I said it again, and the words still felt inadequate. Bland and unable to rise to the occasion.

“Thanks,” Kyle said anyway.

I didn’t want to press him any further, but I felt I had no choice. So I asked, “Why exactly are you here? In Blake’s house?”

His head whipped toward me so fast I thought he’d hurt himself. “What are you? Friends with him? Obviously that’s why you’re here, nosing around.”

“We’re friends, yes.”

Kyle looked disappointed, as though his assessment of me as a decent guy plummeted once I mentioned being friends with Blake. I didn’t say it out loud, but that wouldn’t have been the first time in my life someone’s opinion of me dropped because of my association with Blake.

“Where is he?” Kyle asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m here. Same as you, I’m guessing.”

“No,” he said. “Not the same as you at all. You’re his friend, you say?”

My parents weren’t very religious, but they did send me to Sunday school a few times. I remembered Peter in the garden with the chance to admit he was friends with Jesus or face the wrath of the Romans. While Blake was no Jesus, there was something inside me that refused to deny my friend. No matter how much he deserved it.

“We’ve been friends a long time,” I said. “I’m worried about him.”

“You should be worried,” Kyle said. “He was such a jerk to Jennifer. He kept her around for his own reasons. He yanked her chain, breaking things off at a whim and leaving her high and dry. You have to wonder what kind of guy would do that to a woman. What else might he be capable of?”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

His certainty knocked me off my stride.

Here was a guy much closer to the situation than I was, a person who knew Jennifer and her relationship with Blake in ways I didn’t. He sounded like someone who had seen behind the curtain of these events and had formed harder, more durable opinions.

Since the police seemed to be barking up the same tree, it made it all seem bad for Blake.

Very, very bad.

“I admit Blake might know more than he’s let on,” I said. “But he’s never hurt anyone. Not like that.”

“So he has hurt people?”

“We’ve all hurt people, Kyle, haven’t we?”

I thought of the accident from college, the one I caused. Maggie and Emily Steiner.

If the memory of them ever slipped away, Dawn Steiner or Blake would be there to bring it back.