“Do you do things like that a lot? Break into people’s houses?”

“No, that was the first time.” A muscle twitched in his cheek. “And the last.”

“You’re a good liar.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Maybe not right now. But we talked about Brian at the party, and about his mother—how she’d reported him missing, and stuff. You didn’t give anything away.”

“I’m not proud of it” was all he said.

For a long time, there was silence; they were both lost in their own thoughts. Ralf focused on the road and listened with half an ear to Tupac. The volume was low, but it didn’t matter. He knew all the lyrics by heart.

“Why are you helping me?” asked Sara.

“I don’t know.”

He did know, but he wasn’t about to tell her. He was sick to death of people belittling him, constantly being underestimated. Year after year, he had been mistreated by frustrated teachers, by the neighborhood police, even by Brian. He wasn’t going to let anybody else push him around or put him down. The first step had been standing up to Mikey. Now it was everybody else’s turn. When he found Werner and Helen, he would make the two of them tell him everything they knew about what happened to Brian. Then it would be up to Sara to figure things out with her parents. They could murder each other or fall sobbing into each other’s arms—whatever they wanted, as long as they left him out of it. That said, Sara’s mother had seemed like a good person. She was cut from a very different cloth from Sara and her father.

But that wasn’t his problem.

He had enough to worry about with his own mother.

Less than three hours ago, he had gone home to pick up his things and had pulled the wool over her eyes—telling her he had found work on a construction site up in the north, in Groningen. A project that would last a few days. He would stay with a friend. Previously, she would have looked at him with suspicion and asked for names and numbers, but after everything that had happened last week, she’d trusted him. She’d been genuinely happy for him. The look on her face . . . Shame cut through him like a knife. He was her only child. She deserved better.

His parents both deserved better.

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