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“If you say so. But that’s not the vibe I’m getting from these texts.”

There was a shuffle, and then Mickey made a sound somewhere between a yelp and a gag.

“Let me see that,” Sean said.

“Absolutely not,” Mickey answered. “Gross.”

There came a slap, a squeal, and a thud, and then the phone was in Sean’s hand.

“No fucking way,” he said.

Silas noticed from his son a tone he hadn’t heard in a long time. Determination, protection. He sounded like Philip. Silas swallowed the thought down and stayed quiet, his search forgotten. The water slapped the concrete of the dock with each passing boat’s wake, splashing over the empty boat lift below.

“You are not going over there alone. I’ll tell Mom if I have to.”

“Mom won’t care; she loves the Watersons.”

“She’ll care if she reads these.”

“It’s my phone, narc,” Ruth said. “That’s theft, or something.”

Silas waited for Ruth to tell them about that morning at the clearing. The new pit. But she didn’t, and he found that he liked it, to share a secret with her.

“Come on, Mick! This could be your chance with you-know-who.”

“Ruth!”

Silas remembered a night years back when the kids played MASH on the front porch, a rare moment in which Sean was still willing to indulge Mickey in “girl games.” Mickey named one of the Waterson boys for the “marry” category, and Sean made kissing noises every time the boy came within a twenty-foot radius for the rest of the summer. Mickey had to fight not to cry every time.

“He doesn’t know who I’m talking about!”

“There’s only two of them,” Sean shot back. “But I’d rather not know any of it.”

“Then just pretend you don’t,” Ruth said.

Silas couldn’t see it, but he could sense something happening between two of the three of them, the two who came from him. Some kind of exchange built into their shared blood or memory. He could feel the pull of it, like his cells were being tugged.

“No can do,” Sean said, after a minute. “I’m not letting you guys go there alone. I like Cody and Josh; they’re cool to play video games with or whatever. But I wouldn’t trust them alone with my sister.” He paused. “They can have you, though.”

“Sean!” Mickey said, followed by a slapping sound.

“How about a compromise?” Ruth asked sweetly. “We can all go. I’m sure the boys would rather Sean come than none of us. How’s that?”

“Great, I love being pity-invited to my friends’ house so they can try to defile—”

“So it’s settled, then.”

Silas heard the tapping of nails on a phone screen and the swoosh of a sent message.

“Don’t be such a prude, Sean. Mickey is her own person, you know. You’re not her dad, or her husband. If she wants to get down and dirty with—”

“Gross, gross, gross,” Sean said, pushing back until Silas could almost touch the hairs on his head through the slats of the wall.

“I don’t even,” Mickey said quietly, hardly defiant.

Silas felt his own pulse in his throat. Mickey was barely fourteen. To think those arms, that face . . . he shook his head to stop it.

“Ooh, Mick, did you bring down that Cosmo? The one with the best summer hairstyles? I think that half-up braid would look sooo good on you tonight.”

Mickey jumped up, seemingly as uncomfortable with this conversation as everyone else. Everyone but Ruth.

“I’ll go get it!”

Silas froze in the shadow as Mickey skipped past the boathouse door, her legs still long and spindly the way they had been her whole life. Prone to scabs that she picked until her sheets were mottled with blood, and covered in white-blond down like the softest kind of flightless bird.

She missed him by inches.





PEYOTE





“YOU CAN’T THINK I’M stupid enough to hide your results in my desk, even if I did figure out how to lock it.”

“Yeah, how did you—” I started, but then I stopped. “No, we’re still talking about your thing.”

I managed to get to my feet and face the hallway, where her wet footsteps left dark patches in the carpet that I knew would never fully dry. It’s all carpet everywhere in Hell.

I listened as she pulled something off a hanger, heard the jagged slide of fabric against damp, hot skin. The snap of elastic.

“Okay, all dressed,” she said. “Your innocence remains intact.”

The wetness from her wounds left pockmarks that clung to her T-shirt, as if it had been caught between tiny frothing jaws. An ancient urge rose within me to touch them, to tend to them. I had to clench my hands into fists.

“I’m not a prude,” I said. “You’re just really fucking gross.”

“Come on, Pey. You must’ve read my file by now. What was it the General always said at the end of an exercise?”

Even there in her dank little room, pajamas sticky with her own body’s sap and owing me information, Cal managed to make me feel like the chump.

“Maybe I’m trusting you,” I said, both of us knowing full well I would be finishing her file the minute I got home.