“But—”
JD reached out and put his hands on Riley’s. “You are who you are, period. What you or other people expect you to be doesn’t figure in to the equation. Jane or Riley—it doesn’t matter. You’re you.”
Riley sat back, considering. She pasted on a contented smile for JD, all the while thinking, But who am I?
Riley dumped a few bills on the end of the table, wrestling her coat and backpack from the booth. “This was a mistake. I have to get back. This was so dumb.”
“Ry! Ry!”
She heard JD’s voice behind her, but it already sounded too far away.
I’m no one, Riley thought. Maybe I don’t exist at all.
She slipped into a coffee shop and took a seat by the window, tucking herself against the wall while she pulled her laptop out of her backpack. She started it up, her hands flying over the keyboard.
RILEY ALLEN SPENCER.
The search immediately popped up a half-dozen other Riley Spencer’s before she found a tiny mention of herself tucked between a professor and a mechanic.
Spencer, Riley. Sophomore.
It was a grainy school picture reprinted in the Hawthorne High Hornet. Riley was being quoted about a student and teacher who were murdered last year. It was a brainless, stock quote—“We’re all a little more aware of each other”—that she couldn’t remember saying. And her picture—she recognized herself but just barely. She looked like every other teenaged girl in a school photo in a school newspaper ever.
If she had been kidnapped, did her real family wonder what she looked like? Would they remember her? Would they recognize her? What was going on?
A sob choked in the back of her throat. She snapped her laptop shut and was startled to see JD sitting across from her, holding out her cell phone.
“You forgot this.”
She reached for it, silently, but he didn’t let it go. “You OK?”
Riley blew out a world-on-her-shoulders sigh. “Why would my parents be hiding a birth certificate in my baby book if it wasn’t mine? And then, these people don’t even exist?”
JD shook his head. “I have no idea, Ry. You should just ask them.” He reached over and brushed her cheek with his thumb. She didn’t even know she was crying.
“Second time I had to do that today.”
Riley sniffed and smiled. Something about JD—maybe it was the fact that he was a loner or that he didn’t seem to care what anyone else thought—made her feel comfortable.
“You could just ask,” he repeated.
“No. I wasn’t supposed to be going through my mom’s things when I found the baby book. And then I snooped through that. She’ll be pissed at me.”
JD sat back in his chair and kicked out his legs, crossing them at the ankles. “So just decide what’s worse—your parents being pissed at you or you never knowing who Jane Elizabeth O’Leary is.”
Riley chewed her bottom lip. Two days ago, finding Jane seemed like a fun adventure. Now it had turned into an obsession. She had to know.
“Here.” JD pushed a white plate with an enormous chocolate chip cookie on it. “I find sugar is brain food.”
Riley grinned, breaking off a piece. JD did the same and she knocked her cookie hunk against his. “Cheers.”
“To solving mysteries?”
“Something like that.” She popped the cookie piece in her mouth and chewed, very aware that JD’s eyes were on her, studying her.
“What?” she asked, heat burning the tops of her earlobes.
JD looked at the table, but he was still smiling. “Nothing. I just never thought that I would have spent the afternoon skipping school with someone like you.”
Riley’s brows went up. “Someone like me?”
He broke off another bite of cookie. “A goody-goody.”
She rolled her eyes. “And I never thought that I would be sitting in a café, sharing a giant cookie with a juvenile delinquent.”
As soon as the words were out of Riley’s mouth, she wanted to take them back. Something dark flashed in JD’s eyes, but he tried to pass it off, digging into his wallet. All traces of his playful smile were gone as he dumped a few bills on the table.
“No—I didn’t mean—”
JD stood. “What? It’s nothing. I just feel like heading out now. I’ve got some things I want to do before I get back to Boone.”
No more we, and Riley was stung.
“I didn’t mean that I think you’re a criminal or—”
But JD already had his back toward her, his backpack slung over one shoulder. “Later, Ry.”
She watched, breathless, as he walked out the glass door, letting it slam shut behind him. She slapped her laptop shut and threw it into her backpack, trying her best to keep her eye on JD’s retreating back as he beelined away from Riley.
“JD!” she called when she hit the sidewalk. “JD!”