I dropped my eyes to the screen.

It wasn’t the knowledge Bram could be nearby that had me spooked this time, but what reconnecting with Suze was going to do to me. My past was treacherous, a quagmire of emotional states; step into it, and I risked sinking up to my neck. With the exception of my parents, I’d deliberately avoided all citizens of Swanton. The idea of conversing with a local outside my immediate family made my palms sweat. Everyone in town knew our history, and like the flashbacks I’d experienced about the East Village, talk of my mother’s relatives sent me into a panic. If someone brought up the Skiltons—my aunt, uncle, or cousins—I wasn’t sure I could control my nervous system. I’d probably hurl on their shoes.

Suze didn’t mention my extended family in her Facebook message, and if I could keep our conversations surface-level, I might be okay. I hit send on a comparably cheerful response, stuck my phone back in my bag, and turned my thoughts toward lunch.

No sooner had I started the car than the ringer sounded on my phone. Mom’s call the previous night had come as a surprise; seeing her name on the display again now left me dumbfounded. I’d been sitting in the cold SUV for fifteen minutes—what I wouldn’t give for Gil’s warm layers now—so while I loathed an idling engine, I turned it on and cranked the heat as I answered.

“We have you on speaker,” my mother said. “Can you hear us?”

“Hi, love.” My father’s voice was strangely flat.

“Dad? You’re not at work?”

“Ah,” he said. “The school board insisted I take some personal days.”

“Personal days?” I repeated, bewildered. “What for? What’s going on? You guys are scaring me.”

There was a beat of silence before Mom spoke. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, hon. They’ve got it wrong, obviously. After all these years . . . and he left! It can’t be him.”

“Della,” Dad said with uncharacteristic anger. I heard him sigh, a sound rife with frustration and regret. “The bones they found,” he said. “That body. It’s Brett.”

The fans on my dashboard wrapped me in a dry heat, but I found I was shivering, my body tense and twitchy. I shut off the engine, plunging the car into silence. “What?”

“Brett,” said my father. “He’s . . . well, he’s dead, darling. It seems he has been for a long time, they think about twenty years. Your aunt got the call this morning. She told your mum.”

“But they’re wrong,” said Mom matter-of-factly. “The timing’s all wrong.”

“I don’t understand.” Uncle Brett, married to my mother’s sister, was a ghost long before today. As a kid I rarely saw him, though his name came up a lot, usually in the context of behavior my parents tried and failed to sanitize for the sake of my brother and me. Brett ran into some trouble with a fellow at work. Brett was misbehaving at the Franklin county fair. Not long after he and Aunt Fee split up, Brett left Swanton and never returned. Dad had said his remains could be twenty years old. That took us to the late nineties. I would have been barely thirteen.