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MacKenzie narrows her eyes at me and says, “You’re just making sure I’m still here when you come back out.”

“Maybe,” I admit. “But also I’m confident Uber is pretty familiar with this place as a pickup location. So we’ll manage if you ditch us.”

“Whatever,” she says, and rolls her eyes. But there’s a smile curving at the edge of her lips as I get out of the car. It disappears fast when Bristal starts banging on her back seat window.

“You need to let me out!” she screams—way more loudly than necessary. “Child locks!”

I open the door for her, and she gets out, giving Kenzie a wave as she pulls away to find a spot. We show our IDs to the guard at the door, who checks them against a visitors’ list for the day. We’re led into a small room lined with lockers and told to put all our stuff in them.

“I can’t take anything?” I ask the guard. “Paper? Pencil? Pen? Phone?”

All I get is a headshake for every noun I produce, so I toss everything in a locker, and Bristal’s stuff follows suit.

“You could’ve warned me,” I say as I take a seat next to her on a wooden bench. Other families wander in, everyone signing off on the clipboard and choosing a locker for their things.

“You’ll just have to take notes the way I do,” she says, pointing to her temple. “Between the two of us, I’m sure we can catch everything.”

I’m not worried about catching everything as much as I am about misinterpreting it—or misremembering. I haven’t cleared all my questions with Bristal; she’s mostly here to get me access to Dover. Once I start drilling down on some of my points, I might have two Jamisons pissed at me.

“How much talking are you doing, and how much am I doing?” Bristal asks.

It’s a good question. I need her to warm him up, but I also need her to back down once it’s my turn to take over.

“What all does he know about why we’re here?” I ask.

“I told him that I was doing a podcast for a history credit and that we wanted to ask him some questions about the tornado, but that’s really it. I figured you’d want me to talk first, get him comfortable.”

“Yes,” I say, relieved. “Exactly.”

“But,” she goes on, “I will tell you that he can get squirrely sometimes. Don’t expect a lot out of him about Denise Halverson.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes my dad will talk to him on the phone, and he’ll ask him, like, where this old shotgun of his grandpa’s is, or something like that, and Dover will tell him he can’t really answer that without talking to his lawyer first.”

“Why would that—”

“Unregistered gun,” Bristal says. “Dover might be in jail, but he’s not stupid. He keeps his mouth shut about just about everything, and if he catches even a whiff of something that could lengthen his sentence, he says he has to talk to his lawyer first.”

“What’s he in for?” I ask, popping the question that I already know the answer to.

“Various things, some drug charges,” Bristal says nonchalantly.

“Various like what?” I ask, pushing.

“Uh, menacing, I think. Aggravated assault for sure,” Bristal says, walking along beside me as we come into a room that looks like it doubles as a cafeteria, complete with vending machines.

My blood pressure spikes, and black spots swim in my vision, my hand clutching convulsively as it looks for the comfort of a pen, or a notebook to squeeze. I was expecting booths and bulletproof glass lined with chicken wire, old corded phones hanging in each one. I didn’t think I’d come to prison and have snack time with a felon sitting right across from me. I’m so frozen Bristal has to propel me to the table with the plastic number seven on it when the last name of Jamison is called.

“Aggravated assault?” I ask, my tongue thick on my dry lips. “How is that different from regular assault?”

“It’s the level of intent of harm meant for the victim,” Bristal says. “But it totally needs to be renamed because I’ve never committed an assault where I wasn’t aggravated first. There he is!”

Bristal stands and waves as Dover comes into the room, and my heart rate picks up yet another notch. He’s not handcuffed. He’s not even wearing prison orange. Dover Jamison walks over and gives his niece a hug wearing a navy-blue T-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants. He looks like a dad on a lazy Saturday. Actually, he looks like a hot uncle on an off weekend and I need to get my crap together. Thirty years ago he made a grown woman blush on camera, and he was the first person to separate my mom’s ass from her underwear. I’m eighteen and not immune, but I promise myself that smile isn’t going to have an effect on me.

“Bristal,” he says, stepping back from his niece and giving her a once-over. He spots the black eye right away, touching the same spot on his face. “What’s the other guy look like?”

“We all wish we knew,” Bristal says, shooting a glance at me as they take a seat at the table. “He didn’t give me his name before he ran off after throwing a brick through my friend’s front window. Dover, this is Lydia Chass. She’s the one I’m doing the podcast with.”