It had wrenched Clark’s world off its axis, broken all laws of nature as she knew them, to discover that her quiet brother with his razor wit—a boy who had once described the death of their batty, tender, financially hapless mother as simply, “The thriftiest thing that woman ever did”—could somehow slip between the cracks of the world and become abruptly, insistently absent.

Troy’s girlfriend had reported him missing, another investigation had been mounted (that had been a busy year for the Pettis County Sheriff’s Department), but little attention was ultimately paid to the disappearance of some old running back who had allowed something as simple as a neck injury to keep his team from reaching the championships in his high school days. The town gossips had been too busy still raging about Joel to care.

When Clark’s troubled mother had died, the grief had been simple enough for Clark to handle: the woman was gone, and probably the better for it. But with Troy, Clark had long since found she could not grieve nor resent nor relinquish him. Troy, somehow, was both alive and not alive. He was baked white in the sun, delivering infants in Ecuador or, at this very moment, nursing a drink in some fuggy bar, just like the one Clark sat in now, and thinking of her.

So, despite all her furious misgivings about Joel, when Clark had received word this afternoon that Dylan Whitley had apparently decided to run away from home, she’d dug Joel’s card from where she’d stuffed it in the pocket of last night’s uniform. She’d texted to ask him if there was anything she could do. Who could imagine better than she the anxiety he must be going through?

She wasn’t sure Joel deserved her kindness. She wasn’t sure she could have treated the news any other way.

Joel made the barman pull down a full bottle of whiskey from the dusty top shelf, paid with cash, left his change. He approached her booth with the bottle and two milky shot glasses. He had spotted her after all.

“I hope you’ve developed a taste for rye,” he said, settling into the booth.

“I’ll taste whatever’s liquid.” She accepted a glass, let him pour her a heavy shot. “How are you holding up?”

He didn’t answer her immediately. He downed a double with a grimace, watched her in the hazy light. A runty man at the bar whose eye Clark had been avoiding sidled to the jukebox with a pout and turned on “When You Say Nothing at All.”

“How much do you know?” Joel asked.

“Just that Dylan wants to stay out of town,” she said truthfully.

“And won’t respond to anything I write.” Joel opened his phone, scrolled through it and laid a text exchange in front of her.

Dylan’s most recent text read:

joel im sorry but i cant stay in bentley right now

This was followed by three messages from Joel:

Who is this?

If this is Dylan answer the phone.