In truth, it was exactly the answer I’d been expecting. The one I wanted, really. Because it proved, after everything, that I had been right. Junie had never been his. She’d always been solely and completely mine.

• • •

“Well, damn,” my mama said when she pushed open her trailer door, still dressed in the same clothes as the last time I’d seen her. “Wasn’t it just yesterday that you told me to forget I had a daughter? So who the hell are you? I don’t allow strangers on my property.” She smirked at her own cleverness.

This moment was the one that would decide everything. If I crossed her doorstep, asked for her help, trusted her, there was no going back. No pretending ever again that I was anything other than my mother’s daughter. No better than her. No different.

“Let me in, Mama,” I told her. “We need to talk.”

TWENTY-THREE

I was sitting on a rock next to the river when he found me. I’d been watching the water flow past for over an hour, lost in the ripples and eddies, the occasional silver flash of a fish’s scales. I was surprised when I looked up and saw that the sun was slipping through the late-afternoon sky, its edge kissing the horizon and lighting it up with streamers of pink.

“Hey,” Cal said. “What’s going on? You’ve got Mama worked up into a tizzy. And you know that takes some doing.”

I could barely look at him; hearing his voice was bad enough. Reminding me of all our childhood hours. The times he’d fed me when I was hungry, comforted me when I was hurt, reassured me when I was terrified. Cal, who I loved more than myself. More than anyone but Junie.

He sat next to me, and I could feel his eyes on my face, smell his shampoo when the breeze kicked up. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I kind of freaked out when Mama showed up and said I needed to get out here. I think she thought you might have . . .” He gestured toward the river, where water crashed over rock in an endless spill.

I didn’t say anything. Pulled Izzy’s phone from my jacket pocket and set it on the ground between us.

Cal inhaled once, sharp and fast, scrambled backward on his butt like I’d put down a grenade instead of a cell phone. “Listen,” he said, voice high and trembling “I can explain it. I can—”

I turned and looked at him. “You can explain how Izzy Logan’s phone ended up hidden in your house, or you can explain why you killed them?”

Cal’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, but nothing came out. He looked like one of the countless fish he’d caught and gutted right at this very spot, and I felt the insane urge to laugh. And I knew from the look in his eyes that my worst fear was true. He’d been the one to wield the knife after all.