slack. Tongue stuck. So many things strike me at once that it’s hard to catalog them all. But Eric prompts me to speak—“Fern? Are you there?”—and for him, I try.
“The shops I saw there—in Foster—the other day—they all had names like that. Tom’s Tackle. Cock-a-doodle Coffee. And I… oh my god.”
“What? What is it?”
“I’ve been there,” I say.
“To Books & Birds?”
“Yes, but—I was there, that day, I think. June 24.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I… I’ve only seen Brennan do an event one time. And it was at this weird place, with bird murals, and a parrot. And… it had to be Books & Birds, right?”
“Hold on,” Eric says. I hear him typing something, the sound of his keystrokes so different from Ted’s. “Yep. This is from their website: ‘Customers at Books & Birds can browse for their new favorite read alongside the store’s cheerful mascot, Colton the cockatoo.’ ” He pauses. “But I don’t get it. Why were you there? I can’t imagine Ted sitting through one of Brennan’s talks.”
“I don’t think Ted was there,” I say. Because I’m realizing that I remember standing in the back of the store, watching the crowd laugh and nod and applaud, but what I don’t remember is Ted beside me, scoffing and muttering, as he surely would have done. I close my eyes, try to scrounge up more of the memory. It would have been during my vacation with Kyla’s family, but I don’t remember Kyla being there either. And Kyla and I were never separated—except for during her haircut, when Cooper and I went to get her candy, and Cooper left me at a gas station because he saw some girl.
“Check to see if there’s a gas station within walking distance of the store,” I tell Eric, even though it doesn’t really matter. The memory is taking shape.
It was daytime, the sun scorchingly bright, but I was still nervous to be left alone on a street I didn’t know. I watched Cooper’s car disappear around a corner, and I walked along the sidewalk, head down, arms tucked in tight, as strangers passed me by. I didn’t know where I was supposed to go—Cooper didn’t say anything about coming back to pick me up—and my lungs seemed to shrink, my breathing ragged. “Are you okay?” I think a woman asked me, and it was only when I saw a sign outside a store, Brennan’s name in thick white chalk, that I knew I would be. I had made it safe inside somewhere. I had found a familiar face.
“Yep, there’s a Mobil down the street,” Eric says. “Why?”
“Kyla’s brother left me at the gas station, while we were all on that vacation together, and I stumbled into the store during Brennan’s talk.”
I didn’t speak to him, I remember now. When the talk was over and the crowd leapt to their feet, I didn’t stick around to say hello. It would have been disloyal to Ted.
“I still don’t get how it would happen, though,” I say. “How do you go from giving a talk to abducting someone?” I pause. “Astrid lived on Bleeker Street, which was near where she was taken. Can you look up how close that is to Books & Birds?”
I hear more typing, then silence. A held-in breath. “It’s close,” Eric says.
I sit on the edge of my bed, rest my forehead in the palm of my hand. “So it fits,” I say.
It’s hot in my room, but I shiver anyway. It was only a couple days ago that we looked at Brennan’s books in the kitchen. Ted was calling Brennan a sellout, a fraud, when he might be something so much worse than that. Maybe Brennan’s books have even hinted at it, their titles filled with such ominous words—terror, desolation, isolation.
“Wait,” I say.
“What is it?”
“Hold on.”
I open my door quietly, tiptoe across the hall, sneak down the stairs. Brennan’s books are still on the kitchen counter, and the one I’m looking for is second from the top. The Terror of Isolation. It’s a title that’s always pricked me, reminding me of the night that Ted and Mara didn’t come home, the times Ted abandoned me at stores, the Saturday mornings I hoped he’d ignore his work to take me out to breakfast. Loneliness is a kind of terror. Sadness is too.
I open the book and skim the synopsis. Then, my throat tightening, I check the copyright date, look at the table of contents, and by the time I finish, my hands are