Marcelline had been telling the truth.

Owen was going to kill him.

The whole revelation, silent and white hot inside Owen, seemed lost on Jonathan. “I wonder why you don’t bring up the other people who got hurt that night? You know, those people you actually came with? Your coworkers. Remember them? The little people, who mean so much to you? But the names stick better if they’re pretty, yeah?”

“Touché. There’s a lot about that night—”

For the second time, a person over Jonathan’s shoulder stopped the conversation. Owen had just said her name no more than a minute before, but it didn’t feel as if it were anywhere within reach for him to remember it now. His mind was emptied of everything by the look on her face. The rest of her was trembling in the struggle to keep the tears to a thin glistening line on her lower lids. Jonathan’s stepdaughter. The girl in the video.

Jonathan followed Owen’s gaze and looked behind him.

“Carly? What the . . . ? Are you . . . ? Why are you . . . ? What are you doing?”

The girl was defiant, her mouth tightened down over a barely quivering chin. “I left my phone in your car.”

She said it plainly, a dare blazing up in her wet eyes for either of them to make it seem like not a good enough reason for her to be standing there in the self-consciously grown-up restaurant in her yellow high-tops and braids.

She was too old to be cute. But Owen was more or less immune to cute anyway. She was too young and furled for him to even wonder what she’d be later. She was in one of life’s middle grounds, adrift on frustration in the sea of not-quite-old-enough-to-know. She had nothing to gain or lose, except to insist that she wasn’t stupid.

“Is everything okay?” She spoke to Jonathan, but she looked sidelong at Owen, and he realized with a little sting what she had delivered expertly in that look was that she would cast her allegiance in the direction of whoever told her the truth. He’d bet his whole wallet on that.

“Honey, here.” John scooped his keys out of his pocket. “Go on out to the car. I’ll be right there.”

“Go home, Jonathan,” Owen said. “I’ll get back in touch with you.”

Jonathan searched Owen’s expression for clues as to what all that could mean.

Owen rolled his eyes. “What?”

Owen looked at Carly. Carly looked at Jonathan. Carly looked back to Owen.

He wondered what she wondered about, how much she’d heard or intuited, then he wondered that he gave any thought at all to what a kid might be thinking. Sometimes people surprised him, and sometimes cheesy restaurants had the best coffee. Strange.

“Keep an eye on him for me, Carly, will you?”