“Sorry,” Cash said, but there was an emptiness to the apology. There was no rueful smile to accompany it, nor did he try to laugh off the uneasiness that turned the air around them brittle.

She toed at the album still lying on the floor, making him split his attention. “Was just looking at some old pictures.”

He nodded but didn’t say anything further.

“I hadn’t realized Jimmy and Charles Bell were friends,” she said, because her body might be on the verge of slipping into fight or flight, but her mind was stuck on the dots, the outliers that kept cropping up at perfect places to fit an image that seemed too easy to draw.

Cash’s head tipped to the side, and she couldn’t tell if his eyes were actually empty or the blankness was because of the shadows from the attic. “I don’t think they were. I actually . . .”

“What?” Mia asked, her hand still on her gun, even as he continued to keep his distance. The blood was no longer rushing past her ears, so she could hear the house sigh and settle with the wind, could hear the rumble of a washing machine, could hear any potential shift in Cash’s body that signaled an attack.

“I got the impression Jimmy wasn’t too fond of the guy.” Cash lifted one shoulder, his arms relaxed by his sides. She was beginning to feel foolish for her initial scare.

“How?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how did you get that impression?” The photo of the three of them told a different story. What was the truth? A moment snapped in time, or a gut feeling a decade and a half later. It kept cropping up. That disparity. Mia’s memories acted more like pictures because hers were safe, removed, untainted. But everyone else’s had bent.

Or was it the other way around? She swayed on her feet, just a little, trying to ignore the question that had started as a whisper and then grown to a howl she pretended not to hear when she stared at the ceiling of her childhood bedroom.

What if her mind had simply supplied her with pretty images to paper over horror lingered in reality?

Cash shrugged again. “Don’t know really. Always just was. No one ever said it out loud.”

She shook her head. “You noticed when you were a kid? When you were that young? You thought Jimmy didn’t like Charles?”

Because she hadn’t thought much about any of the adults that summer. Not beyond avoiding getting yelled at and figuring out which house was empty so they could sneak some liquor.

Cash’s brow collapsed. “I mean . . . I guess not, no.”

Right. Her mind grasped for something that was just a wisp, insubstantial but not nothing, either.

Mia dropped her gaze to the floor, and it caught on the photo she’d pulled out of the album.