Friday, 7:01 p.m.
Grace had left 466 days too soon.
From her first day of high school, Grace kept a calendar on her desk counting down to graduation. Every few weeks, she would tear out one of the pages and leave it on Leyna’s pillow.
1,300 days
1,115 days
895 days
Below the number, she would draw a silly face, tape a leaf she’d found in the woods, or share a song lyric or a quote from one of Leyna’s favorite books. That was her way of softening the blow to come—750 days until I’m gone.
Leyna should’ve had 466 more days with her sister at home. Instead, she’d been without Grace for nearly 6,000.
She was thinking about that, stress-eating a pint of peanut-butter-cup ice cream in front of her laptop, when her phone started buzzing again.
Private caller.
What if it really was a job? She’d already blown through a third of the money in her checking account to buy office supplies and groceries. But it wasn’t thoughts of replenishing those funds that compelled her to set down the ice cream and pick up the phone. It was thoughts of the missing girl and what it might mean for Grace.
Leyna stabbed the screen to connect. She heard breathing first, and then a familiar voice, low and deeper than she remembered.
“Hey, Leyna.”
Not a potential employer or someone calling about the missing girl.
Dominic Duran.
In the pause that followed, she tried to picture Dominic’s face, but the only image she could conjure belonged to the past. It had been a decade since they’d spoken, and she wondered if the call meant he’d finally forgiven her.
“Hi, Dom.” She said it as if talking to him were the most natural thing in the world and there weren’t a walnut-size lump in her throat.
It had been Grace, Adam, and Dominic for years, until Grace settled on Adam, and Dominic left for college. Leyna was the stray that always trailed them, years younger but tolerated. And sometimes when it was just her and Grace, they would hike the forest, off the trails, while Grace shared dreams of being a wildlife photographer or traveling to the Bamboo Grove in Kyoto. The woods near home had been theirs for a while. Until Grace turned sixteen, and her moods had darkened, her breath started smelling of mints or stolen alcohol, and she began spending more time alone with Adam. In the last year Grace was home, with Dominic away at the University of Nevada, Leyna was tolerated less, and when she followed, she was usually relegated to the Durans’ kitchen to help Aunt Olivia assemble charcuterie boards or brew sun tea.
Looking back, Leyna couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment her sister stopped having time for her, but it had closely followed Adam’s transformation from cocky jerk to full-blown asshole. Not that anyone but Leyna seemed to have noticed the transformation. And even Leyna hadn’t realized how dangerous assholes could be.
Later, after Grace and Adam disappeared, having moms who hated each other made it difficult for Leyna and Dominic to maintain a friendship, but it was Leyna herself who struck the killing blow, shortly before her nineteenth birthday. She only wished she’d had the foresight to ruin everything before they’d started what could have been something great.
The sound of Dominic’s voice immediately brought back the scent of cedar and a warmth to her cheeks. Leyna sat on the coffee table and knocked over an empty ice cream carton. The spoon inside slipped out and rattled on the fake wood.
“What’s up?” The lump in her throat hardened, threatening to choke her.
He seemed unaware of her inability to breathe.
“How’ve you been?” he asked.
I’ve been fired, she thought but didn’t say. And I still can’t let Grace go.
In the two months they’d been together as a couple, they could spend an hour debating which was the best superpower—time travel, obviously—or dissecting a passage in a book. How was she expected to distill a decade of life into a couple of sentences?
“I’m fine.” Though he couldn’t see her, Leyna smoothed her hair and took stock of the pajamas she still wore. What would she have done if he’d shown up at her door instead of calling?
But no, Dominic would never do that. Not after how things had ended.
“And how’re you, Dom?” She said his name again just to feel it on her tongue, as if she could force a connection that had long ago been severed.
His response came back equally awkward. “I’m good.” Even with all the years lost between them, she recognized the lie, but she had no place asking about it. “Assume you heard about the missing girl?”
So it’s someone calling about Ellie after all.
“Yeah, I’ve heard,” she said. Or tried to say. The words came out garbled. Damn lump. Leyna went to the kitchen and got a glass from the cupboard. She filled it with water from the tap and drank until her throat cleared.
“I’ve been working at this nonprofit in Quincy that focuses on underserved youth and their families. Counseling, classes, tutoring. Connecting them to other resources if needed.”
That sounded like a career he’d have chosen. Dominic’s grief had always been more productive than hers. Leyna set the glass in the sink and returned to perch on the coffee table. She was grateful he didn’t ask what she was doing with her life.
When the silence grew too heavy, he said, “Any chance I could convince you to come home?”
She leaned back, surprised. Never. Not even for you. “It’s not home.”
“Okay, then, back to Ridgepoint.”
“They wouldn’t want me there.” Why do you want me there? She’d learned that you didn’t make many friends vilifying a golden child, especially one still missing.
On the other end of the connection, Dominic exhaled, his weariness as thick as the air in her apartment. “The missing girl was here.”
“Plumas County?”
“The neighborhood.”
She braced herself on the edge of the coffee table, her hand bumping the discarded ice cream spoon. She might’ve gone to the freezer for another pint to self-medicate if she’d thought her legs could carry her.
“When?”
“Midday Thursday, right before she showed up at the youth center where I work.”
“What time was that?”
“A little after one p.m.”
Leyna did some quick math. The campground was just over an hour away. So what had Ellie been doing in the hours between her visit to Quincy and her disappearance?
“I met Ellie,” Leyna said. “She came to the restaurant.”
“I know.”
Her grip on the coffee table tightened, and the fake wood bit into her palm. It reminded her of the glass-petaled roses from Ellie’s bracelet. “How do you know?”
Dominic didn’t answer that, and when he spoke, his voice was low in his throat. “It’s a lot to ask, but it would be better if we talked face to face.”
If it had been anyone else, she would’ve disconnected at that moment. But because it was Dominic, she hesitated.
This won’t go well, she thought. But if Adam was involved, she needed to know. Leyna couldn’t fail her sister a second time.
“If you’ve heard about her, you know she disappeared from a campground. Like Grace.”
“That’s what people say, anyway.”
He sighed, but there was little fight in it. “Not this again.”
Several weeks after Grace and Adam disappeared, a caller to the hotline Dominic and Adam’s mom set up had claimed they’d seen the teens in a car along the North Fork Feather River at a campground on Caribou Road. According to the witness, a boy who looked like Adam had been driving, a girl in the seat beside him. A girl with a strawberry-blond ponytail who was wearing a blue blouse, the same blouse Grace had been wearing the night she disappeared. The theory was, the teens had been camping in the area. By the time the police arrived—somewhat reluctantly, since runaways weren’t a priority—the teens were gone. If they’d ever been there. Leyna had her reasons to doubt her sister and Adam had ever camped along the Feather River.
Over the years, there were a few more sightings of Adam, but none of them panned out, and no callers ever again mentioned Grace. After the reports about the teens on Caribou Road, Grace wasn’t seen again—except by her sister in the faces of strangers.
In the face of Ellie, a sixteen-year-old girl now missing.
Finally, Leyna said, “I’ll come.”
She agreed as if it were a decision she’d just reached, but it had been made the moment Dominic mentioned Ellie’s visit to Plumas County. At the least, she could gather Grace’s Polaroids. New photos might spur new ideas.
Then there was the question that nagged, always nagged—what if Adam was back?
Leyna’s gaze landed again on the sheet of white paper stuck to her wall with the reference to Caribou Road. She’d never heard the recording of the anonymous call that had driven attention to the campground eighty minutes to the northwest, but she’d memorized the details from the transcript.
Pretty girl. Reddish-blond ponytail. Light blue blouse.
Leyna would’ve put more stock in the tip if she hadn’t known that Grace wasn’t wearing the blue blouse when she left. She’d changed into a black one because of the blood on one sleeve.