Her voice rises. In volume. In pitch. And I know that if I answer her truthfully, the next sound she’ll make is a squeal. When we were little, Kyla always used to talk about us raising kids together. She designed matching outfits for our children to wear, planned out their birthday parties from appetizers to gifts. We practiced being hostesses, setting up a circle of stuffed animal guests, using her dolls as makeshift babies. “Excellent crumpets, Fern,” she’d say to me, “I simply must get this recipe.” And I’d respond with “Oh there’s no recipe, Kyla. I just threw some things together!”
It was easy enough to play along—the future was so far away back then—but even still, whenever she thrust a doll at me, said “This is Fern Jr., isn’t she adorable,” I’d fidget on the pink carpet in her bedroom. I’d take the doll from her hands with no idea how to hold it.
“No,” I say now. “I’m not pregnant.” Then I hurry along, before she has time to consider how my voice flattens with the lie. “I’m actually calling because—do you know about Astrid Sullivan?”
“Like, how she’s missing again?”
“Yeah. And remember that time I went with your family to Edgewood Lake?”
“Uh-huuuh…”
“Okay. So do you remember meeting, or maybe just seeing, Astrid Sullivan on that trip?”
Silence. I can’t even hear Thomas crying in the background anymore. I play with one of the air vents, flicking its knob back and forth, waiting for Kyla to respond.
“Do I remember meeting Astrid Sullivan?” she repeats.
“Yeah,” I say. “She had red hair, and freckles, and—”
“No, I know what she looks like, but—where the hexagon is this coming from?”
My fingers pause on the vent. “Hexagon?”
“Oh… sorry. Autopilot. Leland’s starting to repeat everything we say now, so Jeff and I are replacing bad words with bigger ones.”
Even words can be dangerous? Ted and Mara never said too much, so I didn’t have many curses to parrot. The worst four-letter word I knew was fear.
“Question still stands, though,” Kyla says. “Where is this coming from?”
I move my hand to the steering wheel. Grip it hard. Then I tell her everything—about my nightmares that feel more and more like memories, about Astrid’s face jolted loose inside me—and I finish with the most chilling fact of all: we were at Edgewood Lake, right on the border of Astrid’s town, during the time she went missing. When I’m done, I hear a clatter in the background, like a cup falling to the floor.
“Leland,” Kyla says limply. Then, to me: “I remember your nightmares.”
“Right,” I say. “So do you remember seeing her, too? Or-or maybe you don’t remember seeing her exactly, because I didn’t. Not until recently. But maybe you remember something weird happening. Something off. Something that maybe you haven’t thought much about, until now.”
Her sigh sounds like static. “Are you okay, Fern?”
“Yes, I’m fine, just… please. Did you see anything unusual? Anything at all.”
There’s a flash of red through my windshield. I peer through the glass to see the church door opening. An old woman hobbles out. The same one who eyed me from the bench as she prayed.
“No,” Kyla says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t. Which means you probably didn’t either. We were joined at the hip that week, never out of each other’s sight. Except—oh god—remember that awful haircut I got that week?”
I pause at her abrupt change of subject. “Huh?”
The woman uses the railing to make her way down the cement steps. She keeps her eyes on her feet.
“You know,” Kyla says, “that pixie cut I was obsessed with getting.”
It had been such a big deal. Something Kyla had planned for weeks, scouring through magazines, cutting out glossy photos, making an album of options. We were doing it in secret, too. Kyla’s mother loved her blond hair, so long it sometimes caught inside the back of her jeans. But Kyla was eager for the breeze on her neck.
“Of course,” I say. “But what about it?”
“That was the only time we were apart.”
“Your haircut? No, I was with you for that.”
“Yeah, at first,” she says. “But remember? We went to some place in Foster to get it done, and—”
“Foster?” My heart kicks. “That’s where Astrid lived.”
I don’t mention that I’m there right now, in the parking lot of Astrid’s church, eyes on an old woman as she shuffles toward her car. But my pulse thrums. I scratch my wrist. Because it’s confirmation: I wasn’t just close to where Astrid lived. It’s not a theory