say she’s running late, or to fiddle with Spotify, or to pass a snack back to the kids. One second, and, if another car suddenly comes from the side, there’s an accident.”
“Grace had more than a second,” said one of several men with us then. “It took time for Chris to plan this.”
“If he did it,” I argued, “because we don’t know for sure. Hacking isn’t hard. There are other kids in town who could have done it and made it look like it was Chris. We haven’t seen evidence, and I know that’s for the trial”—I interrupted myself, needing to preclude that particular point—“but even if it was Chris, he’s fifteen, for God’s sake, which in some countries is old enough to be independent and leave home and even have kids, and as for Grace, she’s done good for lots of us, so hasn’t she earned the benefit of the doubt? And besides,” I ranted on, “maybe we shouldn’t be talking about her, because I’m not sure any of us is any better, and if you think she’s feeling good about all this, think again. Mothers blame themselves”—I thumped my chest—“like the buck stops here when it comes to responsibility.”
Feeling that large hand on my back again, I sucked in a breath. Only then seeing the startled looks around me and feeling appalled, I lengthened my second breath and managed a sheepish smile. “Sorry. Grace is my friend.” I did believe she hadn’t known what her son was doing, any more than I had known about the STOP sign hidden in a swarm of red oak leaves. But we both felt responsibility. I always would.
A tall beanpole of a man ambled up, and Edward quickly bent toward me. “Is that who I think it is?” He was a reader, so was clearly excited. Me, I welcomed the diversion. David Isenschmidt could be entertaining, in his gawky way.
The world knew him as Dylan Ivory. After years working with a hugely successful mystery writer, he was now writing on his own. He had just returned from a publicity tour that had included appearances on the biggest of the big talk shows, and, after I introduced Edward, who had read his two latest, they began talking books. Suddenly, though, the author looked at me.
“Who is she?” he asked.
I drew back. “Excuse me?”
“Grace Emory. You’re her friend. What don’t we know?”
That quickly, I was alarmed. “Um, like what?”
“Like where she came from or what she did before Devon.”
“Does it matter?” Edward asked, but David’s eyes held mine.
“If you want your story to be complete, there has to be a past.”
“That’s not how Devon works,” I tried, but he talked right over my words.
“No one knows squat, like where she grew up and why she has no family—like who the kid’s father is. For all we know, it’s Zwick. Sure, the boy hacked other accounts, but they could have been red herrings. What he did to Zwick was pretty ugly.”
“What he allegedly did, David,” I said. “And nothing that happened to Zwick is any uglier than what he is doing now to a fifteen-year-old boy.”
“QED. Zwick is known for ugliness. Maybe the kid inherited it.”
“Are you planning to write about this?” Edward asked with a qualm I was glad to hear.
David shot him a glance, which wasn’t the way I would reward a loyal reader, but the man was bizarre. “No. But it’s an interesting premise, is it not?”
“It’s a wacky premise,” Kevin said, having walked over in time to hear enough. “Zwick wouldn’t go public if he was Chris’s dad. Why would a father put his son through this? Sorry, Davie. You won’t get a bestseller out of this one.”
“My point,” said the writer Dylan Ivory, “is that things aren’t always what they seem.”
I wasn’t laughing now. Things aren’t always what they seem. Nor did I have a comeback. No, they weren’t. He was building a story around Grace and Chris. Another time it might be around Edward and me.
In that instant, I felt like a fraud.
Kevin must have sensed it, because he slipped a comforting arm around my waist. At first I thought it was Edward. But no. Edward was watching, but the arm was Kevin’s.
In the next instant, Nina’s amplified voice rose over the rest of the conversation. Shortly thereafter, we were seated in the nave, and Cornelia was beside me, holding my hand, asking how I was with the kind of concern that might have made me wonder, if I