I was opening my mouth to protest, Come on, Desiree, that’s against the law, when she said, “Listen to this. I’m such a dope. Until I was, like, fourteen, I thought lions were boys and tigers were girls. I swear to God. How was I so stupid?”

My heart bloated. I couldn’t hold back my smile. Shared idiocy is the best kind of connection between souls. “Me too,” I said, my words actually coming out in a shiver.

“What’s our problem?” she said, playful.

I laughed, then said, deadpan, “You’re joking about the cougars.”

“You’ll see.” Her smile was seductive, one snaggletooth slipping free. “So, your husband is from here? What’s his last name?”

“Bishop, but you wouldn’t know him. He’s forty-seven. Twice your age, I’m sure.”

“Yep. I’m twenty-four”

Here’s an opportunity to dig. “I was actually born here too,” I said. “But we moved away in 1991. I was little.”

“1991, damn,” she mused. “That year is famous around here. Carved into this town’s memory. Dawn Young was murdered in ’91. You remember that?”

“No. I mean, I was six when we moved away; I barely remember anything from back then.” Most people couldn’t recollect much of their early childhood, and my autobiographical memories were especially absent.

If a brainful of memories were a forest, trauma went in there with an axe and chopped memories down. For me, it cleared out most of the happy and mundane memories of my childhood, and it spared the most shocking ones. In the barren forest of my mind, these lonely trees were honey locusts, their branches spiked with long thorns, their trunks wrapped in treacherous barbs like shark teeth, warning: keep away.

“So, your hubby is,” she said, tipping her chin up and closing her eyes, “ten years older than you. Damn, he made out well.”

“Impressive math skills,” I said. Seriously. “So, what happened to her? The girl who was murdered in ’91?”

Desiree shrugged. “I wasn’t even born then, but it’s a juicy story. One of our only gruesome stories. My dad’s a cop, and I was a bit of a true crime fanatic when I was in high school. The story goes, a couple of kids found the girl under the grate of a storm drain, her dress blood-stained down the middle.”

I scanned for Emily. She was jumping from one platform to the next.

Even being this close, it was unlikely that Emily overheard Desiree. This pool-in-a-glass-box-room trapped the splashing noises, and the warm air venting in from big silver ducts overhead softened the shouts of kids and created the ultimate whooshing, white-noise machine.