“Where is she?” Rhys finally asks.

“I took her to Ms. Yee’s room,” he says. “She’s there.”

My eyes drift to Grace’s mat. Where she should be. Some of her things are still scattered around. The clothes she wore yesterday. Rhys asks if we can see her and Trace tells us no. He crosses the room to Grace’s mat. He picks up her sweater and buries his face in it. He starts to cry and the material can’t muffle the sound. We sit there and watch him uselessly until he raises his head.

“This is real, isn’t it? That happened.” And then he calls her name. “Grace? I—”

There is no answer.

He stares blankly at nothing and then he grabs her blanket, her pillow, and walks out of the auditorium. The air is too heavy to breathe. I can’t breathe. I get to my feet and I leave and I walk down the hall, my hand against the wall to steady myself because the world is moving, it’s moving under my feet until I finally have to stop and just sit on the floor. I don’t know how long I’m there before Rhys is beside me, helping me stand.

We walk back to the auditorium together.

There is a window in the basement we never barricaded.

This window is at the back of the school, facing the athletic field. It’s close to the ground and semi-concealed by boxwood. That’s how Baxter got in. It would be a forgivable oversight except as soon as Cary tells us about it, we all see it in our heads and it is the most painful kind of realization. The next stupid thing: shelves were placed in front of that window, a barricade. Baxter put them there the first time and then fought them down the second but don’t worry, Cary tells us, nothing else found its way in after Baxter came, after Grace died.

We checked that basement and we looked at those shelves.

“It wasn’t obvious,” Rhys says, like that should make it okay that we looked at those shelves and never considered the possibility of a window behind them. It actually makes it worse. We all knew Baxter was lying about forgetting, he wanted to use it as leverage so why wouldn’t he hide it from us? Why wouldn’t we look for something hidden?

“Where is he?” Rhys asks. “Where did you put his body?”

“He’s in the basement.” Cary stares at his hands and then he shakes his head. “I can’t believe he came back just to do that.”

“We sent him outside to die,” Rhys says. “Why can’t you?”

“Someone should check on him,” Harrison says. “Trace, I mean.”

“You do it,” Cary tells him. “You’re closer to him than we are.”

Harrison’s eyes widen. “I don’t want to—I don’t want to see her—”