“But you think she’s crazy. That’s why you left her.”
“Kacey, you know your mother probably better than anyone does.” His eyes are pleading. “She has a lot of problems. I wasn’t equipped to deal with them, so I left. I didn’t ever mean to leave you, too. But she didn’t want me to be in your life.”
“But did she really say you couldn’t see me? Or was it just an easy way out for you?”
My father cups his chin. Sad puppy-dog eyes.
I want to hit him. “Do you have any idea how messed up I am?” I say.
My father gapes. He’s looking at me like a stranger. I wonder if he’s thinking it: Is my daughter fucked up enough to kill her best friend?
The lock in the front door turns. Andrew steps into the kitchen. Hearing the door, Ashley comes in from the living room. No doubt she was listening in on my father and me this whole time.
She looks Andrew up and down. “You said you’d be home from the track meet an hour ago. I’ve been calling you.”
“I didn’t go to the track meet.”
“Then where the hell were you?” Ashley looks from him to me, like I had something to do with this. I think of Detective Burke’s appearance at the school this afternoon and my chest tightens.
“I was at the sheriff’s station,” Andrew says. “They wanted to talk to me again.”
Ashley turns to me, slowly. “Kacey. Please go to your room.”
—
The argument lasts half an hour. I can’t hear most of it, but the parts I catch are bad. My dad: It doesn’t matter if you’re eighteen. We should have been there.
Ashley: Do they think you had something to do with this?
Andrew: Of course not—just routine questions—
Ashley: About what? Kacey? That detective—has it in for her—
Andrew: They’re talking to everyone—not just Kacey and me—
Andrew doesn’t tell them about the phone records. He’s lying—so he doesn’t worry them, maybe.
Which means that whatever went down in that interrogation room today made Andrew think there’s finally something to worry about.
Later, I have to brush my teeth upstairs, because Andrew is soaking in the bathtub across from my room while Lauren showers upstairs. When I come back to my room, I see my phone blinking and pick it up.
There’s a text from Andrew.
Meet me in the bathroom. Not really in the tub. There’s something I have to tell you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Andrew is sitting on the bathroom rug when I open the door, so I sit down on the toilet seat and pull my knees up to my chest. The water’s running into the bathtub, and it’s loud enough to drown out our conversation.
“I didn’t just drive around the night Bay went missing,” he says. “Around ten, when my mom went to sleep, I drove to your dad’s hospital.”
I hug my knees tighter. “Why?”
“I wanted to see if he was really working.”
My arms fall from my knees. “What? Why wouldn’t he be working?”
“Because I thought he was lying about all the double shifts.” Andrew puts his face in his hands. “Two weeks ago, my mom left her cell phone on the table when you guys left for the café. She got a call from an unknown number, so I figured I’d pick up and tell whoever it was to call the café instead.”
I don’t know where this story is going, but I don’t like it. I lick my lips. “Who was it?”
“Some woman named Beth Schrader. I didn’t recognize the name as one of her friends, so I Googled it.” Andrew looks up at me, bleary-eyed. “She’s a divorce attorney in Madison.”
Divorce. The word lands like a punch to the kidney.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask. Even if Andrew wanted to keep this a secret from Lauren, he could have told me.
Andrew’s eyes glisten. “I confronted my mom about it. She made me promise not to tell you or Lauren. I’m so sorry, Kace.”
I’m shaking. A million thoughts zip through my head: where will I go? Everything I was so afraid of—Ashley getting pissed at me, being sent back to New York, having to live with my mom again—it was all set into motion before I even stepped a foot in that barn.
But of course it all makes sense—Ashley’s constant anger at my dad’s work hours. Her little speech to me in the car the other day: I wanted someone to fight for me.
How badly had I wanted my perfect new life to work out that I was willing to overlook things that were right in front of my face?
A thought breaks through the cloud cover in my brain: I can’t lose them. Ashley will no doubt get custody of Andrew, and Lauren, and the house—
“I’ll never see you or Lauren,” I blurt. “I can’t live with my dad alone. I barely know him—I’ll have to go back to my mom.”
“Don’t say that. I think she’s waiting until we go to school—and if we both go to school in Madison we’ll see each other all the time.”
If I even get into school in Madison. If not, who knows what will happen to me? I can’t think about that right now. “Why does she want to leave him? Is it because of me?”
“Of course not. She wouldn’t get into it with me, so I thought maybe he was—”
“Having an affair.”
“I thought. But I saw his car in the parking lot—and I felt like an asshole and came home.”
I inhale. Exhale. “Did you tell the police all this?”
“Of course I did. But no one saw me at the hospital. No one can confirm I was there. It looks like I’m full of shit about where I went that night.”
My voice comes out hollow. “This is bad. The phone calls were bad enough…but you sneaking out. It’s bad.”
Andrew holds his head in his hands. “Can you stop saying that? I know it’s bad. What are the goddamn chances my phone picked her to butt-dial that night?”
I draw in a breath. “Swear to me you never hooked up with her.”
“I swear to God.”
Swear to me it was just a butt dial. Swear to me you really drove to the hospital Saturday night. Swear to me you didn’t meet up with Bailey.
But I stay quiet. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the doubt lingers.
“Kacey.” Andrew looks at me with wild eyes. “You can’t be thinking that I did this. I had no reason to want to hurt Bailey, let alone kill her.”
I can’t tell him what he wants to hear: that I know him, and he’s not capable of hurting anyone—never mind a girl who’s been his friend his entire life. I want to believe so badly that Andrew’s not lying, and it really was just a butt dial. I want to believe he’s not a liar.
But everything I’ve believed so far has been wrong.
So I say the only thing I can think of: “You’d better find a way to convince Burke of that.”
—
I wake up feeling like I’m dying. Cramps—real, actual period cramps, not invented ones to get Mrs. Lao off my back—at four a.m. I wind up curled on my side on the bathroom floor. After an hour, Ashley comes down to check on me. I wonder if she went to bed at all last night, or if she stayed up and listened to my every movement.
She presses a cool hand to my forehead. Removes it and sits down next to the toilet. “Did you get any sleep at all?”