Page 115 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“Who?” Dalton asked.

It took all that was in me not to roll my eyes. Was Dalton really doing this? I was trying to explain, to set things right. Why wouldn’t he let me?

“Can you just hear me out, please?” I asked. “It wasn’t what it looked like, the other night. Greyson is an old family friend—”

Dalton put his hands in his pockets and laughed. “Look, Calloway,” he said. “I don’t give two fucks what you do with your friends.”

“Okay,” I said, taken aback. “Okay, fine.”

Dalton shrugged. “I’m just tired of playing,” he said. “That’s all.”

“What do you mean, you’re tired of playing?” I asked.

“Nothing, okay?” Dalton said after a moment, as if he had thought better of what he’d just said. “I didn’t mean anything.”

I looked at Leo. Panic flickered in his eyes as the cold, nauseating realization hit me. Dalton had been playing. The whole time, when I thought he liked me, he had just been playing a stupid game.

“You put me on your fucking board game?” I asked Leo.

Me. Leo had put me on his sick Board of Conquests. He had put me on there knowing that I would become some target for his friends to mess with.

Suddenly, I remembered that evening in my room when Leo had asked me about Dalton. He had warned me about getting involved with him. At the time, I had taken it as genuine concern for my well-being, but now, I saw what it really was. Leo hadn’t been looking out for me—he had been looking out for himself. He knew that Dalton was just with me so that he could check off a box on his board, and Leo didn’t want him to win.

“Charlie—” Leo said.

“What base was I?” I asked.

“I didn’t—”

“What base was I?” I shouted.

I could feel people staring. I didn’t care.

“Fourth,” Zachery said. He had a cruel smile on his face, like he was delivering the punch line to a dirty joke. “You were fourth base.”

I looked at Leo. His jaw was set in a hard line, like he was waging some sort of battle inside himself, and he wasn’t sure yet which side should win.

I didn’t say anything. I pushed open the French doors to the patio, and I ran.

I didn’t go back to my room. Instead, I got in my car and drove down to the Ledge.

I sat by myself on the edge as daylight faded around me and looked down into the black waters of the ravine running a hundred feet below. I took out my phone and dialed Drew, but it rang and rang and she didn’t answer. I knew that her parents had probably taken away her phone privileges, but I was desperate. I needed to talk to her. When I got her voice mail for the third time in a row, I hung up and stared down at the ravine.

I hadn’t meant to do it, I hadn’t meant to let them in, but somehow I had. Dalton and Leo and Drew and Stevie and Grandma Fairchild and Uncle Hank and my mother, all over again. I had let them in—I had made the mistake of caring, of trusting, and now, in one way or another, they had all abandoned me, screwed me over.

For a moment, I closed my eyes and pictured the bottom of the ravine and wondered what it would be like to just let go of it all, to jump.

Thirty-Two

Alistair Calloway

July 2007

My eyes traced my wife’s profile in the photograph. That was her. Grace. Sitting at a booth in a greasy diner off the interstate between Hillsborough and Hartford. Hal’s Diner. I had never heard of it, never been there. It wasn’t the type of place I would ever take Grace and the girls, wasn’t the type of place locals patronized. It was a dive diner frequented by truckers looking for a warm meal at two in the morning or drunks trying to sober up after the bars closed down. And apparently, a place frequented by adulterous housewives looking to have secret rendezvous with their lovers.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

The man across from Grace in the booth was average-looking. The photo had been taken from across the parking lot with a telephoto lens, so I could see the man my wife was fucking in exquisite detail. He was in his early thirties, and he wore a cheap-looking department store suit that was too long in the sleeves. His hair was starting to thin at the temples. If I had seen him on the street, he wouldn’t have inspired a second look. He was exactly the type of man I wouldn’t have hesitated to leave my wife alone with. But here he was, in a booth in a dark diner off the interstate with my wife, holding her hand.