Owen waited at the curb. He didn’t like the worry of all she might get up to in there if she changed her mind, but he weighed it against the inescapable fact that he didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a teenage girl’s father, and he was too old to be her brother. People would stare.

Carly reappeared after a tense few minutes. She slid the festively wrapped rectangle into the back and plopped into the passenger seat as if it weren’t only the second time she’d gotten in beside him. She adjusted the air flow onto her face and petted the leather of the seat.

“All set?”

“Easy-peasy,” she said, but looked as if she might cry.

“What is it?”

“My mother must be freaking out.”

“So send her a text. Make something up. Tell her you’re at the movies.”

“Yeah, I might have thought of that if I had my phone anymore. This is bad. What if she calls the cops?”

Owen pulled into a parking space. “Do you know your mother’s phone number?”

“Yes, but she doesn’t have her phone. John does.”

“Is there someone else who can take her a message?”

“I guess Ada. She only lives two streets over.”

“Do you know this Ada’s number?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know your own phone number?”

“Ye-eess.”

“I know how to mask a text, spoof a number.”

Owen watched Carly fall lost into the sea of possibilities. She gasped. “Oh, wow. Will you show me how?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you would be an unstoppable menace. But I will send your mother a note so that she doesn’t think you’re dead.”

“I wouldn’t be an unstoppable menace.”

Owen squinted through the windshield. “If you could only see you like I see you. No. I’m not showing you how to do it.”

“You know I still have to make that call later. To tell whatsername what happened so that you can get whatever ‘laundry’ means in secret code.” Carly pierced him through, the cheeky point of it glittering in her eyes, trying to bring him around to meet up with her honesty.

He held his smirk down between his teeth. God, this fucking day. “I don’t like you.”

She buckled her seat belt. “I don’t think that’s true.”

They watched the clear streamers of heat waving on the rim of the rise in the road. Owen sent a text from Carly to Donna via Ada, saying Carly was sorry. That she was upset and keeping her phone off. That she was fine and safe and that she’d be home in a little while.

“I don’t want to sit here anymore,” she said. “Can we drive?”

“Okay.”

“Your car is pretty.”

“Yes, it is.”

•  •  •