“You think you want to know things, but then you know them, and it’s too late. You didn’t want to know that. You didn’t want to know that at all,” the Secret Police’s press release reads. “This is one of those things you will wish you had never known.”

The statement goes on to say that memory is a tenuous human construct, and nothing matters in the Grand Scheme, so whatever.

In other news, a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase, was seen. I don’t remember anything about him or why this was news, but it had seemed important at the time. I wrote it down: “Say the important thing about the man in the tan jacket.” What was it? What was I supposed to say?

20

“It’s not a good idea, Josh.”

“Why?” His shouts were muffled behind his locked bedroom door.

“Because—”

In the space after the word because, Diane thought through what the next words could be.

Because he is a dangerous person? Maybe. Troy doesn’t seem to be a danger. But anyone could be a dangerous person.

Because he will only let you down? Probably. He had disappeared before, he could disappear again. He could also just be a terrible father.

Because it is complicated. More complicated than you can process with your young brain, she wanted to say.

Because she didn’t have a reason exactly but felt a storm on its way, a confluence of Troy’s reappearance and Josh’s interest and the disappearance of Evan, and she wanted to wrap herself around Josh and keep him from all of whatever was going to happen next.

“Because I said so,” Diane said.

There was no audible response.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Where are you going? It’s seven o’clock.”

“Out.”

“With who? With Don?”

They both took the expected tone and said their lines as if from a script, but the scene had gotten mixed up and reversed somehow. They both wanted to put it back the way it was supposed to be, but neither of them knew how to do that.

She was going out to try to find Troy again, perhaps make another visit to the movies. She needed to confront Troy now, before Josh did. Josh would inevitably find him, so it would be better if she could facilitate that on her own terms, rather than her son’s or, worse, Troy’s.

Also, given that she had hit a dead end in her search for Evan at work and with Dawn, the only place she could get any more information was at the hall of records, but citizens were not allowed to know where public records were kept. She figured they were somewhere in City Hall basement, but unless you had high-level clearance to get into the records offices, you would become stuck in the elaborate, tricky mazes designed to trap news reporters and nosy genealogists.