of water to the guy with the broken glasses, but she’s looking at me. I have an overwhelming need to get out of here.
So I do.
I head back to the car, grabbing Cecily and pulling her with me.
“Hey, wait, is that Ben Michaels?” she says. “Oh my God, I thought—”
“It’s not him.” I don’t want to explain what little I know of the multiverse and doppelgängers. Not now.
“But—”
“Cee, I said it’s not him. Do they have anything you want?”
Cecily shakes her head.
“Can we get out of here?”
She must see it on my face, whatever it is that I’m feeling. Or maybe it’s just her good-friend instincts that let her know this is a dead topic. Either way, she nods and moves around to the driver’s side. “Out of here it is.”
I get into the car, my door slamming shut behind me.
Cecily starts the car and we pull away, leaving Ben’s lookalike behind. I curl my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and lean my head back against the seat.
A few times, I catch her glancing at me, and I know she wants to ask what my deal is. But she doesn’t. Because that’s what makes our friendship work. We tease each other—she’s too high-spirited and I’m too bitchy—but we’re there for each other when it matters.
Which means she knows when I need to be left alone.
I think about Ben Michaels all the time.
Sometimes I wonder if I chose wrong—if I should have asked my Ben to stay. If I had that day to do over, I wonder if I would still make the same choices.
Mostly I just wonder if I’ll ever see him again.
06:12:21:53
Twelve hours later, I arrive at Qualcomm and see Cecily again. Her uncle ran the stadium before the quakes. Now it’s the largest evacuation shelter in San Diego, and running it is a family affair.
Normally I like being here. Something about the way Cee has adopted the shelter and all its inhabitants as her personal responsibility makes things feel a little less bleak. Hanging out and being bossed around makes it seem like we’re all in this together.
But not right now. This isn’t that kind of visit.
When she sees me, she doesn’t sugarcoat it. “There’s another missing person,” she says, her white-blond hair hanging disheveled from something that might have been a ponytail. Her gray T-shirt is dirty, and her jeans are ripped in a few places. If I’d ever wondered what it looked like to carry the weight of part of the city—the homeless part—on your shoulders, now I know.
Our missing person this time is Renee Adams. She’s twenty-two years old, and according to the description, she’s five-four and thin, with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair, and brown eyes. The only possessions she has to her name are a white long-sleeved sweater, a pair of 7 jeans, flip-flops, a last-season Coach purse, and a gold ring. She worked downtown, and before the quakes, she lived with her boyfriend in Pacific Beach. He’s presumed dead now, and she arrived at Qualcomm after seeing that her apartment building had collapsed in on itself.
Assigned to a cot in Club Level section 47, one of the areas reserved for single women, Renee kept to herself, spent more time sleeping than awake, and cried a lot. She was even assigned to the suicide watch list for one of the grief counselors.
But she wasn’t in her group therapy session this afternoon. And at this moment, a little past nine thirty on Monday evening—more than three hours past city curfew—she isn’t anywhere in section 47. The all-call announcements in the stadium have gone unanswered. Her cot is empty.
Except for the ripped sheet and a tiny, yellowed fragment that unmistakably used to be part of a fingernail.
I hold a ruler between gloved fingers and take a picture of the measurement. The rip is four and three quarters inches long, half an inch at its widest point, and the nail looks like it might be from her thumb.
I imagine a girl pulled off the cot, reaching out to grab on to something—anything—and catching hold of the sheet. Only sheets aren’t very strong, so it rips easily, and she leaves a tiny piece of herself behind.
“When did she go missing?” Deirdre asks, her voice quiet but weighed down with a sense of gravity.
I don’t look at Cecily when she says she doesn’t know. She’s trying to look calm and in charge, trying to hold it together, but her eyes are red-rimmed, and her face has