I am dizzy trying to connect the dots, but in the dark, I could be twelve or twenty-five or fifty. I am unbounded by time, floating, and what she says doesn’t make sense, but my childhood memories come to me in the black night—rich in detail, vivid in color—and I latch on to them and talk. I tell her about Tate’s dad. How he was a mean giant and that I had to throw a rock at his head to stop him from being cruel to a little boy. I told her about the bully I glued to his seat. She laughs so hard I feel her body shake in my arms, and in the darkness I remember that I am a teacher. “Wait, how old are you?”

“Ten.”

“Don’t throw rocks and don’t glue people to their seats; get an adult to help you instead.” Giving advice, this little bit of normalcy in the terrifying blackness that surrounds us, helps me to breathe a little easier. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Her voice is small and I hug her close, grateful for the contact. “You sound like Uki,” she says.

“Who?”

“Uki. My dad tells me stories about her at bedtime.” I hear her sniffle. “I thought he was telling me stories about my mom, but I was wrong because Uki is brave and strong, and the boy loves her. She sounds like you.”

A man’s voice booms from somewhere below us, shouting, calling, tinged with a desperation that makes his words stutter and stop. And my pulse races because I know that voice. “C . . . C-laire! Are you . . . h . . . h-ere? M . . . M-aree!”

“It’s Daddy!” She squeezes my hand. “It’s Tate, your best friend! He lives in Whittier, and he kissed you once. I saw him!”

I gasp but my chattering teeth make it a vibrating sound.

He calls again. “Maree! Claire!”

“Here, we’re here!” I scream until my voice is hoarse. My head pounds, chest hurts, but despite the darkness and the hollow feeling that I’ve forgotten everything important and the girl in the dark who feels like she’s always belonged with me, I smile. Tate, the skinny boy with the thick black hair and the glacier-green eyes who held my hand when my mom left, is here.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

We stand in the lobby of BTI, the girl, Tate, and me. She holds on to his legs, sobbing, and he rubs circles on her back. Then she turns from him to me, and when I kneel down, she wraps her arms around me and squeezes. “Thank you,” she whispers.

I touch the back of her head, run my hand down her length of soft brown hair, and feel my heart expand when I breathe in, because the moment feels exactly as it should.