“He took me for a drive in his big old Lincoln Navigator. It was dark, after nine o’clock. I thought he wanted to talk alone in the car while he drove around, but he didn’t say anything except tell me to put my phone and my wallet on the dash. I did.” I wait a beat. “He drove me to the Bluff. Parked right outside the house where Luco Stevens raped me, where Frankie shot him on the front steps. I was pissed. Why take me there, of all places? He looked at me, wearing that stupid flat cap of his, and said, ‘This is where the second worst thing in your life happened. And now you want to run off and track down the man responsible for the very worst thing that happened to you?’”

I pause. We roll past a series of mansions set back from the road, front lawns the size of soccer fields.

Caesar says, “What did you do?”

“Got out of the car and slammed the door and told him to fuck off.”

Caesar smiles. “Bet he didn’t like that.”

“He rolled down the window and said, ‘I’ll be waiting for you at the bar.’ And he drove away.”

Caesar brings the Frankenstein to a stop at another intersection and turns to stare at me, his smile gone.

“Took me two hours to walk to Ronan’s,” I say. “I had to hide a few times, fight off one dude who tried to grab me. My uncle left me alone in the Bluff, at night, with no phone and no money, as a test. To see if I could make it out on my own. And I did. So going to a rec center in the Bluff in broad daylight is not going to hurt me.”

Caesar’s hands tighten around the steering wheel, but he says nothing, just drives.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Vine City Rec Center is a low, whitewashed stucco building with yellow and green trim behind a cinder-block wall topped with ornamental spikes. Balloons tied to the open front gates bob in the breeze. A banner that reads WELCOME TO YOUR NEW REC CENTER! hangs above the double front doors, which are closed. Caesar pulls into one of the last open spaces in the parking lot to the right of the main building. I see local news vans from 11Alive and Fox 5. At the back of the lot, a tent provides shade to a crowd gathered before a stage, where a man in a gray suit and bright pink tie is emphatically waving his arms as he speaks. Next to the tent are foldout tables loaded down with lidded foil pans and stacks of paper plates and sweating pitchers of iced tea and water covered in plastic wrap to keep the flies off.