She’d wasted a lot of time searching for Celine, worried Celine had gotten lost or hurt, but it seemed she might have actually taken Mira’s advice and run off. While relieved, she wished Celine had told her she was unhappy. Last night, Mira had given her an out. All she had to say was the truth—that she’d changed her mind, that she wanted to end it, and needed the help of her friend. Celine could have told her but chose not to, and Mira had to admit she felt a little betrayed by this revelation. Celine had gone through so much effort that Mira wondered what the point of it had been if this was supposed to be the outcome. You have to be here for my wedding, you just have to come, Celine had pleaded on the phone, guilting her with their past so she would say yes. I want my best friend, she’d said, but when it came to it, she couldn’t tell her the one thing that might have given credence to her words.

Celine’s intentions had been a sham, Mira reasoned, but hadn’t Mira’s own been as well? She stared at Jesse and had to face the fact that she was here for him, had come for the possibility of him.

“What were you running from?” he asked. “Was someone following you?”

“No,” Mira told him, and the image of the men returned. Downtrodden frames fixed on the burden of their task. They’d had no choice; the expressions on their faces made that clear. She’d seen the same look many times. The students at her school were filled with the same resigned anguish for a system designed to break them before they’d barely begun their lives.

“I went to look for Celine and I got lost. I found this group of men digging this large hole, like some sort of mass grave. It was so big. They had to have been digging for hours. Another man stood watching and yelling orders at them all. After a while he told them to stop and the men carried over these large sacks. I think bodies were in the sacks. It looked so real, but it couldn’t have been. Could it? No, that’s ridiculous. It must have been another reenactment.”

“There wasn’t supposed to be any reenactments today, or least not any before the wedding, but now that’s not happening, I don’t know.”

“A rehearsal for one maybe?”

“Maybe,” Jesse said. He was calm, relieved almost, as if he’d been expecting to hear what Mira had told him. His face scrunched up as he turned back to the woods. “Do you think you could show me where this was?” he asked.