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"The police wouldn't listen." My thumb traces the edge of a tattered flyer. "Blaming the people passing through town was easy; admitting their own children were the ones stealing from them was an impossibility. But I’d seen the patterns. I was certain it was a handful of local kids, snaking through the openings left by vacationing neighbors and parents who were too preoccupied with work to see what was happening in their own backyards."
"Serena was always very into figuring things out. Her friends too," my mother says, her voice drifting into that soft, nostalgic register that usually precedes a long-winded story. She’s distractedly shuffling through a loose stack of Polaroids she just pulled from one of the crates, her thumb pausing on a faded shot of a group of teenagers sitting on a tailgate.
"It’s a shame, really. That whole group—you, Casey, Mara, and Evan—you were all so inseparable." She squints at the photo, her brow furrowing as she scrapes at the edge of the gloss. "I completely forgot about these three in the back. Look, it’s Ian and those Taylor twins from down the street."
She holds the photo up to the light, peering at the blurred figures as if trying to resolve them into focus. She rubberbands the stack of photos and tosses it to the side with a small, hollow thud. "It’s a massive design flaw in the human experience—the fact that you can be inseparable for eighteen years and then spend the next eighteen slowly forgetting all about each other."
Tamsin lets out a dramatic, long-suffering sigh and rounds the corner, nearly knocking over a stack of decaying municipal records to wrap an arm around my middle in a squeeze that threatens my ability to breathe.
"Oh, ignore the existential dread, darling," she says. "She has me now. Between my devastating charm and my superior taste in knitwear, what else could she possibly need?”
"Tamsin, your loyalty is noted and appreciated," my mother says, not once breaking eye contact with Baryn. "But we are currently interviewing for a very specific vacancy—namely, a partner with the requisite height to reach the light fixtures and the biological capacity to produce a grandchild. Now, Slate, dear—tell me, do you have any history of heart disease in your family? You look like you have excellent circulation."
Baryn’s poise performs a slow-motion collapse.
He blinks, his dark lashes fluttering in a way that is absurdly unfair, and for the first time since I met him, the man looks genuinely speechless. He looks from my mother’s hopeful expression to me, his mouth opening and then closing again.
“I... uh,” he starts, his voice climbing an octave into something scratchy and bewildered. He clears his throat. “My heart is... in good working order, I think. Excellent... plumbing. Very high-functioning.”
I can see a faint, dark flush creeping up the back of his neck, bleeding into the blond hairline at the base of his skull. The sight sends my thoughts spiraling down a dangerous, horny path, and suddenly, I’m obsessed with the idea of being the one to break his composure. I can’t help but wonder what’s hiding beneath that rigid exterior. Is the buttoned-up deal the real him, or is there something completely feral waiting to be unleashed? Waiting for me to unleash it?
"Good," my mother chirps, clasping her hands together. "Good. We like a robust cardiovascular system in this house. Serena has always been a bit of a marathon runner when it comes to her grudges, so you’ll need the stamina."
I close my eyes and pray for a sinkhole to open up beneath the rug. "Mom. Please. Stop vetting the man's arteries and let him do his job."
Baryn catches my eye, and there’s a flicker of desperate gratitude in his gaze. He seizes the opening. "Right. The job," he says, his voice regaining its I’m-a-serious-journalist edge.
He reaches for a stack of manila folders on the coffee table, physically putting a barrier of 2009 community watch logs between himself and my mother’s matrimonial ambitions.
“Is it so terrible,” my mother presses a hand to her chest, “for a mother to dream about her daughter finally falling in love?”
There are several unsupported assumptions in that sentence, but one is considerably more offensive than the others.
“I don’t believe in love. I believe in biochemical compatibility—dopamine-driven attraction, oxytocin-mediated bonding, and a baseline level of sexual compatibility that people like to romanticize.”
“My God,” my mother drags a hand down her face. “Is this what higher education does to a person?”
The next four hours disappear beneath stacks of yellowed newspaper clippings, old town directories, curling photographs, and file folders labeled in Elaine’s cramped handwriting. Dust works its way beneath my fingernails and into my lungs while the coffee table slowly vanishes under a massive stack of Stillwater’s collective memory.
My mother is in her element, a whirlwind of "I remember the day that was taken" and "Oh, that was the summer the mayor’s nephew got caught skinny-dipping in the reservoir." She recounts every minute detail—the flickering streetlights on the night of the third robbery, the specific shade of red on the truck that shouldn't have been parked behind the old mill.
Tamsin periodically drifts in with dry commentary, but she mostly just floats on the periphery, her focus entirely dedicated to a high-stakes game of virtual chess on her phone, leaving the three of us buried in a sea of decaying paperwork.
I watch Baryn. I watch the way his hands move—meticulous, reverent, never missing a margin note.
He doesn't just listen to my mother; he interrogates the information, cross-referencing her ramblings with a digital spreadsheet on his laptop that looks far too sophisticated for a hobbyist podcaster.
The more he responds, the more curious I become. He isn’t just invested in the story of Casey’s disappearance. He’s interested in the mechanics of it—where the investigation went wrong, what everyone overlooked, and which failure allowed the truth to stay buried for this long.
As the afternoon light stretches across the floral rug, turning the dust motes into tiny, floating sparks, I realize I’ve stopped looking at the files and started looking at him.
If he’s been collecting information about my best friend’s disappearance for years, he isn’t just a narrator for her story. He’s a vault of information even I don’t have access to.
And I’m becoming dangerously interested in finding the key.
"That's it," my mother finally says, leaning back into her armchair with a satisfied exhale. "That's everything I have on the summer of '09.”
Baryn looks up, his eyes bloodshot but still intensely focused. He glances at the mountain of folders, then back at me, and something between us shifts.
