“I knew if I could just talk to you,” Nick whispered. “I was so afraid to talk to you.”

I stared at the ground. Don’t, don’t, don’t, I chanted, willing Nick to stop trying to discuss it. You cannot break what is already broken. You can only make it harder to reassemble.

“How’d you know she had that drawer?” he asked.

I looked at Marley’s belongings from the drawer, scattered around me like a salt circle. “The Adventure,” was all I said. I opened up the notebook I’d carried with me on our run and pushed the pages of it through my fingers like a flipbook. One contained sloppy writing that looked as if it had been scribbled with the wrong hand.

Everything is Something.

I flipped the pages once more. Some sheets were ripped out. Some had imprints of words once written on the pages above. The second-to-last sheet had a single sentence in neat block letters.

THE TOWN HOLDS THE ANSWERS.

It’s time to get everyone together, I thought to myself.

Nick read over my shoulder. His breath was warm behind my ear. Steady. “We can’t do this alone,” he said. It was like he was inside my thoughts.

Do what? I wanted to ask, but it was futile. I knew what he meant. No Marley adventure was ever complete without all the kids of Albany Lane. It surprised me he would come to that conclusion so quickly. And that he would want to see everyone else after we’d all shut him out for five years. I had to remind myself I didn’t know him anymore. That he was a wild card who seemed to be reading my mind, and that shouldn’t be as comforting as it felt.

“I’ll call Ruby,” I told him. I should’ve resisted involving everyone so quickly, but it would’ve been too easy. I was done with easy. We’d already started. We had to see it through.

Ruby would spread the word to the rest. She would make them come.

Wordlessly, Nick collected the folder, and I the notebook and the box. We didn’t look over any of it. It wasn’t yet time. Instead, we tucked everything into our old safe spot inside the sewage tunnel, like the old days. Still papering the circumference of its entrance were some of our group’s pictures and plans, the details of which had faded long before we returned to remember their existence. Nick touched them anyway, feeling for what he could no longer see.

We walked up the bowl and over to the swings. I made quick work of my call to Ruby. “Tell them it’s about Marley and it’s urgent,” I said. Details would bog everything down.

“I’m on it,” she told me, never requiring much context before diving headfirst into action.