“Well, you know my dad was there for years. I was already interning by senior year. Then I started loading trucks. Way fancier than it sounds. My cousin Byron had a buddy over there…kinda took me under his wing—and I’ve been moving up ever since.” He stirs his coffee carefully, just the way Misha did, adding sugars one by one. “Optimal really saved my dad back when he left the carpenters union. I’m not sure what he would’ve done. I never forgot that. It saved his life. Men need good work.”
“Women, too,” I say, without missing a beat.
“Women, too, of course.” It’s hard to stay annoyed when he smiles like that.
“Optimal has done a lot of good for the town,” I say carefully. “We’re just here to make sure they haven’t done bad.”
He scoffs. “Gallagher’s all fired up, I hear.” When the waitress arrives with the food, he pretends not to notice how she stares at him. “Remember the time he shot Grant Haimes? Got him in the knee. He had to drop varsity.” He shakes his head. “?‘Goddamn ky-oats!’?” He does a decent imitation of old man Gallagher.
“I thought he nicked his ear. Grant, I mean.”
Brent shrugs, like it’s a minor detail. “Look. I’m telling you this because I actually give a shit. My grandpa was a farmer, and my dad loved absolutely nothing besides his .44 and his fishing rod. No one cares more about Barrens than I do.” He shakes his head, picks over his omelet. “Gallagher’s an anarchist looking for a reason. A conspiracy theorist. He’ll take potshots at anything—literally. But he’s misfired big this time. Optimal’s clean. We’ve had plenty of audits and passed them all. Flying colors.”
“But Optimal did settle a case—” I begin.
He interrupts me. “That was back in Tennessee.”
I don’t blink. “They’ve had plenty of bad press. Rumors of violations across the board—corruption, getting in bed with local politicians, paying people to look the other way.”
“Bad press isn’t a legal statute,” he says. “And rumors aren’t evidence. Every company has bad press, Abby, and you know it.” It’s a deft redirection, and he might actually believe it.
I decide to go all in—if we’re going to remove the weeds, might as well get down to the roots. “I’ve been looking back at the Mitchell case.” I watch his reaction carefully, but he barely blinks. “You were with Kaycee back then. You must have an opinion.”
“Opinion.” He repeats the word as if I’ve just asked him for money. “I don’t have an opinion. They made it up. It was typical Kaycee: act first, think never. She was so desperate for attention. I felt bad for her.”
I don’t like how easy it was for Kaycee to slip away, and how willingly everyone in Barrens let her go—even if she was lying. Especially if she was lying.
“Have you talked to her?” I ask.
“No. She didn’t even tell me she was leaving. I had no idea.”
“So you didn’t talk to her at all after she left?” Brent and Kaycee were together for nearly two years, which in high school is an eternity. And yet when she left, it was as if she stepped out of her old life completely, like shrugging out of a coat.
“Misha talked to her, once or twice,” he says vaguely. His smile, this time, is very thin. “She made it obvious that her goal was to avoid speaking to any of us.”
“Didn’t she say why?” I ask. “I never understood what she was after. Why did she lie about being sick?”
He shakes his head and his voice turns unexpectedly hard. “I thought you were here to look at Optimal. Don’t tell me you’re a detective, too.”
“She was Senior Queen. She painted her whole body for graduation.” I remember our last day of school seeing a comet-streak of paint left by her hand against the wall when she stumbled. Even sick, she had to be painted and worshipped. “She didn’t seem like she was on the verge of running away.”
He folds his napkin carefully. When he looks up, he seems exhausted. “Everything she did was an act. Not just the getting sick but…other things, too.” He stares into the distance. “I don’t think she ever said a single thing that wasn’t a lie.”
I think of the way she looked at me, the day I found Chestnut in the woods and knew what Kaycee had done to him. That’s sick, she’d said, lifting her chin, as if I were the rotten thing. How could you even think something as sick as that?
I think of the day years later, when I found her hugging a toilet seat, with blood unspooling in the water behind her. What’s happening to me? Truly afraid. I would have sworn it.
Brent clears his throat and leans back. “You want to look for the real violations around here? Check out the old construction, not the new. Can you believe the high school was basically crawling in asbestos when we were there? Optimal wanted to donate a new gym and convert the old into an auditorium, but abatement was half a million dollars. Made more sense to build out the new community center instead.”
“Asbestos isn’t what we’re looking for,” I say.
“I’m just saying, it’s the old Barrens that’s screwed up.” Brent holds up his hands as if in surrender. “Optimal turned this town around. Gallagher is just angry his way of life is going down the tubes. He wants someone to blame.”
Brent O’Connell is certainly good at what he does: he’s a natural-born salesman.
“You might be right,” I say. I keep my voice light, casual. “Or you might be wrong. That’s why I’m here. To figure out which.”
“And I thought you just wanted to see me,” Brent teases. “Just do me a favor and don’t let Gallagher take off an ear—you’re too pretty for that.”
Ten years ago I would have died if he said I was pretty; now I’m surprised to find that it irritates me.
“I’m from here too, remember,” I say. “I know how to shoot back.”
The bill comes. Brent pulls out his card, but I get to it first. “On me. Please. For taking up your time.”
“You’ll have to let me make it up to you,” Brent says, just as the first rain drums against the window. “Will you?”
It takes me a second to understand that he’s asking me on a date. “I’m not sure—” I start to say, but he cuts me off.
“Please, Abby. It’s really nice to see you again.” He sounds like he means it. I was prepared for deflections. Prepared, even, for his charm. But the apology, the compliments, the flirting, and now this…
Memories of last night do a quick-shuffle through my head: Condor’s smile, the way he drums his thigh when he’s thinking, his hands, brown from the sun, pulling me closer to him. Brent’s hands are pale and well kept. I realize the difference between Condor and Brent. With Condor, the person I don’t trust is myself.
“All right, screw it,” I say. Brent O’Connell, the Golden Child, football quarterback, hometown hero, wants to take me on a date. “Sure. Why not.”
Brent smiles. “Welcome home, Abby Williams.”
Chapter Eleven