“Good point.” I brushed my thumb over Catalina’s address, noting how Benji wrote it with so much more precision than hisown. “Noah knows everyone. And if he used to live across from this guy, he might know where he is now.”
Phoebe perked up. “Can we go ask?”
“Noah’s at work,” I said. “Kind of like I should be.”
She smiled sheepishly. “Oh. Right.”
“You might get to skate through the year, but my boss isn’t so bereavement-friendly. I can’t keep leaving early.”
“Your boss sounds like a bitch.”
“Not the point.”
Phoebe shifted her weight between her feet. “I know. You can go back to work, if you want.”
Her contrition pinched somewhere beneath my ribs. “Also not the point. Today doesn’t count. But this was the twelfth time I’ve had to talk to the principal. That’s a problem, Bee.”
She scrunched up her face. “It’s so not twelve.” She reached for the letter again. This time, I let her take it. “I get it, okay? I’ll be better.”
“I’m not asking you to be better,” I replied. “I’m asking you not to break anyone’s nose on school property.”
She offered a salute and returned to the couch, tossing herself over the side to land with a softflump, scanning the letter again. I exhaled, feeling like I’d finished dead last in a marathon. Maybe somewhere my dad was beaming with pride and giving me a corny thumbs-up—You’re a star, Vi, I knew you could do it!
The glittering fragments of my heart jostled inside my chest as I made my way to my nearly empty bedroom and plopped face down on the mattress.
Two
I forgot about the letter until Noah answered the door and Phoebe shoved it in his face, shouting, “WHO LIVED HERE BEFORE US?”
“Jesus,” Noah said, blinking rapidly. He and I were the two most important people in Arden’s life, but I was the one talking her down after their parents set them up. Originally from Seoul, her parents had a lot of expectations when it came to a partner for Arden, and she revolted at every opportunity until they shipped her off to dinner with a sharp-jawed future pediatrician.
Four years later, Arden remained sore about it.
“Phoebe,” I said. “When I said to ask Noah, I didn’t mean the second we got here.”
Ignoring me, she brandished the letter. “This came today. Do you know anything about this guy?”
Noah glanced at me, raising his eyebrows. He’d spent enough evenings playing the buffer between us to recognize the shift in Phoebe—something illuminated for the first time in months—that I didn’t have to say a word. He delicately turned the envelope over in his hands, studying it.
“You opened it?”
“Not the point.”
His eyes cut to me. “Might be kind of the point.”
I shrugged helplessly. “She’s fourteen, man. I don’t know.”
“Okay, let’s check this out,” he said, stepping aside to let us in. Phoebe herded him to the couch like a border collie; I could practically hear her nerves revving. I didn’t know why she was so invested in this, but the relief of it doused me in a warmth that had me wondering if I’d been living in a permanent winter since September.
“Do you remember him?” Phoebe asked, bouncing on the cushion beside Noah. A line appeared between his eyebrows as he inspected the envelope again and then carefully slipped the letter out.
“When we moved in, a woman lived there. Shawna.”
Phoebe slumped. “Oh.”
“She had just moved in when we did, so Benji must’ve moved out a year, year and a half ago.” He rubbed his chin, eyes skimming the letter. “Strange that it would show up now.”
“It’s weird, right?” Phoebe scooted closer, reading over his shoulder. “I wonder if this Catalina chick held on to it for a while and was finally like, ‘Bye bitch!’ And sent it back.”
