Maggie crouched for a better look. Her round baby face was plastered with something disgusting. Mashed broccoli? Asparagus? It was a putrid shade of green. “Ick. What were you feeding me? Soylent green?”

“Peas.” Her mom sighed again, damply this time. “You used to love peas.”

“You don’t have to cry about it. I’ll start eating peas again, if you want.”

A wet laugh escaped Mom. She closed the album, rubbed her eyes, and sat back, resting her shoulder blades against the seat cushion of the armchair. “Your friends are nice.” Her palm smoothed the burgundy cover, and she matched Maggie’s nod with one of her own. “Even Linnie. I guess I wasn’t prepared to think so, knowing what I did about her.”

“But you don’t know her.” Maggie sat on the floor and picked up another album. Idly opening it, she admitted, “Neither do I.” Loving and neglectful, caring and careless, friendly and furious, brave and scared. “Linnie’s hard to understand.” What would she be like in two days, when they reached her hometown? They’d promised Sam they’d stop there to pick up the letter at Linnie’s old neighbor’s house. Or at least Caleb and Maggie had promised. Linnie hadn’t said a word about the destination. That, at least, was consistent in Linnie’s character: a steadfast resistance to looking ahead.

“You could say that about everyone,” Mom said, and reopened the album in her lap.

Maggie nodded. No one was ever one thing. Not even Matt Dawson. Those who’d been at the hearing for him and testified (football coach, an old teacher, his parents) had been tearful and incredulous: “Matt’s a terrific kid.” “Respectful, you know?” “He wouldn’t—couldn’t—do something like this. I just can’t believe it. I can’t picture him hurting anyone, least of all a girl.” As character witnesses, these people hadn’t been conspirators. It was just that the possibility of Matthew Dawson leading a drunken gang rape had been beyond their comprehension. And Matt Dawson had cried along with them, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. But eventually he had confessed. Then even that had been dismissed by his fans. A forced confession, they’d insisted. The result of coercion.

She shook off these dismal thoughts and concentrated on the page she’d opened to in the album, jarred when she realized she was looking at a photograph of her grandparents, taken at Thanksgiving. Grandma Heed, smiling at Dad, sat at one end of the dining room table. Opposite her, at the other end, sat Maggie’s grandfather, his expression dour. This was not unusual. Behind his back, Mom and Dad had regularly changed his nickname from Gramps to Grumpy. And though Maggie had gotten plenty of attention from her grandmother, even as a young child, she’d sensed that Grumpy Gramps didn’t care much for kids.