Max is silent as we walk back to the parking lot. He puts a hand on my shoulder near the car, where I’ve frozen.
The dates line up. This is where Caleb disappeared to, that weekend he was supposed to be at the college visit, staying with Terrance. At least part of the time. He took his car and drove up here and asked Ashlyn to see the paperwork. What did he see? What had been set in motion that day?
And then there’s the other issue—the one that feels worse, like I’ve stumbled upon answers only to discover I don’t like what I’ve found. The knowledge that Caleb lied to me from the start. That the moment he told me about his father, rested his forehead against my stomach—a moment that made me feel infinitely close to him—was all a lie. And I’d fallen for a version of him who wasn’t real, who never existed.
That he must’ve had a moment where the truth was right there, so close to the surface, and he looked up in my eyes, and found me lacking.
My phone rings when we’re halfway home, and the name flashes Eve. I pick it up, and the voice on the other end feels closer, more personal. “Jessa?” she asks.
“Yes?” I say.
“Is there a problem?” she says.
I worry that maybe she knows where I am. That she knows there’s nothing but problems. In the silence, she continues, “I thought you’d be here after school.”
I look at the clock, realize that she probably expected me over an hour ago. I look at Max, who shakes his head. She must not have seen my car at his place.
“Yes, sorry,” I say. “I’m running late. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” I need what’s in that room. I need to dig all the way to the bottom, because it’s all that’s left from him.
After another ten minutes of silence, I ask Max, “Is it true, about his dad?”
His hands tighten. “He told me he was dead, too. Ashlyn could be wrong.”
“Right,” I say. But everything twists inside. The more I learn, the less I feel I know. The less certain I am about anything. This person I thought knew me better than anyone, and I hadn’t known anything real about him.
I feel distant, distracted. I look at Max, and wonder who he really is, too.
We park in front of Max’s house, so I can get my car. There’s a pang of worry, that Eve has seen my car here. I don’t want her to know I’ve been with Max all along. But I shake the thought. What are the chances?
“I’m going to show up,” Max says. “I don’t want you there alone with her.”
“Max—”
“I’m not asking for your permission, Jessa.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet. Just trust me, okay?”
After a long pause, where he stares at me waiting for a response, I slowly nod. “Okay,” I say. Something lurks inside Max’s words, as much as I want to rely on him. And I realize what it is: it’s Caleb. It’s the shadow of him, and all he kept hidden, and everything I thought I understood.
I drive around the block, stare up at the narrow house, trying to see the ghost of Caleb. His mother is waiting, and opens the door even before I knock.
“Where were you, Jessa?” she asks.
“School,” I say.
“Really,” she says, and there’s something in her eyes I can’t decipher. I wonder if she’s seen my car at Max’s place. Of course she must have. But I am bound to the lie, and so I stick to it.
There’s something I’m missing. Something I don’t trust, about anyone. I don’t want to give anything away. It feels like a tightrope, and the answers are dwindling.
“You’re almost done up there,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
“Today should be the end of it, don’t you think?”
I nod tightly. This is it. My last chance, before all that is Caleb disappears for good.
The first thing I see when I go upstairs is his backpack, leaning against the wall. His green comforter. And then: Mia. She’s sitting in the middle of his bed, staring up at me like I’ve interrupted her.
I quietly shut the door behind me, to muffle the sound of us. “Mia,” I whisper.
“You’re here again,” she says.
“Your mom asked me to do this. She asked me to help.” I sit beside her, but she looks away.
“He’s really not coming back,” she says. “My mom was right.”
But I say nothing, because now I’m not so sure. But then I think, Maybe she’s talking about Sean. Maybe she knows something.
I drop my voice even lower. “Mia, what happened to your dad?”
“He’s gone,” she says, and she has this faraway look, staring out the uncovered window.
“I know. What happened?”
“He and Caleb got in a fight.”
“Were you here?”
She stops talking then, turns to face me. “Yes. It’s all because of you, you know. They were fighting more and more. Caleb was always making excuses, he always had to be with you. I have to go to Jessa’s race,” she mimics. “I have to help set up at Jessa’s for her brother’s party.”
“Wait, what? He said that?”
“Yeah. Your brother was graduating, right? And he spent the whole day with you instead of watching me so my parents could go away.”
“He wasn’t—” I cut myself off. I don’t need to argue with a nine-year-old. But he hadn’t been there all day. He’d barely been there at all. I think back to that to-do list I’d found in his bedside table, the date written down: 22. I had assumed he was reminding himself about Julian’s party, but maybe it was something else.
Going to see Jessa’s race, he’d told his mom before taking off that last day, as an excuse. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t told her we’d broken up. Maybe he was using my name as an excuse. Meanwhile, where had he really been heading each time?
“Mia,” I say, leaning closer, but then I hear Eve call out for Mia as well, and she scrambles to the door, down the steps, and I’m left shaking in the middle of his room. There’s barely anything left. There’s his comforter. His sheets. His backpack, leaning against the empty wall. There wasn’t much inside, which I remember from when Max went looking for his money: just some notebooks, a few stray papers, and a pen, missing a cap.
His textbooks were never here. They weren’t in the closet on his shelf, on his desk, or in his locker. And I wonder if he ever purchased them at all this year.
The backpack is a dark green, with multiple pockets. Max had already tipped the bag over, emptying the main contents, when he went through this room, in his fury.
Now, all that remains in the bottom is the pen he would tuck behind his ear, or rest between his teeth, if he was concentrating. There’s an old test—a 91, circled in red—crumpled and forgotten at the base of his notebooks. In the side pocket is his student ID, the same image hanging above the petition outside the cafeteria. We all took the photos for them at the beginning of the year, and they always looked ghastly, overexposed by the printer settings and white background. But Caleb looks alive in his.
The second pocket has been unusable since last year—the zipper stuck permanently in the closed position.