“I know.”
“We have to pursue this.”
I shut my eyes, Phoebe’s smile seared into my memory, my eyelids, my very being.
“I know,” I said.
Three
Two days after the letter arrived, I found Phoebe waiting on the sidewalk outside our apartment when I got home from work, a storm of emotions brewing in her features.
“You’re late!” she cried as soon as I was within earshot. Her backpack sat on the pavement at her feet, meaning she hadn’t bothered dropping it off upstairs. I knew something was up this morning when she wolfed down a bowl of cereal and told me to have a great day before rushing out the door. A stark difference to the silent stompings of mornings past. I floated through most of the day, keenly aware my phonewasn’tringing (we weren’t supposed to keep our volume on at work, but considering how often Phoebe’s school called, it had become a necessity, and my students danced along to the ringtone whenever it chimed). The optimistic part of me hoped we’d simply turned a corner and she liked me again, but I knew better than to trust it by now.
She’d been sleuthing. Hopefully the nice, legal kind of sleuthing that takes place in a public library, but I had my doubts.
“Hello to you, too,” I said, keeping my pace leisurely to pissher off. As much as I wanted her happy, sometimes the older sister gene won out. “And I’m not late. This is the time I get home. You’d know that if you didn’t have detention every day.”
She sneered. “Not today.”
“Not today or you skipped it today?”
“Vi,” she said, ignoring the question, “I found him.”
I sighed. “Of course you did.”
“I didn’t do anything illegal,” she told me in a breathless rush, eyes bright.
“Okay,” I said. “Then how’d you find him?”
“Can’t you just be like, ‘Wow, Bee, you are so beautiful and impressive. Let’s hit the road.’?”
“Wow, Bee, you are so beautiful and impressive,” I echoed. “Before we hit the road, though, I need to know how you managed to track this guy down.”
She scrunched her nose up, which always preceded something I wouldn’t approve of. Barbies flushed down the toilet, an abandoned baby bunny living in a box in her closet, something terrifically illegal to find a man who didn’t want to be found.
“Remember when Noah said our apartment building probably doesn’t keep records?” She smiled with all her teeth. “Well…”
A breath wheezed out of me like an old balloon. “Phoebe.”
“I didn’t break into anything,” she added quickly. “Rhonda, the lady who works in the office? I just asked her some questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Just, like, how her day was going and what she likes most about her job.” She bit her thumbnail. “If she’d be interested inletting me man the desk for a bit while she has a long lunch with her boyfriend.”
“So, bribery,” I said flatly. I shouldn’t have expected anything less when she was so hell-bent on answers. “Which is illegal.”
“It’s not bribery. There was no exchange of goods. Just information.”
I groaned.
“It’s fine,” she insisted. “I didn’t break into anything, either. Rhonda looked up Benji for me and told me he lived here for two years, he has fantastic credit, and he works at Sequest. You know Sequest, right?”
I did. Sequest was a small nonprofit organization that supported LGBT+ youth, particularly those who’d been displaced, and I passed it every morning on my walk to work. Multiple laws broken in an effort to find a man ten minutes down the road.
