“What?” Nicholas said. His tone was strident enough to cut through the chaos, and we all turned to him. He pushed back his chair and rushed out of the room, phone still held to his ear. Lex went after him, ignoring Patrick’s attempt to grab her arm. Mia went after Lex, I went after them, and Patrick went after us all.
We found Nicholas in the den. He had turned on the television and was changing the channels until he landed on a local news broadcast.
“I’ll call you back,” he said into the phone, and hung up.
On the screen a reporter was standing in front of the FBI field office in L.A., a building I would recognize anywhere. Underneath her was a banner that read “New Clue in Case of Missing Boy.”
“—told that hikers discovered the distinctive custom bicycle as many as three months ago, but the FBI had chosen not to make that information public at the time.” The picture cut from the reporter to a still of a red mountain bike with chunky wheels and designs painted in gold on its frame. “This is the second major development in recent weeks in the six-year investigation into what happened to ten-year-old Daniel Tate, who disappeared from the affluent community of Hidden Hills while riding his bike to a friend’s house. A recent Los Angeles Magazine article revived public interest in the case less than a month before Tate was discovered alive in Vancouver, Canada. The FBI is hopeful that the discovery of Tate’s bicycle will be the break they’ve been looking for in the search for his abductors.”
“Oh my God,” Nicholas whispered.
I turned and looked at Lex. She was looking at Patrick. Neither of them looked surprised.
So that’s why they’d brought me here.
I whipped my head around at the sound of a crash to my left. Jessica was standing on the stairs, the shattered pieces of a wine glass around her feet, staring at the bicycle on the television screen.
? ? ?
Jessica collapsed amongst the glass, immediately taken over by a fit of crying and shaking, and Mia burst into tears at seeing her mother upset. Lex hugged Mia to her, and Patrick and I went to help Jessica up. She was gulping for breath and bleeding from several shards of glass embedded in her skin. We each put an arm around her shoulders and helped her up the stairs back to her room.
“They f-found the bike?” she said.
“I know it’s a shock, but this is good news, Mom,” Patrick said. “It’ll help them find who took you, Danny, right?”
“Right,” I said. Nice cover, Patrick. Very smooth.
We got Jessica into bed. I tried to follow Patrick to the bathroom when he went for the first aid supplies, but Jessica’s grip on my arm was unbreakable.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said softly. I didn’t have the first clue how to comfort someone, especially in a situation as bizarre as this one, so I just patted her the way I thought I should. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“I’m scared,” she whispered.
I swallowed. “I know. But it’s going to be okay. I’m here.”
“Danny—”
Patrick walked back into the room and Jessica stopped. He handed her a couple of pills and a glass of water. “Take these.”
“Patrick,” I said. “Are you sure—”
“She’s hysterical,” he told me. “She needs some rest.”
We removed the glass from Jessica’s skin and cleaned the cuts, and by the time we were finished, she was asleep.
? ? ?
I collapsed onto my bed, body exhausted but mind racing. They’d found Danny’s bicycle, the one that disappeared when he did, and they’d found it months ago. The discovery hadn’t been made public, but somehow Patrick and Lex had known, I was sure of it. The LA Magazine article that got everyone thinking about the case again and this looming piece of new evidence, that was why they’d brought me here. I’d appeared at just the right time for them, when they were the most worried and desperate.
How had they known about the bike?
In my back pocket, my phone started to vibrate. I was too wiped out to even reach for it. And there was no one I wanted to talk to. But it kept vibrating, and eventually I gave in and fished it out of my pocket.
Ren, the display read.
I hesitated, battling with myself, and then answered the call.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she said. “I just saw the news, and I wanted to see if you’re okay. Do you want to talk about it?”
“I thought this was all too much for you, and I was supposed to be talking to a professional,” I said.
She sighed. “I never wanted to stop being your friend, Danny.”
I rolled over until I was facing the wall and stared at it, finding a spot where the former paint color was showing through tiny gaps in the blue. Ren wanted to be my friend. Someone wanted me, in some way, wanted to know me. Why, again, was she the person I was trying to keep at arm’s length?
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been a jerk.”
“You’ve been fine,” she said. “I know this isn’t easy for you. I just . . . miss you.”
I took an unsteady breath. “I miss you, too.”
I imagined her smiling at that. I imagined her sitting here beside me.
“So,” she said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I really don’t.”
“In that case, did you see Isabella kiss Gage’s brother on yesterday’s episode?”
“No, tell me about it.”
Ren caught me up on everything happening on A Life of Love, and I just enjoyed listening to her talk. When I was fully apprised of the goings-on of Bridgeport, we talked about our final projects for art class and sci-fi movies and looking at colleges, and it was just . . . simple. Nice.
“My uncle keeps buying me these college guides and just leaving them in my bedroom, like not actually mentioning them makes it subtle,” she said. Her voice was low and warm and close to sleep. I checked the time; it was late. “But I don’t even know if I want to go to college, you know? It seems like just a way to stall real life. There’s no way in a year I’m going to know what I want to be for the rest of my life, so what’s the point?”
“Maybe you’re putting too much pressure on it,” I said. “You don’t have to know what you want to be for the rest of your life. Just for the next ten years, or five, or ten minutes. You can always change your mind.”
“I guess.” She yawned. “I just want to be happy.”
My own eyes were starting to droop. “That’s the trick, isn’t it, figuring that out.”
“Hmm,” she said.
We were both silent, and I listened to the soft sounds of her breathing through the phone. Then my eyes closed and I fell asleep.
? ? ?
I woke up with my phone on the pillow beside me and a text from Ren waiting on it.
Good morning, sunshine! You snore! :P
I smiled and tried to save a piece of the feeling for later.
Lex offered to let us stay home from school—Nicholas raised his eyebrows at the notion that she possessed the power to offer such a thing—on account of the bicycle news, but Nicholas wanted to get back to his classes so he could graduate on time, and I wanted to see Ren, so we went.
“Goddammit,” Nicholas said as we approached Calabasas High. The place was swarming with press, maybe even more reporters than there’d been when I first came back to school. “What do you want to do?”
“It’ll be okay,” I said with more steadiness than I felt. “They can’t follow us inside.”