But her story has left me with a bad feeling, like I’ve just swum through oily water, and the sink in the bathroom is so filthy that washing my hands only makes me feel dirtier. My first whiskey-soda does little to help and the second only makes me sad. I can’t help but think of Becky Sarinelli, and of that poor fluttering photo that landed in the aisle at that pep rally: her skin a glare in the camera flash, her exposed body. And that was before photos could be instantly shared the way they are now.

Thinking of Becky Sarinelli gets me back to thinking about Condor, and wondering why and how he could have done that to her.

Old mistakes, he’d said, about Hannah’s mother. But old mistakes are never old. We relive them again and again. We repeat them, and hope this time things will turn out differently.

I don’t want Condor to be a mistake.

Or maybe I just don’t want to be alone. Being in Barrens is reminding me of how lonely I was here. It’s reminding me I’ve never really stopped being lonely.

That was what drew Kaycee and me together as kids: we were the two loneliest best friends in the history of the world. My father was lost in his religion, and hers lost in his alcohol, his rages, his black-market economy and the people who bought and sold from him. My mother was dying. Hers might as well have been dead.

But being best friends with Kaycee could be just as lonely as having no friends at all. She was so unpredictable, even back then. She could be cruel and distant, explosive. She could hit you and then stroke the bruise, promising to make it better. Either way, I soaked up the attention. I remember building forts with her in the woods, and how I would always turn tree stumps into crowds of friends, into imaginary siblings who comforted me and cheered me on. Kaycee wouldn’t invent friends, but subjects. That way, she said, they would never disobey her when she ordered them to stay.

Sometimes I think Chestnut—a stray, just like me, skinny and desperate and fearful until I managed to coax him to me with a handful of shredded chicken—was the only real friend I ever had.

In a sick way, it made sense that Kaycee had to kill him.

—

By the start of my third drink I know that calling is a very bad idea, but by the bottom of it, I don’t care.

Pick up, I think. And: Don’t pick up.

He does, on the second ring. He sounds clean, even over the phone.

“Abby,” Brent says, and I try to pretend that he’s the one I wanted to call all along. “So crazy. I was just thinking of you. What’s up?”

I shred the damp napkin beneath my now empty drink and eye the clock over the bar. Four forty-nine. “I’m just leaving the office,” I say. “How about a drink?”