“Abby.” Sheriff Kahn looks like a mourner at a funeral he’s secretly excited about: like he’s trying a little too hard. Some tragedies are inexplicable. People run. Girls run away all the time. “I’m sorry to bother you so early.”

The morning light feels like a terrible uninvited houseguest. I stand there blinking and sweating, while Sheriff Kahn refracts light from his shoulders.

“Not as sorry as I am,” I say, and then immediately regret it. I try again. “Can I help you?”

“I have some bad news,” he says. I watch him force himself to look directly at me.

“I saw you called.” I pause, taking in his expression, but I can’t read it. “And honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Kahn flinches. He waves a hand as if to shake off a fly. “I’m not here about that.” The pause is long enough to contract the whole world into a heartbeat. Not here about that means here about something else, and I make a sudden pivot to possibilities I didn’t even know I should fear. For a wild second I think he must be here about Kaycee Mitchell, or whoever was pretending to be her.

“I have some bad news about your father.”

What’s funny is that right away, it feels like I was waiting for him to say it.

“Can I come inside for a minute?” he asks, in a softer voice.

—

It’s amazing how many different ways there are to suffocate. You can suffocate in water as shallow as a puddle, by smothering and by choking. You can even suffocate by breathing if you’re breathing the wrong air.

It was TJ who found him. He went to see him just a few hours after our meeting with Dr. Chun. It was part of their routine. On Mondays he usually went over to inspect the trees of course and for a ginger ale. It seems important for me to tell Sheriff Kahn this, about the routine of it. It seems important for me to prove I knew his routine—at least, some small part of it.

I don’t know why I feel the need to give off the impression that I know more about my father’s daily life than I actually do—like when I justified renting my own place to Monty’s mother. Strangers make you feel like family should be the most important thing. Blood is thicker than water, that kind of thing. How are you supposed to act when it’s not?

TJ’s story is short. He says my dad seemed moody and confused. He talked a lot about my mother. He ranted about cancer and the government, how the disease was invented by a U.S. lab back in the fifties to try to get people off their Social Security.

He gave TJ his hacksaw as a gift, one of his favorite tools.

And then TJ called me twice, with no answer. Sheriff Kahn doesn’t say that part. I doubt he knows.

My head is full of ringing echoes, voices I can’t make out, someone screaming for air.