“What?” I demanded, turning to my mother. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“We did find you, Cammie.” Mom looked down at the ground. She seemed worried and afraid and ashamed. “We were just a little too late.”
Chapter Twelve
Okay, to tell you the truth, I totally didn’t know what was weirder—that someone knew something about my summer, or that, come Monday morning, I was crammed into a school van with my mother, my aunt, my new therapist, my roommates…and Zach.
I could hear him talking with Bex in the third row of the van, where the two of them sat next to Dr. Steve. I didn’t look at them or speak. I kept my eyes glued to the road ahead. The only thing that broke my trance was when my mother would turn from the front passenger seat and glance back at me, almost involuntarily, as if to make sure that I was still there.
“Now, Zachary, how is that study schedule I designed for you?” Dr. Steve asked about an hour into the journey.
“Good,” was Zach’s reply.
“And your new courses…anything there I should know about?” Dr. Steve went on.
“Everything’s fine,” Zach said, but he didn’t sound fine at all.
We drove through the countryside, along unfamiliar winding roads, and I didn’t let myself think about the classes I was missing (six) or the number of tests that were being added to the ones I already had to make up (two). I wasn’t at all concerned about the facts that my favorite jeans were now really big and my best friends were still pretty hostile. No, I didn’t let myself think about that.
Instead, I watched the road and the landmarks, looked at every gas station and café as if that would be the sight that would spring the trap that was my memory and put everything back the way it was supposed to be.
And yet we kept driving in circles. Hours passed and we kept backtracking and stopping for no reason—all the standard vehicular antisurveillance techniques—until, after what seemed like forever, the van finally slowed and turned onto a narrow lane that was all but invisible in the dense forest, a path hidden beneath a thick layer of falling leaves.
Mom shifted in her seat and looked at me. “You know where we are?” she asked, and I nodded.
“It’s coming back?” Liz said, her eyes bright. “See, I knew it would come back if we just had patience and faith, and now it’s—”
“It’s not back, Liz,” Macey told her just as the van pulled out of the forest and into a large clearing. It was almost noon, and the sun glistened off a lake—its water as smooth as glass under the clear blue sky. Only the sounds of the birds that filled the woods broke the stillness. It was as if that place, too, were sleeping, waiting for its owner to wake up.
“It’s Mr. Solomon’s cabin,” I said.
“Well, it’s certainly…” Dr. Steve struggled for words. “Rustic.”
Crawling out of the van, Liz held one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun, and I stepped out beside her. It felt good to stretch. Everything was cooler, fresher there. I waited for some memory to come rushing back and slap me across my senses—send the whole summer back in a blur—but nothing came.
All I felt was chilly air and warm sun and the sense that Summer Me was still hiding, lurking, like the shadows out there in those woods.
“I was here?” I said, turning to my mother and my aunt.
Dark sunglasses covered their eyes, and they didn’t look like my family—they looked like agents who needed answers if they were ever going to see the other side of this particular mission.
Abby pushed her glasses onto the top of her head and studied me. “When we discovered you were gone, we notified all the key people, but we couldn’t look for you like we normally would without alerting the Circle that you were missing. From an operational standpoint, that was the hardest part.”
I didn’t want to consider what the mother and aunt standpoints might have looked like.
“We had to keep it quiet,” Mom went on. “We couldn’t let them know you were in the wind. Alone.”
I blinked, told myself it was the glare and not the words that were causing my eyes to water.
“But we knew how you were trained,” Abby went on. “And we had an idea of what resources you had with you, and…”
“We knew you,” Liz finished, smiling.
Bex sounded significantly less chipper when she pushed past me. “Or we thought we did.”
Macey shrugged. “We didn’t know where you were, Cammie,” she said, stepping away from the van. “But this seemed as good a place as any to run.”
It was, after all, where she had run. I smiled, knowing that at least I was in good company.