They resumed the ride back in the direction that had swallowed up Marcelline, and Jonathan after her. They hadn’t made it four miles past where they’d first set out before they found her car on the side of the road.

“Stop!” Carly cried. “Wait, stop!”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?” Carly twisted in her seat, ducking out of the seat belt to better see into Marcelline’s car as they drove past.

“Well, I don’t know. What do you think you’ll say to the cop who stops while we’re poking around an abandoned car?”

“What if she was in it?”

“She wasn’t. She’s with Jonathan.”

“You don’t know that. Please.” Carly was winding up to crying again. “Stop! Go back!”

“Listen to me. Calm down. She’s not in the car. She’s not in the hospital. I promise you, she’s with Jonathan.”

“She might not be. She might be hurt.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t hurt. Look, that wasn’t a crash. That was a swerve to a stop. The back right wheel was broken, she may have tagged something, maybe a curb, but the car wasn’t smashed in. There’s no reason to think she was banged up at all. But she was being followed. We know that. So, Jonathan picked her up. The question is whether she was happy or not to go with him.”

“You can’t know that’s what happened. You weren’t there. Maybe someone else stopped to help her. Maybe she got away.”

“And you don’t think we would have heard from her by now if any one of those other things had happened?”

That corked her right up. She wound herself back under the seat belt and chewed her fingernails. Owen watched Marcelline’s car disappear around a bend in the rearview mirror.

“Does your stepfather carry a gun?”

“What? No! I mean, I don’t think so.” Her shrinking confidence on this point dwindled, sputtered, then went out. “I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“Marcelline had one.”

“Well, maybe she got to it first. I still think she would have called by now.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“We still wait.”

But it was only for a few more minutes. The texts started rolling in.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Jonathan had rehearsed having the upper hand even before he’d ever once in his life had the upper hand. He’d done it since he was a little boy. Instead of getting songs stuck in his head, he looped elaborate scenes about his life, and the life he would have—detailed plays of his saying whatever he wanted to say, doing whatever he wanted to do, having whatever he wanted to have. Having everything, as a matter of fact.

All the practice had made him good within a range.