“I’m really, really sorry. Trust me, Im, I’d rather go to Fitchburg with you than get a candlelight couples’ massage with my mother.”
Pressing my free ear against my bedroom door, I can clearly hear Lindy down in the kitchen. Right about now, she’ll be scanning the political section of the morning paper and eating her usual breakfast: one cup Greek yogurt, one hard-boiled egg minus the yolk, two cups basic black coffee. I’ve got ten minutes till she marches upstairs to pack her briefcase, pops her head in my room to say good-bye, and is out the door by eight forty-five. After which, I’d planned to pick up my partner.
Sherlock Holmes was never stymied by Watson’s pedicure appointments. But Jessa has plans with her mom, and I can’t judge her for that. I wouldn’t even know how.
“No, it’s completely okay. Of course you should go. I’ll be fine on my own.”
“Excuse you?” she scoffs. “You may not go to a strange city and knock on strangers’ doors alone. You will so get kidnapped, and I won’t know how to find you without you.”
“I won’t get kidnapped because I’m not a kid.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone says before they get kidnapped. But hey, Chad can totally go with you! He’s not working and he doesn’t have class on Tuesdays.”
“I’m not dragging your brother—”
“Chadwick!” she shouts into the speaker.
I cringe. “Jessa, no!”
“I’m not letting you go if you don’t take someone with you, so who else? Maybe that policewoman? Maybe Lindy?”
A harsh point. But honestly, I’ve sort of gotten used to having someone in the passenger seat, and if nothing else I could use a navigator. So after I shower and scrape my hair into a neat ponytail and, at the last moment, stuff a Ziploc bag of Lucky Charms into my coat pocket, I drive over to the Prices’ house. A miserable-looking Jessa waves at me from their bay window while Chad slides into the frost-fogged car. Slumping down in his jacket with the ski pass permanently affixed to the zipper, he palms back the white-blond jumble of his hair and yawns, rubs his eyes with the heel of one hand. “Cold one, huh?”
So now we’re talking about the weather. I fiddle with the heating vents to delay conversation. Like the coffee Lindy left in the pot Thursday night—bitter to begin with and by Friday morning, toxic—the awkwardness between us is exponentially worse in the daylight. I only make it halfway down Cedar before pulling onto a dead-end side street and throwing the Civic into park. “We know you know something’s going on.”
Carefully, Chad watches a pack of boys in winter jackets and athletic shorts wrestle for a basketball below a hoop at the end of the cul-de-sac. “It’s your secret, Imogene. I’m sorry Jessa opened her mouth. You really don’t need to tell me.”
Untrue. I have to give him something if I want him to look at me the way he used to, and not as a doctor-in-training trying to diagnose the wounded. I breathe deeply. “We’ve been trying to find my dad. But I think—I know—Dad is looking for my mother. My real mom, I mean, who left when I was two years old. So, I am too. It’s . . . complicated.”
“Sounds like it.” He whistles low. “That’s heavy stuff.”
“But thanks to you, we’ve kind of got a lead. Dr. Sorbousek told us that my mother said she was going back home, and we know she’s from Fitchburg originally, so—”
“So that’s where we’re headed. Makes sense. But . . . are you okay?”
There’s that question again. “Always,” I quote my dad with a smile, hoping I sound so much cooler than I feel. Then Chad looks at me, studies me with perfect, sea-glass-green eyes and for a heart-pumping second I’m carried away by butterflies—no, bigger. By full-size Victoria crowned pigeons.
“You’re so tough, Imogene Scott.” He not-quite-smiles back. “How did you get to be so tough?”
Later, I’ll come up with a thousand possible retorts. For now, I can only shrug and stare helplessly back until he flashes a dimple and shakes his head.
“So what’s the plan when we get there?”
I perk up—my own strategic genius is a safer topic—and drop the envelope of bills Lindy left for me in his lap. Two hundred bucks! Seems like way too much money for a prom dress, but I’m not complaining. Fitchburg’s more than an hour northwest, and my car is running on fumes and hope.
He flips through the cash, then sits up straighter. “Holy bankroll. Are we opening a meth lab?”
“We’re ‘buying a prom dress,’” I air-quote.
“Oh, well, now I understand why Jessa thought I should come along.”