Page 85 of I Will Ruin You

“Are you going to make me go there again tonight?” Rachel asked.

“Don’t have any plans to, sweetheart. Last night, it was something unexpected.” She had nothing to say to that. “How’s the bug collection coming?”

Rachel shrugged.

“It’s nice you have a new interest.”

Another shrug. Then, “Amanda said she might give me all her bugs because her dad hates them, but I don’t think I want them.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s like zoos. It’s mean to keep things locked up, even if they’re dead. They should all be set free.”

“When I was a kid, I collected stamps for a while.”

“Stamps? What are stamps?”

That stopped me cold. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Why would a kid who’d been raised in an age of emails and texts, whose parents paid all their bills online, know anything about sticking a little square of paper onto an envelope and dropping it into a box down the street?

I laughed. “Never mind. It was pretty boring, anyway.”

“Did you sell the boat?” Rachel asked.

“You heard about that?”

That shouldn’t have surprised me, either. She could have overhead Bonnie and me talking about it, or Bonnie might have mentioned to her that I’d been thinking of it.

The truth was, there was no need to sell it now.

She nodded and I said, “No, I didn’t sell the boat.”

“Okay,” she said. “For sure?”

“For sure.”

“And you won’t change your mind?”

I shook my head. “You seem pretty worried about it,” I said, patting the back of her head. “How come?”

“The boat’s a family thing, and if we didn’t have the boat maybe we weren’t going to be a family anymore.”

I stopped, knelt down, took her two hands in mine, and looked her in the eye. “That would never happen.” I took her into my arms for a quick squeeze, and we continued on our way home.

In the freezer, I found some meatballs we’d made up a month ago and sealed in a plastic container, let them simmer in a tomato sauce, put on a pot of water to boil for spaghetti, and then scrolled through my phone looking for more stories about Billy Finster’s death.

Then I thought, if someone checked my phone’s search history, they’d have to wonder why I was so interested in Finster’s murder. And then I realized my laptop at school would be equally incriminating. Someone might get around to talking to Belinda, who’d be able to report I’d asked her if we had a current address for him. Just how many clues had I left behind?

Stupid stupid stupid.

Bonnie arrived home shortly before six. When she found me in the kitchen I put the phone aside and smiled weakly at her. I didn’t know where things stood between us at that moment. I decided to make the first move, walked over, and put my arms around her.

“Hey,” I said.

She started to cry. Then she started to shake.

“It’s okay,” I said, holding on to her more tightly. “It’s okay.”

She wiped a tear from her eye and pulled back far enough to ask, “Where’s Rach?”