“I’m not here for blood, Brent.” We’re standing so close I can see the veins of color in his eyes. “I’m here for the truth.”

He frowns as if he doesn’t believe it. “I know it sounds crazy, but this town loves Optimal. I love Optimal.” He’s searching my face as if for signs that I believe him. “They’ve done a lot of good. You should see the new community center—you should see the theater they’ve built, a whole arts wing for the school to use. They’ve given life to this town.”

He talks like the converted do about church.

I extricate my hand from his. “If they’ve done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to worry about.”

He shakes his head. “I’m not worried about them. I’m worried about you. I just…don’t want anything to change between us, okay?” he says at last, though I’m almost positive that isn’t what he originally intended. “After all these years…” He sucks in a breath. “I always wanted to see you. I always hoped I would.”

Then he does kiss me. His lips are cold and taste like cheap tequila. A little like metal, too.

Like he’s the one who’s out for blood.

Chapter Twenty

My rental house is dark and humming with recycled air. I punch off the window units and shove open a window in the kitchen and my bedroom, even though I’ll regret it when I wake up sweating. Immediately the sound of country relaxes me. Emptiness punctuated by crickets chirping and the hoot of an owl. For eighteen summers, I fell asleep to that same sound.

It pulls me back to the past, to riding my bike—a salvaged thing my dad found behind one of his job sites and hammered into shape—down the rock-studded path that led to the reservoir. It pulls me back to stripping with Kaycee down to our underwear to swim out in the reservoir, competing to see how long we could hold our breath underwater, and of how she used to float on her belly, letting her hair fan out around her, pretending she was dead.

It was the summer after sixth grade when I found Chestnut—or, rather, he found me. Kaycee got a bad flu, and for a week straight I didn’t see her. I spent hours alone in the woods. I was lying on the ground counting clouds when I heard the whine of something behind me and sat up imagining a bobcat, a bear, or I don’t know what. Instead, a wiry, half-starved dog was eyeing me through the branches in the woods. Crying and wagging its tail all at once.

One of the only things I bothered unpacking is an old wooden jewelry box that used to belong to my mother and still, I imagine, every so often, releases a bit of her smell.

On top of the stained velvet lining that’s peeling away from the wood is a plain red collar, faded with age.

Chestnut Williams, it reads, next to the home phone number my dad still uses.