had a big dog that was always barking.
“Mr. Goss passed away about . . . two years after the rescue, I think. Lung cancer.”
“Oh,” I said. But also, she had checked. All these little things she mentioned, she had followed up. They had, indeed, caused her to wonder.
“Look, the point is, nothing could be corroborated. It was a dead end. There’s no story in any of it. I assure you, we did our due diligence. No one wants to get caught reporting a lie.”
“But it’s a lot. A lot of little things.”
“Yes, but you can find anything if you look hard enough. You can see anything if you want to. I don’t think he’d believe the truth if we showed him a live video at this point.”
Though I hadn’t touched the sandwich, I fidgeted with the glass plate, spinning it on the surface. I almost didn’t ask, but I’d come all this way. “But what do you think?” I asked.
Emma Lyons turned to the cabinet alongside the wall, refilled her drink from a separate crystal container. Like she needed to steel herself for the truth. “Well,” she said, recapping the drink, “it doesn’t matter what I think, Arden. Sorry, Olivia.”
“Please. It will stay between us.”
She took a deep breath and a long drink before speaking. “There was only one thing that really bugged me, but we couldn’t air it even if we wanted to. Protected by your medical privacy. It’s what one of the doctors said . . . I was interviewing him at a bar, my own poor judgment, and his, but I wanted something we could use. Not a medical fact but a quote—about how strong you were, how you’d defied the odds. We wanted general statistics, nothing that violated your privacy.”
“And?”
“And,” she said, drawing out the word. “He said you weren’t dehydrated enough. But so what? You were inside a storm drain. It rained. Presumably, you could drink—though I’d imagine it was not the type of water one should be drinking.”
She started tapping her nails against the glass, the sound echoing through the room.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Well, no.” She lowered her voice, eyes to the window again, like a nervous tic. “He said that the injury was weird.” She waved one hand through the air, like she had to show how trivial such a thing might be. How she didn’t quite believe it herself. “I told him, look, she was stuck in a pipe. You were swept away. Surely things could get weird, the angle you’d be stuck at. Things like that. No one knows exactly what happened while you were down there, how far you traveled. But this is the one thing that sometimes niggles at me around each anniversary. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly, other than a sort of sixth sense that develops when you’re on to a story and you get the feeling that—here, there’s something here.”
“What is it?” I asked. She’d spent so much time trying to downplay the story, it had only managed to do the opposite. I was riveted.
“He said it was weird, but not in the way that I meant. He said it was unusual but that he had seen it before. And it wasn’t from being swept away underground.” An echo of Bennett’s words: That’s rare in a kid. Must’ve been incredibly painful. Was that why I didn’t remember? The pain causing that disconnect?
We stood in silence then, the only noise coming from the dog chewing a bone under the table.
“You didn’t report any of this?” I asked in just over a whisper.
“That? I couldn’t. And really, it was obvious the doctors and your mother weren’t seeing eye to eye by then. She worked in health care and had her own opinions on things. They saw her as an impediment toward your treatment, so I’d take all that with a grain of salt.”
“I remember. She didn’t like the doctors. Said they weren’t interested in fixing me.”
“Your mother stopped bringing you to the follow-up appointments. And then there was some talk from other medical professionals that, to hear your mother discuss it, your history of sleepwalking didn’t fit any sort of profile. That she was maybe straining the truth, whether intentional or not.”
I remembered Dr. Cal saying it would’ve been unusual that a doctor had given me medicine to stop the episodes. Maybe it hadn’t been their idea. Maybe my mother had demanded it. She’d always believed what she needed to believe.
“Well, look,” Emma continued, “it’s just