn’t find any evidence besides the broken window and strewn boxes Regan already knew about, so Sasha can’t imagine going back into that house on her own, police on their way for a chat or not. She offered Regan the option to stay and rest, but she insisted on going home, so Sasha waves goodbye and reminds her that she’ll be back by three to pick up the girls and head to Wild Roast Café.
When she’s out of sight from Regan’s house, she pulls over on the woodsy two-lane road just up the street and opens her tracking app to see where Drew has gone. That absolute shit has driven himself all the way to Hartford. She zooms in and sees that he seems to be stopped at a Carl’s Jr. So he’s suspended, in some deep, deep shit, lying to her and stealing photos of dead people, but he’s popped in to treat himself to some bacon fries at a fast-food joint. She’s seething as she white-knuckles the steering wheel and gets on the freeway, headed into the city.
The gray and drizzle are relentless. The extended forecast hasn’t a speck of sunshine in sight, and the constant gloom is mirroring Sasha’s mood as she becomes more and morecertain Drew is turning unknowable and slipping further away from her into something dangerous. She keeps the radio off and lets her thoughts bombard her as she tries to play out worst-case scenarios and potential solutions—because there must still be a way out for him. If he made a bomb threat or even... if he—she can barely stand to let herself think it. She’s been repressing the thought, staying in denial so it won’t really be a possibility in her mind, but it niggles around the edges, and then there it is. The question she hasn’t wanted to ask herself. What if Drew planted that bomb in Regan’s car that killed someone? Will Sasha be visiting him in prison for the rest of his life? Maybe she’d be able to protect him if he would just confide in her—because then she could believe it was an accident, a joke gone wrong, that he thought it would be a prank and never conceived it was powerful enough to really blow up. Or... she doesn’t know, but there has to be a reason. Drew isn’t a monster.
When she gets into the city, she looks at her tracker again, and he’s just outside downtown. His car is parked in a lot, and she doesn’t know the area, but she’s not far away, so she drives too fast over wet, cracked streets and her tires dip into potholes as her heart speeds up, wondering what she’ll find. What could he possibly be up to?
When she spots his car, it’s at a Dave and fucking Buster’s. She can’t believe she’s letting him get away with this when he should be grounded with his phone and computers locked up for a year. At minimum. But she is certain this is a better strategy if she actually wants information. So he’s playing pinball and dicking around, and she just has to swallow down the absolute fury over this Ferris Bueller shit and wait it out.
After an hour, she finally decides to walk over to the Starbucks across the street and order a cup of coffee. She keeps her eyes on the parking lot where his car sits just a couple rows over from hers, and watches even though she has the app. There is still a tiny part of her that hopes—what? She doesn’t even know—maybe that his friend took his car for the day and Drew is at the library studying and feeling guilty for whatever it is that got him suspended. She’ll call the school about that later this morning to find out. She dreads that, too.
She drops her coffee when she spots him. She’s mid–Stevia pouring when she takes a glance out the window and sees him walk to his car with the hood of his sweatshirt up, looking shifty as he keeps his gaze down and hurries to his car. She apologizes for the spill as she runs out the glass doors in time to see his taillights glowing in the dark haze of the day, turning onto Sixth Street. She jogs back across the road, almost slipping on the wet pavement, pissed off and breathless from the unexpected spring, and then she jumps in her car and goes. She opens the tracking app because she doesn’t want to tail him too closely, and anyway, he’s already too far ahead.
The next time he stops, it’s at a smoke shop called Vapors.Great, now I probablyhave todeal with vaping on top of everything else, she thinks, but she quickly brushes the thought away and tries to stay focused. She sees his car parked in the small gravel parking lot. The place is a brick building with no windows and a metal door. It has a hand-painted sign with a poorly illustrated pink pot leaf on either side of the shop name, and it all looks as shady as it can possibly manage.
She parks next door at a Mexican grocer so her car won’t be recognized, and she doesn’t see him anywhere. He must have already gone inside. She is trying to imagine what he would drive all the way to the city for if all he wanted wasvideo games and vapes. There’s plenty of that sort of thing in Cloverhill Lakes. He’s not in there more than fifteen minutes, but when he does emerge, it’s from the side door of the building. An older man stands in the door frame and they shake hands—the man stands very close to him, saying something, holding Drew’s elbow with his free hand and leaning in like whatever it is, it’s something very important. She even sees the older man look around, subtly down the street right then left, to make sure nobody is around. Then he pats Drew’s arm a couple of times, and Drew gets in his car and drives off. Sasha doesn’t notice him carrying anything—she can’t detect a look of distress or fear. It’s like this is a totally normal thing to be doing. Once Drew is long gone, she knows what she has to do. She has to find out who these people are and what they want with her son, because he didn’t come all the way here for smokes. She needs to get to the bottom of what he’s involved in, and that means finding out who he’s secretly meeting and why.
She tries the front door and fully expects a little bell to ring indicating a customer and to be greeted by sickly sweet tobacco scents and a young, stoned cashier, but none of that happens. The door is locked. She planned to pretend to be a customer and ask some casual questions to see if she could garner any information at all, but it’s closed—it looks as though it’s often closed and probably a facade for something far more sinister.
