“You want to talk right here?” he asked.

An unwanted truth exploded out from under my careful compression. “I’m not sure I want to talk at all.”

After the police found Nick hiding behind the dumpster of an apartment complex nearby, they brought him into the station for questioning. I was already there, bloodstained and exhausted, sitting on a bench with Aidy’s arm wrapped around me. Our parents like bookends, terrified of the weight they were expected to support, on either side of us. Nick looked right at me, his eyes even wilder than when he left me lying on the floor of the shed near the scene of the crime. He didn’t say a word. That’s pretty much how it went the day after that. And the next. And the next. And so on.

Until year five.

I’d long since decided it was his job to open the lines of communication again. But something about the extra energy in the air made it so I could be both the first to draw and the winner of the showdown. I set down my plate with calculated carelessness, like nothing was all that important to me. “What did you want to say, anyway?” I asked, trying to fold him into someone small and insignificant. Someone whose presence I could discard as soon as our conversation ended.

He dropped his voice a few decibels, almost as a challenge. You think you can hear over the music? You’ll have to get so close to me you breathe in my peppermint gum. “Marley is everywhere,” he said. He reached across the dessert table to grab my hand. “Please, Ollie.”

No one called me that anymore. I was Olivia the brave, sixteen and capable. Not Ollie the brat, eleven and scared.

“I really can’t talk here,” he continued. “I don’t want to yell.”

Our sweaty palms got stuck in the clasped position. And I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. I hated myself for my severe lack of minding. Even more for letting the hand-holding be accompanied by walking. The blare of the music faded to a low thrum as we reached a hollowed alcove between twin cedars behind City Hall.

As if we traveled time in the distance between the building and the trees, we became like the little kids we once were, watching our old neighborhood friends from a place out of their reach. The tent was still in plain view, stark white against the blackened night around us. Soft string lights lined its perimeter, casting a dreamy glow on Aidy and Harrison making small talk with the Campbell twins, Bigs and Teeny.