“Uh…okay,” I told her. “But Zach was with Bex last summer.”
“Not with me with me,” Bex clarified.
“Yeah,” I said, almost ashamed of where I’d allowed my mind to go just days before. “Of course. He was with your—”
“And not all summer,” Bex said, staring down at her hands.
“Bex,” I spoke slowly, surely, “tell me everything you know.”
In the living room, Townsend and Abby were arguing again, their voices floating through the wall; but the only words that mattered were Bex’s.
“After you left and school was out, your mom was going crazy, and Mr. Solomon was…sick. So my mom said Zach should come to London—that’d he’d be safe with us.” Bex shook her head slowly. “Everything was crazy. Everyone was crazy.”
“Bex, I know.”
“No,” Macey snapped. “You don’t. Remember when I ran away? Well, multiply that by about a thousand and then maybe you’ll start to understand.”
She was right, but that didn’t mean I had to say so.
“What does this have to do with Zach?”
“People go crazy in different ways,” Bex said with a shrug. “Liz took up baking—almost burned her parents’ house to the ground. But Zach…well, the two of you really are a lot alike, because Zach…ran away.”
“So…” I thought about the look in the old woman’s eyes, the words echoing in my mind: your young man. “So he might have found me.”
I know it sounds weak and all, but the truth is, I had to lie down. Maybe it was the lingering effects of being too thin and too banged up for my own good, but it was more like the words were too heavy for me.
“What does that mean?” I stared up at Bex. “What does it mean—that he found me and then…left me? Or I left him…Or—”
“He was only gone two weeks and then he came back,” Bex said, almost pleading with me not to jump to terrible conclusions.
“But maybe, in the meantime, he’d found me,” I said.
“No,” Macey said. “He didn’t.”
“You don’t know that,” I told her.
“No, but I know boys.” She exhaled a half-laugh. “And I know liars. And when school started, Zach was as in the dark about where you were and where you’d been as anyone.”
“We’ve got to call Mom,” I said. “We’ve got to call her and have her ask him where he went.”
“We did,” Bex said. There was a strange light in her eyes when she said, “He told us he went looking for you.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked, far too tired of secrets.
“Nothing,” Macey said, easing onto the mattress beside me. “There is absolutely nothing else you need to know.”
She looked totally convincing—sounded totally convincing. But I wasn’t convinced. Maybe it was the spy in me. Or maybe I just didn’t believe anything anymore.
Chapter Twenty-four
That night, even as I slept, I saw the city streets. They were emptier than I remembered, though. Too dark. Too cold. Something pulled me forward, down a path I didn’t know. And beneath it all, there was a word that kept washing over me, breaking against me like a wave.
Cammie.
Cammie.
Cammie.