I shook my head. “You said this was around when I came over. And I didn’t see them. Alex, you didn’t either, coming back from the taco truck.”
“I probably took the side entrance,” he said, cocking his head. “You reach it first if you’re heading east. You would, too, if you were coming from your apartment.”
“That’s true.” How different would my life be if I’d walked one hundred and fifty feet farther? I turned to Sarah. “When did you talk to Lloyd?”
“That fall, right in the middle of everything.”
Ten years ago. “Had you met him before?”
She shook her head. “Edie had pointed him out once, but they never really hung out at Calhoun. I guess where you could see them.” She nodded at Alex. “I only talked to him that one time.”
“Alex, you could have seen them at Calhoun that night, talking to her mom.”
He shrugged. “Guess you’re right. They were lucky I took the other door.”
“Sarah, do you still have his contact info?”
“Seriously?”
I nodded. The waitress tipped more coffee into my mug, brown liquid sloshing everywhere.
“Of course not.”
“Okay.”
Now Sarah leaned back. “I just wish I could figure out what she was doing,” she said, “for that last ninety minutes or so. She said goodbye to Lloyd—didn’t tell him anything about where she was going—and then she obviously didn’t come back to the apartment, because we were all still in there. There’s just this…gap.”
The lost hours.
“Maybe her mom called her down again,” I said. “After Lloyd left. They talked some more, they’re getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, so Edie brings her back inside to your apartment, which is newly empty.”
“The gun—the weapon was Kevin’s gun, though, something in the room,” Alex said. “Her mom wouldn’t have known it was there.”
“I’m not saying it was premeditated,” I pointed out. “Who the fuck knows what went on? Maybe her mom insisted on coming in to look for something, or to, I don’t know, tell Edie to pack up and go, and they were fighting and things got out of hand. Maybe it was an accident.”
Sarah shook her head. “We have the phone records. Lloyd was the last person she texted. Her mom couldn’t have called again.”
I bit my lip. “Okay, but maybe—”
“This is crazy,” Sarah announced, a little too loudly. “We’re talking like I did when I was twenty-three and grieving and trying to make everything a lot more complicated than it actually was. Right?” She slurped her ice water. “Like, no, life isn’t actually a soap opera and the simplest answer is probably the right one. There’s a reason nothing you’ve uncovered during your…your investigation proves anything different.”
The three of us watched one another across the booth, across the ten years.
“But if Lloyd left the concert early,” I said, “maybe he quickly got all the photos he needed and headed back to—”
“Lindsay, stop. Do you hear yourself? Do you have any idea how you sound?” Sarah pressed her palms flat on the table. “Look, with Edie…I loved the girl, but she had a lot of enemies. We could probably fill a stadium with people she had a beef with, right?” She let out a mirthless chortle. “She was smart, and funny, and incredibly charismatic and all that, but she could also be really horrible to people. I lived with her—I saw that firsthand. I mean, weren’t you guys fighting at the end? If I didn’t know you better…hey, you grew up shooting guns, right? You knew Kevin’s gun was there, you wandered away from the rest of us before the concert, you don’t remember a…a fucking thing from the night—”
Alex piped up: “Hey, you know—”
“And I know what you did.”
We locked eyes. Did Sarah know about the Warsaw Incident, the drunken disaster Edie had promised not to share? Had she betrayed me?
“To your mom. When you were a kid? Edie told me.”
Not the Warsaw Incident—something worse. We stared at one another and the entire room vibrated with my heartbeat, bum bum, bum bum, bum bum.
She pulled the napkin off her lap, folded it carefully. “I said if I didn’t know you better. Look, at the end of the day, I think she was really depressed, and she took some drugs that messed her up even further, and she was alone and everything sucked and she made a really bad decision.”
Sarah knew. The dark childhood secret I’d let slip just once, soused on my friendship with Edie, deep into a game of Truth or Truth. I looked down at