“The world’s best pizza. I’m not lying—it’s really good.” She’s really laughing, and it makes me pause. It’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh.
I take a bite to humor her, feel the warmth, the flavor, the grease in my mouth. “Oh shit,” I say around the bite, and she laughs. I can feel my eyes bugging out of my head. I change my mind, finishing the slice.
“We should come back here one day,” she says, “just, one day.”
“Yeah,” I say as she grabs the to-go box. “Let me know, though, if it’s as good reheated.”
She shakes her head. “Come on, you already know the answer to that.”
Joe is sitting at the kitchen table when Nolan drops me off, much like when I got home from school. I wonder if he’s moved at all since then, except I see a beer there instead of a soda, so…
“I come bearing dinner,” I say, the rest of the pizza still lukewarm in the box.
“I thought you were studying at the library?” he says, half question, half accusation.
“We took a dinner break,” I say, sliding the box onto the table. I open the top, contort my hands into the best impersonation of a magician revealing her tricks. “Ta-da,” I say.
Joe picks up a slice halfheartedly, not realizing he’s in the presence of the self-proclaimed World’s Best Pizza. He takes a bite, puts it down. Takes one more, then chases it with a beer. I frown. I make a note to tell Nolan: Not as good. The subject is unaffected.
I get myself a paper plate from the pantry, to join him.
“Who was that, Kennedy?” he asks as I sit down across from him.
“Nolan, I told you.”
“I’m just wondering if…you know.”
I raise an eyebrow. I do know. He wants to know if this Nolan is my boyfriend. As in, have I broken his no boys rule officially. “He’s just a friend of mine, Joe. I am allowed to have friends, right?”
He nods, and I take a slice from the box. I scrunch my nose, chewing carefully. It’s missing something, outside the restaurant. It’s not just the heat. It’s something else, and I can’t put my finger on it.
Joe puts the bottle down, spinning it on the table, not meeting my eye. “The call that came in earlier,” he says, “it was the Realtor.”
I stop chewing. Wondering if they told Joe I’ve been messing around with the house. That I’m spooking the prospective buyers.
“There’s an offer,” he says.
“What?” I say around a bite. Not possible. No one would want to live there. “Who wants to live in that house? You don’t even want to live in that house, Joe, and it belongs to us.”
He shakes his head. “From what I understand, they want to take it back to its roots.” He spreads his hands out, as if this is something that should clarify everything. It doesn’t.
“What does that mean, take it back to its roots?”
“Turn it back into a working farm. I guess.”
“And how does one do that, exactly?”
He takes a deep breath. “They just want the land, Kennedy.”
The acreage, stretching from the road to the fence to Freedom Battleground State Park. It’s what drew my mother to it in the first place. That, and the fact that we’d never had land before, growing up closer to a city. She said it would be good for us, the space, the air. The house, quirky and charming, was full of history, which she loved. But she’d given me and Elliot control over the paint, the furniture, deciding what each room would be used for. That first summer, we painted it ourselves, steamed the carpets, hung the porch swing, dug the garden. Before the start of the school year, Will showed up with flowers—the kind ready to plant—and helped us transfer them to the side yard himself, the knees of his khaki pants covered in soil afterward. It was the first time we met him, the first time he’d asked Mom to dinner. It worked; they left us there to finish the garden ourselves.
“And what will happen to the rest of it?”
He doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. They intend to level it. Take it all down. “No,” I say.
“Kennedy.”
“Joe. No. It’s my house. I say no.” We hadn’t built it from the ground up, but it felt like we had brought it to life. I picture Elliot with white paint on his knuckles, dirt under his nails, his eyes unfocused, his cheeks flushed red from the sun. So different from the Elliot I was used to seeing. I think maybe that’s what Mom meant, when she said it was good for us. In the middle of that summer, it did really feel like a house could change us.
“It’s not that simple—”
“Except it is.” It’s mine—in my name, but in Joe’s trust.
He raises his eyes to mine, and he looks immeasurably sad. Worse than the first day I was here, when he cleared out the TV room, pulling furniture out into the hall to make room for me, while I watched. “Kennedy, who do you think is paying for Elliot’s lawyer?”
I open my mouth, then close it again. I didn’t. I didn’t think about that at all. Elliot gets a lawyer, I testify for the DA; these are opposing forces, opposing motivations. “I don’t…”
“Look, I don’t want you to worry, but…”
“But what, Joe? What?”
He shakes his head at the table. “We need to make a decision here, and we’re running out of time.”
I’m staring out the window when he says it. At the dusk, settling to dark.
“Do you hear me, Kennedy?”
I’m breathing heavily, and it’s the only sound I can hear, and the room feels charged suddenly, like something’s about to burst.
“Did you know he won’t see me, Joe? If we’re paying for the lawyer, shouldn’t he have to see me?”
He freezes. “Why do you know this, Kennedy?”
I can practically see the wheels turning in his head. “Because I wanted to see my brother.” The brother I remember from the summer, not the one stuck inside a cell with nothing to do. I can feel the claustrophobia. My stomach hurts.
He sighs, but his shoulders remain tight, fixed. “That’s not a good idea right now. The trial starts next Tuesday.”
“Well,” I say, “don’t worry, Joe, because it seems like I don’t have a choice anyway.”
He’s looking at me like he’s missed something major, and he has. He’s trying to find out when I went to the jail, and how I got there. What happens in this house when he’s at work. All the things I do when he’s sleeping.
Maybe it was a mistake, telling him, but at least we’re not talking about the house anymore.
“It’s for the best,” he says softly.
“It’s bullshit, Joe. And you know it.” I storm down the hall, and I slam the door. He didn’t even notice that I brought him the world’s best pizza.
I take out the folded-up sheet of paper with the readout, the signal.
And then I send Nolan a text.
What are you doing tomorrow? We need answers, and we’re running out of time.
There’s not even a place to park in front of my house. My parents’ cars are in the driveway, and there are several dark cars parked along the curb, so I end up at the corner of the street, walking the rest of the way home.
“Where were you?” my dad asks as soon as I open the door. There’s a group of them gathered in the dining room—my parents, men and women in suits, Agent Lowell. But no one waits for me to answer. They make a space for me and beckon me forward.
Agent Lowell has a hand on the back of a chair at the table. “Here, take this,” he says.
My mom paces behind me. My dad, in contrast, is completely still. Once I’m seated, Agent Lowell places a photo directly in front of me, on top of the wooden table.
The picture is of my brother. They don’t really need me to confirm this; it’s obvious. In the image, he’s walking sort of diagonally away, but his head is thrown over his shoulder so he’s almost looking straight at the camera. Like someone called his name and he’s looking for the source.
Still, it’s a punch to the gut, seeing this. Something new. A moment, an image I’ve never seen before. I’d just about given up on seeing any such moments ever again.
I lean closer to the image. At the edge of the frame is the solid brown tail and a hind leg—Colby, beside him.
I can’t figure out where he is, though. Only that the dog is with him, and it looks like he’s in the woods. Colby would never leave him, my dad told the investigators, and he’s right. We lost my brother and our dog that day, but I’m really only allowed to admit to missing the one. But here they both are, and something tightens in my throat, seeing them again.
Agent Lowell places a second photo in front of me, this one zoomed in on Liam’s face. “In your best estimation, is this an accurate picture of Liam the day he went missing?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It is.” I can feel my heart racing.