“I’m sorry about what happened,” I said.

He smiled then in a way that looked kindly and spiritual, but felt, in every way, the complete and total opposite. “Well,” he said, and that was all.

I waited for him to go on. To say all those things people do: it was no one’s fault, we all know how much you loved Cassie, blah, blah. But he stared at me instead. Like he was waiting not so much to hear whether I blamed myself, but to enjoy how much I did.

“Um, take care,” Rachel said finally, dismissing him.

But he just smiled at her. “It is both a tragedy and a gift that Cassie will be missed by so many.” He turned back to me. “Be sure to tell your dad that I’m sorry for his loss, too.”

Then he squeezed my arm in a way that should have been warm, but felt creepy. And what loss? My mom? He’d seen my dad so many times since then, hadn’t he?

“What a dick that guy is,” Rachel said when Vince had gone. “I know he lost his daughter and all, but I bet he was a dick way before that.”

“He’s a minister now,” I said. “Or something like that.”

“He can still be a jerk.”

“Is there anybody here that you do like?” I asked, even though I couldn’t argue with her assessment of Vince.

She smiled. “You.”

BY THE TIME my dad finally leaves—after much hemming and hawing and him saying that he’s worried about me, and me saying he doesn’t need to be, and lots and lots of details about where he’ll leave his itinerary—it is almost 9:40 a.m. I try Jasper again, but once again the call rings and rings before finally heading to voice mail.

My stomach has officially started to churn.

I move fast through the rest of what’s in the box, turning to the evidence bags. Luckily, there isn’t much that survived the fire, which is why we never received anything in the way of personal effects. Nothing my dad had wanted, anyway. The things in the evidence bags must have been thrown from the car when it hit the guardrail. A set of headphones I imagine tangled in a nearby tree. There’s one of my mom’s blue clogs, too. I always hated those shoes. I’d been trying to convince her to throw them out instead of getting them fixed again. The force it must have taken to rip the shoe off her foot and hurl it away from the car. What was she doing wearing clogs in the middle of winter anyway? I lift the shoe, only a tiny bit. But as soon as my hands are on it, I know it’s a mistake. Don’t touch the shoe. It will make you cry. When I drop it, there is an odd, hollow thump.