“I’m okay.” I smile and he smiles back, the concern in his face retreating. He waits until I hold my hand out for him to pull me up.
“Steady,” he says when my leg wobbles and I lean into him. Trev is solid, warm. Mina giggles and presses into his other side until he’s got two armfuls of us. We hold on to him. Put him between us like our barrier against the truth.
But her hand finds mine behind his back and our fingers lace together, the click of our rings a secret sound only we understand.
Some barriers, they’re made to be broken.
33
NOW (JUNE)
“You’re quiet today,” David says halfway into our second therapy session on Monday. “What are you thinking about?”
I look up from my place on his couch. I’ve been twisting the rings on my thumb, tracing the grooves of the letters like they’re a key to a lock I haven’t found yet. “Promises,” I say.
“Do you keep your promises?” David asks.
“Sometimes you can’t keep them.”
“Do you try?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
David smiles. “In a perfect world. But I think you’re well acquainted with the unfairness of real life.”
“I try to keep mine. I want to.”
“Did Mina keep her promises?”
“Mina didn’t need to. You always ended up forgiving her, no matter what she did.”
“You care about her a lot.”
“Way to state the obvious, David.”
David’s eyebrow twitches, his pleasant smile dropping at my hostility before settling back to neutral. “You forgave her a lot, too.”
“Don’t talk about her like you knew her,” I say. “You didn’t. You won’t.”
“Not unless you tell me.”
I don’t talk for a long time, just sit there, and he doesn’t force me to continue. He folds his hands together and sits back in his chair to wait me out.
“She was bossy,” I say finally. “And spoiled. But really thoughtful. And smart. Smarter than everyone else. She could bullshit her way out of anything by just smiling. She was a bitch when she needed to be and she’d never apologize for it. She’s the first thing I think of when I wake up, the last thing I think of when I go to sleep, and the only thing I think about in between.”
I stare at the framed diplomas on the wall, the award David got from some organization for homeless youth, another from an abused women’s group. By the time he speaks, I’ve practically memorized the entire wall.
“That makes her sound like an addiction, Sophie.”
I keep staring at the wall. I can’t look at him. Not now.
“I don’t want to talk anymore today.”
“Okay,” David says. “We’ll sit here just a few minutes longer, in case you change your mind.”
When I get into the car, my phone vibrates. I’d turned it off during my session, but now I see that Rachel has left me a message.
I call my voice mail and freeze in the act of turning my keys in the ignition, listening to the message play: “It’s me. I got the drive open. You need to call me. I think I know why Mina was killed.”
34
TEN MONTHS AGO (SIXTEEN YEARS OLD)
“We’re lost,” I insist.
“No, we’re not.” Mina navigates Trev’s truck down the dirt utility road we’ve been on for the past thirty minutes. It’s dark outside, and the Ford’s brights cut through the forest as we rock back and forth on the rough road. “Amber said off Route 3, down the second road to the right.”
“We’re totally lost,” I say. “No way there’s a campground out this far. There’s nothing here but trees and deer.”
Mina sighs. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll turn around. Maybe we missed a turnoff or something.”
The trees are too thick to get a signal, so I can’t call Amber to tell her why Mina and I are so late to join her and Adam at the campground. Mina backs the truck up slowly—the road we’re on is cut out of the mountain, hugging a cliff that’s so steep, I can’t see the bottom in the darkness. The wheels skirt close to the slope and Mina bites her lip in concentration, her knuckles white against the wheel. After a few false starts, she finally gets us turned around, but we only get a half a mile before a thunka-dunk, thunka-dunk reverberates through the cab, and the ride gets even bumpier.
“Crap.” Mina slows to a stop. “I think we have a flat.”
I grab the flashlight from the glove box and follow her out of the truck, shining the beam on the tire.
Mina frowns. “Do you know how to change it?”
I shake my head and look down the road. It’s at least three miles back to the highway. I rub absently at my leg, thinking about how much it’s gonna hurt, walking that far.
Mina pulls her phone out and stomps around, trying to get a signal. I don’t tell her it’s useless, because she’s got that determined look on her face and she keeps throwing glances at my leg, like she knows the hurt I’m anticipating. I lean against a big piece of slate that’s embedded in the mountain looming over us like a gray giant, and wait for her to admit defeat. It’s August, but it’s still cool at night, and I like the little shiver that goes down my back, the prickle of goose bumps over my skin. It’s nice being out here in the forest; loud in its own way, the rustle and cracks in the undergrowth—hopefully a deer instead of a bear—the groan of the branches in the wind punctuated by the steady crunch of Mina’s boots against the road. I close my eyes and let the sounds fill me.
“You don’t have any signal?” Mina asks hopefully after about five minutes of walking back and forth, waving her phone around.
“Nope. We should start walking,” I say. “It’s not like we’re blocking a main road. We’ll get Trev to come change the tire in the morning.”
“Don’t be stupid. I can’t make you walk that far. I’ll go get help and come back for you.”
“I’m being stupid? You’re the one who failed the wilderness skills part of Girl Scouts. You’ll probably get eaten by a bear. You go, I go.”
“It’s a road. I can’t get lost following a road. And anyway, you couldn’t walk that far,” she says.
“Sure I can.”
“No way,” she says, her mouth set mulishly.
“You can’t tell me what to do. I’m coming.”
“No!” Mina says.
“Yes,” I say, starting to get annoyed. “What is up with you? Stop treating me like I’m—”
“Weak?” she finishes for me. “Disabled? Hurt?” Her voice rises with each word, trembling and high-pitched, like they’ve been stuck in her forever, now finally free.
I jerk back from her, like she’s hit me instead of just telling the truth. Even though she’s standing ten feet away, I need more distance from her. I stumble, achingly aware of my clumsiness in that moment. “What the hell, Mina?”
But I’ve inadvertently unleashed something in her, and she keeps talking, the words spilling out in the night. “If you walk that far, you’ll use it as an excuse to take more of those stupid pills. And then you’re gonna be all dopey and zoned out, like you always are lately. I know you’re in pain, Soph; I know that. But I also know you. You’re hurting yourself, and either no one else has noticed or they’re not saying it. So I guess I’m going to say it. You need to stop. Before it becomes a problem.”
Panic and relief twine inside me. Panic, because she knows, and relief, because she doesn’t realize how bad it is. She thinks I’m still at the edge of the hole, ready to throw myself off, instead of in it so deep that I can barely see her at the top.