She stood watching him for a moment before she approached. Izzy’s father sat in a beach chair with some kind of fancy drink. Even had an umbrella. Although she was almost as tall as he was, Izzy hadn’t fully outgrown the fear she had of him ever since she’d found the black kitten dangling from the clothesline.

“Looks like you,” Leanne had said about the kitten when Izzy first bought the animal home from the dump where she’d found her. “We can have a tea party!”

Izzy draped the fern of the kitten’s backbone against her chest, and the creature purred and purred. She never stopped. Even when she ate or drank, she purred. Izzy felt the thrum in her heart as she fell asleep.

The next morning, she went outside and saw the kitten hanging. Izzy began to scream and scream, Leanne rushed out and held her, and then Larry came and pinched the clothespins and let the tiny body collapse into the dirt.

He never admitted to anything. He said the cat must have gotten out, someone must have caught it and put it there.

That was when Izzy realized she’d had her first darkness, although she wouldn’t name it that until years later when Ted played the song for her and Cyrus. He was the only person she’d ever told about the kitten and about the darkness that had perhaps tried to forewarn her of what was to come.

“I think I’ve felt that, too,” he’d said, pulling her against his chest, into a different kind of darkness. One that shone like a sea at night.

That was all Cyrus would say.

“Greetings, wayward daughter,” Larry said now. He grinned. The expression long in the tooth came to mind. “I heard what happened.”

“You haven’t seen him, have you?” she asked. Larry was more lucid than Leanne but even less trustworthy.

He scratched his whiskers—a few grays had sprouted among the dark hairs—with the tips of long fingers. “How could anyone leave you, daughter? That makes no sense. He been drinking?”

“Cyrus doesn’t drink.” She repeated what had happened, said she didn’t think he would have just left her.

“Tied at the hip still?” Larry had never been a Cyrus fan, even before the pregnancy. Less so after. “I’m sure he’ll come back. Stay and have a drink.”

“You know I don’t drink either.” She swatted at a fly. “Jody said he came to see you.”

“Jody Rivera? She’s almost as crazy as your mom. Why don’t you go ask that brother of his in the can? Maybe it has something to do with drugs.”

“Fuck you,” Izzy said, but under her breath. You never knew how Larry might react. There was no way Cyrus was involved with drugs, but what if Joe or the people he knew on the outside had something to do with Cyrus going missing? It would take a couple of weeks to get in to see Joe at CAL. She didn’t feel she had two weeks to wait.