Teeny looked at me as if I’d failed an un-failable test. The shame I felt rivaled anything I’d ever experienced with my parents. This was true disappointment. Letting down the people who included me in their life by choice, not genetic obligation.

“Do either of you have Nick’s number?” I asked.

“Do you?” Teeny let that rhetorical question sit. “First, you were lost, now everybody’s lost except for you. The Adventure’s about as successful as it usually is, huh?”

The Adventure had deteriorated with such rapidity that in trying to figure out when the downfall began, all my memories seemed clouded with doom. I reminded myself I was the only one with Marley’s journal. I was the only one with fingers to point at people who may have hurt her. I could still get ahead of this, and the outcome would still be worth the price being paid. It had to be.

Bigs pulled into Cadence Park’s parking lot. In the distance, Ruby stood at the concession stand over by the park district. The girl who was usually behind the counter was out front, helping Ruby clean herself up. The physical tenderness between the two of them told me more than Ruby had in quite some time. I took in the situation with a different kind of curiosity. Last we spoke of concession-stand girl, Ruby decided it wasn’t worth it to try and pursue her.

Her Marley letter was right. Ruby could keep secrets locked inside of her.

I never thought she kept them from me.

A sudden, flaming embarrassment over how I’d made her worry burned through me. I conjured up an image of her talking to concession-stand girl in between phone calls to Teeny. In my imagined scenario, Ruby was complaining about my shortcomings, thinking to herself, Finally, a person I can confide in about Olivia.

When she saw me get out of the car, she ran over. “Why were you so worried?” I found myself asking once she reached me. If no one else had returned, why was it me she sent Teeny and Bigs to find on the streets?

“I had this terrible feeling you’d gotten hurt,” she told me as she rested her head on my neck. She pulled back to look at my face. “Looks like I was right.”

There would be nights I felt scared—of the dark, of the future, of the past, of nothing in particular—and my usually useless cell phone would ring, Ruby’s gravelly voice on the other end, telling me she’d been thinking of me.

“What happened?” she asked. “Where’s Harrison?”

“I left him,” I told her. It was a retaliation best suited to the situation building in my head. Scare her off. Let there be no more secrets for her to tell someone else. Let there be no more things for anyone to misinterpret.