“I don’t think you get to criticize me for hurting my family with a straight face. What the hell does it even matter to you?” he said.
“I care about them.” I saw a brief flash of my mother as she was the last moment I saw her, with a phone pressed to her ear, dry-eyed and stone-faced. “You have no idea how lucky you are, to have a family like yours.”
Nicholas laughed and his fingers dug into the steering wheel. “A family like mine? If you and I are right, one of them murdered my brother. A little boy who, yeah, was a pain in the ass but was just a little boy. More are lying to cover up for that person with no regard for how much it hurts the rest of us. How’s my dad going to feel when he finds out the truth? Or Mia? They’ll have to go through losing Danny all over again. This family is poisonous, and I’m just trying to get out while I still can.”
“But you didn’t know any of that when you decided to leave without telling them,” I said.
“I didn’t need to. They’ve done plenty of other things.”
“But they love you,” I said.
“It’s not enough.” He gave me a dumbfounded look. “Where can you be from that you think some ingrained, biological imperative to ‘love’ me is enough to excuse what they’ve done?”
“It’s not an imperative.” Something inside of me was cracking and breaking loose, like a calving glacier. “Maybe it seems like it to you, but not everyone loves their family.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “They didn’t love you?”
“It was only really my mother,” I said, “and no.”
“I guess I knew that,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have ended up here, would you?”
I thought about the first time I ran away from home, how they’d put me into a temporary care home until they could locate my family. The adults fed me and patted me on the arm and talked to me in kind tones. A kid there taught me a card game and another lent me an extra pair of socks when my feet got cold. When my mother finally came to collect me, I screamed my throat raw and broke two fingers punching a wall. That was the day I learned: Don’t give them your name, because then they can’t call anyone to come take you away.
“I guess not,” I said.
“How bad was it?” he asked.
I shifted in my seat. It was weird, talking about myself. “Pretty bad.”
Nicholas cocked his head at me.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever completely believed anything that’s come out of your mouth,” he said.
• • •
At dinner that night, over Vietnamese takeout, Lex asked us how school had been.
Nicholas shrugged. “It was okay.”
“Danny?” Lex asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.”
“So, nothing unusual?”
Nicholas sighed and lowered his chopsticks. “They called you.”
“Yes, they did,” she said. “Where the hell were you two?”
“Nowhere special,” Nicholas said. “We just didn’t feel like school. You gonna ground us, Mom?”
“Just don’t take off like that without telling anyone, okay?” Lex said. “I was worried.”
“Well, we’re fine,” he said.
“Why can’t I skip school when I don’t feel like it?” Mia asked.
I vaguely registered the sound of the front door opening.
“You want to answer that one?” Lex asked Nicholas.
“Because, Mimi,” he said, “your school isn’t an exercise in pointless, torturous futility.”
“Hey, guys,” Patrick said as he entered the dining room.
“Hey,” Lex replied with the surprise we all felt. It was Monday; Patrick never came over on Mondays.
“Lexi, can I talk to you for a sec?” he said. He sounded weird. Overly casual.
“Yeah, okay, just let me—”
“What is futility?” Mia asked.
“High school. Eat your pho.” Nicholas turned to Patrick. “What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing,” Patrick said.
Nicholas’s phone started to ring.
“Do I have to eat this?” Mia asked Lex. “I just want some cereal.”
“Hey, can I call you later?” Nicholas said into the phone.
“Try three bites,” Lex said.
“Lexi,” Patrick said. “I really need—”
“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 publ
ic, 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.”
“I’m going to call Asher and see where he is,” Nicholas said.
We pulled into a space in the student parking lot, and Asher came out to meet us. Just in case.
“Hey, man,” he said to me as I climbed out of Nicholas’s car. “You okay?”
I nodded. “Fine.”
“It’s good, right, that they found it?” he said. “It’ll help them catch the bad guys, right?”
“Hopefully,” I said, exchanging a brief look with Nicholas.
We were halfway to the school when a reporter and cameraman stepped out from behind a pickup truck.
“Daniel Tate?” he said, pointing a digital recorder at me.
“Leave us alone,” Nicholas said.
“Daniel, are you optimistic that your kidnappers will be found?” the man said, taking a step closer to me. Suddenly Asher was standing between us, his palm, the size of a serving plate, on the man’s chest, pushing him back.
“No comment, asshole,” he said.
A movement at the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned and found a bank of cameras trained on me from the front of the school where the news vans were parked. This idiot reporter had attracted their attention. I immediately turned to hide my face.
“Nicholas,” I said. “Look.”
Nicholas took in the rows of cameras, with their telephotos lenses, and made an instant decision.
“Fuck this,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”
We went back to the car, and I covered my face with my hands until we were far away from the school.
• • •
We went home, and because only Jessica’s car was there, we didn’t even need to explain to anyone why we were back. Ren texted me to see how I was, and I gave her the gate code and invited her to come over later that night. Meanwhile, Nicholas and I locked ourselves in his room to go over everything we knew, since there was suddenly new urgency to our investigation. It didn’t take long. There just wasn’t that much evidence. One moment Danny was there and the next he was gone.
On the Saturday morning Danny disappeared, he had breakfast with the family, except for Robert, who’d been in Palo Alto on a business trip since the previous Thursday, and Nicholas, who had spent the night and the bulk of that day at a friend’s house. Danny told Jessica he was going to ride his bike to his friend Andrew’s. The nanny had the weekend off, so Jessica then took Mia to a doctor’s appointment and to run several errands, which the FBI had verified. Patrick and Lex spent the day with friends, several of whom had been able to confirm their alibis. Everyone’s movements were accounted for in the hours before Jessica called the police to report Danny missing that evening.
Some part of the story was obviously off, but so many years later, it was hard to tell which one.
“This is impossible,” Nicholas said. “If the FBI can’t figure this out, what makes us think we can?”
“Hubris?” I said.
He laughed in that way he usually did, not a real laugh but a puff of air through his nose that could just as easily be mocking as amusement. “You’ve been paying attention to Mr. Vaughn.”
“Well, he’s just so inspiring,” I deadpanned, and he actually smiled for real.
Suddenly, someone downstairs started to yell. We glanced at each other and jumped up, Nicholas shoving all the papers under his bed before we rushed from the room. We stopped on the landing of the staircase and looked over the railing into the foyer. Lex must have arrived home while we were working, because she and Jessica were down there somewhere, and they were arguing.
“—me what to do. I’m the mother here, Alexis!”
“Then act like it for once in your life!” Lex replied. “We need you. Think of Mia; she’s only a little girl. If you keep going out there, someone’s going to notice, and then what’s going to happen to all of us?”
Jessica’s voice dropped, not so much that we couldn’t hear it anymore, but enough that the words became unintelligible. Lex’s reply was likewise impossible to make out. Then Jessica was stalking through the foyer and out the front door.
 
; “We have to follow her,” Nicholas said.
“Now?” I asked. It was on our list of things to do, but we were checking off tasks a little quickly for my taste.
“Of course now,” he said. “You heard what Lex just said. This could be important.”
Nicholas ran back to his room to grab his keys, and then we headed downstairs. We crept to the front door so that Lex wouldn’t hear us and then ran around the side of the house to the garage, where Nicholas had parked, ducking under windows when there was a chance we could be seen. As soon as we were away from the house, Nicholas gunned the engine, and by the time we’d reached the gate that shielded Hidden Hills from the rest of the world, we’d caught up to Jessica’s SUV. Nicholas followed her from a discreet distance onto the freeway, where she headed east.
An hour later we were still driving, and the sun was sitting low in the rearview mirror.
Nicholas slammed his head back against the headrest in frustration. “Where the hell is she going?”
“Could she know we’re following her?” I asked.
“I don’t see how,” he said. “We’re a hundred yards behind her, and there are nine billion black BMWs in Southern California. Maybe she listened to Lex and isn’t going where she isn’t supposed to. Maybe she just likes to drive around, like she told you.”
“On the freeway?” I said.
Nicholas’s cell phone began to ring, and the display on his car’s computer console read “Asher.” He frowned but answered.
“Hey, I can’t really—”
But Asher was already talking. “Want to come over?” he asked, his voice filling the car. “I just found the most terrible-looking movie on Netflix.”
“I can’t,” Nicholas said.
“Hot date?”
“Danny and I are doing something.”
“Again? What’s going on with you two?”
Nicholas glanced over at me. “Ash—”
“A couple of weeks ago you barely even spoke, and now you’re ditching school together and, like, attached at the hip. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but what changed?”
Nicholas sighed. “Just making more of an effort.”
“Liar! Oh my God, you’re so bad at it!”
I grinned, and Nicholas shot me a glare.