“I never read them before tonight. I hadn’t even opened them. But last night, when I read that last one, about Jordan, I just…I need to know. What he’s talking about? Does he really know something about Jordan? Did Jordan tell him something?” She pauses, takes a ragged breath. “Look, you wouldn’t understand. The weekend before my brother died…I was an asshole to him. A total fucking asshole. He probably hated me. And then he was gone. We never made up. If David”—she chokes on the name—“knows something—anything—about what Jordan was thinking before he died…if it was something about me…I have to know.” Her hands are clenched into fists and her fingers are losing their color. She looks up at me with wide eyes full of sorrow, and I know that I’m going to help her, no matter how bad an idea I know this is. “Zach, why did he leave me alive?”

I take a deep breath, sensing that this is one of those moments I’ll remember forever, one of those moments that will stick in my brain, that will split my life in two. And then I ask:

“What do you want to me to do?”

Chapter Forty-five

The morning after I call Zach, we’re in the car heading to the one place I never would have thought I’d be going: the fucking Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles. I cannot believe this is my life. There is something very wrong with it.

Everything in me is balled into a tense knot: my stomach feels like it’s trying to escape my body and run down the freeway, back home.

After we decided to go last night, I googled the Twin Towers jail. It has the honor of being named one of the top ten worst prisons in the United States. All I know about jail and prison is from Orange Is the New Black, and I’m pretty sure the place we’re going is nothing like that.

It was surprisingly easy to make an appointment to see him. Scarily so. I guess as long as you’re on someone’s approved visitors list, they don’t care who you are. I read that there are eleven thousand inmates at the two jails downtown, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s that simple.

With every mile we drive, the knot in my stomach grows larger. Soon it’s going to swallow my entire body, and all that will remain will be a pulsing mass of anxiety. I haven’t heard from Lucy since our blowup Friday night. This is the longest we’ve gone without speaking in years. But I can’t think about it right now; if I do, I might implode. I can’t imagine my life without her.