She stares at me, her eyes wide. She does not know her son discovered this. She doesn’t realize the field is even now.
Her eyes drift behind her, to everything circling around us. I know what she sees. Slippery rocks, a raging river, a girl reeking of desperation. “You look so cold,” she says. “You shouldn’t be in that water, Jessa.” Except her words carry the weight of a threat.
But I stare into her eyes, hold her gaze. We are almost exactly the same size. “This time,” I say, “it wouldn’t be an accident.”
And I see the coiled anger come to the surface and then sink back down. I don’t believe she’s evil. I want to believe she is not a psychopath, or a killer of teenagers. She is, however, protecting something. Her son, yes, but also herself. And if I threaten that, really threaten it, I’m not entirely certain what she’ll do.
But neither of us will get the chance to find out. Because I hear my name. I hear him yelling it. And my heart flips, my body turns to the sound.
But at the last minute, just as I’m opening my mouth to call back—Max, I’m here—I feel the world begin to tip. As if I’m leaning too far, because she’s got me in a grip, and she’s pushing me back, holding me so I’m practically leaning over the river, close to the waterfall. “You let him leave,” she says, and the loss is agony, written across her face. And I think that maybe I am wrong, after all. That there is nothing more potent than the power to grasp for something just as you feel it slipping away from your grip. That it’s an impulse in all of us, to fight for the thing that we are losing, even if we’ve already lost.
She lets go.
And I fall.
—
It only takes me a moment to get my bearings, to think Just plant your feet down, like you did before. Except something’s wrong. The current keeps forcing me down. This is not just a moving current, but a violent one. The current from the waterfall churns the water around me, and though I poke my head through the surface, I cannot catch my breath.
I picture her on the shoreline, saying, as Max comes into view:
I got here, and she was gone.
I found her things.
Too long in the water.
She’s gone.
So I stop fighting so hard against what the current is trying to do. I let go. I let it take me. And after some time, I find my footing downstream, and am able to push my head above water, suck in a breath, just as the current knocks my feet out from under me again. I try once more, standing, and reaching the blade of Caleb’s knife to the shore, wedging it into the surrounding roots before I lose my balance. Locking myself in place as I grip onto a low branch with my other hand. I suck in a gulp of air, then turn to see the light in the corner of my eye.
It’s not only Max on the shore, now, beside Eve. He’s led some people my way. A few rangers, with radios, one lowering himself into the water already upstream, while Eve looks on.
I call Max’s name. Everyone freezes. And when the world starts up again, he’s running.
—
The first thing I feel, when I’m capable of feeling again, is the warmth of another, sitting beside me in the back of an ambulance. The first words I process, from the person sitting beside me, with his arms around me, trying to transfer more heat: “Somehow,” he says, “I knew you wouldn’t wait.”
They’re telling Max he has to leave the ambulance, but he isn’t having it, and eventually, they relent. The doors close.
When I’m sure no one is listening, I press my face close to his, and I tell him the secret. “I found him,” I say.
It’s the first Monday of winter break, and the doorbell rings. My parents are picking up Julian from the train station again, and I’m almost as excited to see him as they are.
But this doorbell is not them. I walk evenly down the steps, and peer through the peephole of the front door, and I’m not surprised to see him there.
I’ve left him a letter.
Rather, I’ve left Carlton Evers a letter, delivered through the lawyer of the trust.
I knew it would get to Caleb, eventually, when he came back for the money.
—
And so I’m not surprised when he shows back up, after weeks of rumors, standing on my front porch.
He looks, suddenly, like an adult. I see Mia in the car behind him. I’d heard he came back to his house, when his mother got arrested for the concealment of a body. Caleb said there were no other options, and maybe he thought that was true, but I saw another way. I took action.
I couldn’t live with someone else’s secrets like that. And I don’t think Eve would have let me live, knowing I held her secrets in my hands.
Caleb had told me about the cameras. About the fact that he was driving, yes, but I knew where they were heading. I knew they’d taken Sean’s car to sell, too, and that the cameras would show his mother following behind him. A sliver of evidence, to get the investigation moving. I didn’t know what would happen next. He said it was self-defense, but she still covered up a death.
I didn’t go to see him, when I heard he was back. I had said what needed to be said, done what needed to be done. I had already found what I’d been looking for.
So now he stands here, the car full of luggage, and I know he’s leaving for good this time.
“I came to apologize,” he says.
I run through the list of things he could apologize for: lying to me, leaving me—twice—letting me believe he was dead. “And to thank you. You were right. There was another way.”
“I told you there was. You needed to trust me.”
“You’re right,” he says. “I did. I do. I don’t know if you can understand this, but I had been betrayed by everyone who I trusted, and it spilled over to you. You didn’t deserve that. Or the things I said to you.”
I accept his apology, but his words linger. This lack of trust, filtering to the rest of his life. And look where it got us.
“What’s going to happen? To you?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I don’t know yet. But I’ve been talking to the lawyers about testifying. About deals. There are different possibilities.” They haven’t charged him with anything yet, so I had to hope there was a chance they would not.
I nod. There’s unfinished business, and my dad had told me this could take months, years, to play out. I heard, through my parents, that, since Caleb’s return with his father, they were adding to the list of his mother’s charges—charges of perjury, at the very least, from the case years ago. It would take time to resolve, I knew.
Police had been searching for Sean’s body in the Pine Barrens, but they’d yet to find anything, and his mother wasn’t talking.
For Caleb, it was just beginning. But this part wasn’t my story, anymore.
“Where are you going?” I ask, looking at the car beyond.
“With my dad,” he says.