By the time I buckled myself into my seat, I was already regretting what I’d done. My stomach churned from anxiety throughout the entire hour of my flight. Without my phone, it would be difficult to reach Henry, I couldn’t talk to Jennie, and I wouldn’t have any way of tracking down Mischa. And Trey would be able to look through anything on my phone… including my call log, which was full of no one but Henry.

The fact that he’d busted out of Northern troubled me, as did his claim that he’d been in the infirmary there on Tuesday night, when we’d last spoken on the phone. How on earth had he been able to get himself to Chicago—especially if administrators at Northern were probably searching for him?

When I landed, I found Mom waiting for me at the baggage claim. “Did you want to stop for lunch?” Mom asked. “I texted you, but you didn’t reply.”

After the way I’d begged my parents to allow me to have a phone again after I moved to Tampa, there was no way Mom would ever believe I’d left my phone behind in Florida. But I hadn’t expected that my missing phone would be an issue almost immediately after I landed in Wisconsin. So I lied. “I think I packed it into my bag.”

“Well, I hope it turns up when we get to the house,” Mom told me. She studied me hard for a moment before she raised an eyebrow at me and continued, “Mary Jane stopped by last night to tell me that Trey’s gone missing from his school. She asked me to let her know if you hear from him.”

My stomach iced over, and I prayed that my face wasn’t revealing anything. “Oh. Wow. I just spoke with him on Tuesday night. He said he was in the infirmary, but didn’t say anything about leaving Northern. How could he have gone missing?” I let some of the real anxiety I was feeling play out on my face, hoping Mom would take it as concern for him.

Mom met my gaze for just a fraction of a second, and the doubt I saw in her eyes felt like a little stab in my side. “I think he’d be smarter than to contact you and put you in a difficult position. But I hope that when you find your phone, you’ll tell me if he’s reached out to you.”

“Mom, I really think my phone’s in my bag,” I insisted, trying to steady my voice so that she wouldn’t think I was trying to start an argument with her. “I thought I had it with me on the way to the airport, but I may have even left it at Dad’s because it was so early in the morning when we left the house. You can search my stuff if you want.”

We stepped outside the sliding doors of the airport, and Mom looked straight ahead as we continued on to the parking lot. “I don’t want to search your stuff. I want to be able to trust you.”