Olive was determined to work quickly, to hurry up and get her room taken apart so they could put it back together. It was taking forever. They’d had to put her room on hold while they tore out the bathroom wall and redid the plumbing, which had begun to leak. Then her dad decided they really needed to paint the living room, and they’d gotten two coats done before he announced that the color was all wrong and Mama wouldn’t like it at all, so they’d tried a paler shade of blue, which he said wasn’t right, either. Olive put her foot down, insisting that they had to leave the living room and go back to working on her bedroom. If her dad wouldn’t help, and just abandoned the work like he had with so many other rooms before they were done, she’d finish it herself. She’d been camping out on the lumpy living room couch since before school ended and needed the sanctuary of her own room back. She could live inside a house that was a construction zone if she just had one finished place to take refuge in, one room where everything was in its place. An eye in the center of the storm.

“What’s up, Ollie?”

“I’ve been thinking. You know, about—” She hesitated, not sure she could go on. Knowing this was the one subject she wasn’t supposed to bring up, the thing that hurt her father the most. But she had to. She needed to know. “About Mom. About how things were just before she left.”

He clenched his jaw. He did not wear a mask when he worked, so she could see the muscles working under his taut, unshaven skin that was now coated with a thin layer of plaster dust. He looked like a ghost.

“Yeah?” he said, holding the sledgehammer, ready to swing again, but waiting now.

“I remember how she was gone a lot. Did she ever tell you where she was going, who she was spending time with?”

“No, Ollie, she didn’t. And when she did tell me, it was real vague. ‘Out with Riley’ or ‘friends,’ that sort of thing.” He paused. “Part of me knew she was lying. But I didn’t want to face the truth.”

“What truth is that, Dad?”

He scowled, shook his head. He wasn’t going to say it out loud.

“But what if that wasn’t the truth? What if that was all just rumors?”

“Drop it,” he said.

“But, Dad, what if that’s not what happened? What if she—”