Page 115 of For Your Own Good

Zach grabs the remote and turns the TV off. “It’s because of the FBI. No chance they’re going to talk to reporters.”

“Or maybe they just aren’t doing anything.”

“They aren’t going to let this go,” Zach says. “It’s like a school shooting, but not as violent.”

Courtney grunts.

Homeschooling hasn’t turned out to be a good thing for Courtney, though it might be better if she were away from her phone and the TV.

“What else have you found out about that Fallon woman?” she says.

Another mistake of Zach’s. He shouldn’t have told her about the plant book in Crutcher’s office, or about seeing Fallon Knight outside his house. If he’d known another week would go by without an arrest, he never would’ve mentioned it.

“Nothing. Just that she hates him,” he says.

Courtney stares at him until it feels uncomfortable.

“Seriously,” he says. “I haven’t found anything else.”

She sighs and goes back to her computer. Zach returns to his own work, his head hanging a little lower.

Usually, he doesn’t feel bad about lying. Now, he does. Courtney isn’t someone he hides things from—or she didn’t used to be. She also used to have a mother who was alive, instead of murdered, and everything she knew about jail came fromOrange Is the New Black.

Since she came home, she’s become obsessed with TV shows about jail. She rates them according to how realistic they are.

When she’s not doing that, she’s searching online about the Belmont murders. Every article, every message board, every chat. It’s both completely understandable and completely disturbing.

His parents would say she’s trying to process her mother’s murder.

This time, he thinks they’d be right.

So he doesn’t talk about Fallon anymore. Or Crutcher. He doesn’t tell her that he has followed Fallon on several occasions, and that she stops by Crutcher’s house once a day. Every day. Never gets out of her car, though. She just drives up, stops, gets on her phone for a minute, and then drives away.

It makes zero sense to him, but it must mean something to her. She keeps doing it.

Fallon keeps following him, too. Zach has seen that run-down little car a few times. Once, a block from his house. Another time, a few cars back at a stoplight.

He doesn’t know why Fallon has been following him, but does have fun with her. The first time he saw her, he drove to a maternity store. The second time, to a dog park. With no dog.

But Zach hasn’t told Courtney any of this.

He has to lie to her. It’s for the best.

THE CONFERENCE ROOMis ten stories up, with a view of the town. In the distance, Teddy can see Belmont.

“We need to decide on the speakers,” Winnie says.

Teddy smiles as he turns to her. It’s cute that she uses the wordwe. As the new head of the Parents’ Collaborative, she has embraced the power she thinks comes with it. Winnie still isn’t a board member, but that takes time. And a lot of schmoozing.

He sits back down at the head of the table. Ms.Marsha is on his left; Winnie is on the right. Everyone else in the room is irrelevant.

“Run down the list,” he says to Winnie.

She recites the names of potential speakers for the Remembrance & Recovery ceremony. It’s a pointless task, because he has already decided who will speak, but it gives him something to do since he’s not teaching.

Beyond the walls of the conference room, people are busy doing office things. Typing or inputting or downloading. Paper shuffling. Whatever cubicle people do. The business is owned by a Belmont parent who offered a conference room to the school while Belmont is closed. Teddy was quick to take that offer, adding that he preferred to have lots of windows in his work space.

Ask, and he receives.