Me, I found out who I was after we lost Mom. I know how that sounds, but I had to take over, do the cooking, do the cleaning, keep the house together. I decided that you have to pick a direction in life, and that’s that. I’m going to go to college, marry Jonny, become a physical therapist, and help people recover from serious injuries. You know, like Mom never got a chance to do. Laura is jealous that I’m so sure of where I’m going.

I made up my mind to talk to her. I got out of bed and slipped down the hallway to her room. You can’t really be quiet, because the floorboards screech like witches. I tapped gently on her door.

“Laura?”

On most nights, the yellow lamp beside her bed glowed until very late, and I would find her with a book under her nose. Tonight there was no light under the door. When she didn’t answer, I turned the knob carefully and went inside.

“Laura?” I said again.

She wasn’t there. She hadn’t come home yet. I switched on the light, which made my eyes squint and blink. Her room was the way it always was. Laura was messy. Clothes on the floor. Albums stacked on her dresser by the record player. Posters of Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, both a little crooked where they were taped on the wall. Books everywhere. Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath. Gail Sheehy.

Where was she?

I thought back to the evening in the park. Laura and I drove up there together. I was meeting Jonny after his softball game, and he and I were going down to the lake to swim. I knew tonight was going to be the first time for us. I’d been planning it for weeks.

The thing was, before Jonny showed up, Laura was acting weird. She was saying scary stuff I didn’t understand. Then she asked me if I could keep a secret. I said sure, I could keep a secret forever if I needed to, which was true. But she never got a chance to tell me what it was. Instead, she went off by herself onto the trails. It was night. The rain was pouring down.

I never should have let her go.

I told myself that everything was okay. Laura had a rendezvous with a boy. Just like me and Jonny. That was why she was late tonight. I almost left her room, but then I saw something on her bed, and I realized I was wrong.

The letter was just like the others that had arrived anonymously over the past two months. Laura told me they had stopped. Why did she lie? I unfolded the piece of paper and stared at the grainy black-and-white photograph and what was scrawled across the page in red ink and almost sank to my knees and threw up.

As I held it in my hand, I remembered something else from the park. Before the storm broke, before Jonny found us, Laura kept saying that someone was hiding in the woods.