Page 42 of Room to Breathe

The fire burned bright downon the beach as Ava parked her car. It flickered with the breeze, and the shadows of people surrounding it seemed to flicker as well.

I didn’t want to be here.

I’d been listening to my parents fight at home, and while that seemed like a bad thing, I was actually learning things for the first time in over a week. Like the fact that it was only my dad and two other partners who were being investigated. That the fourth partner wasn’t suspected for some reason. My mom had accused that partner of being the one who told. My dad maintained that there was nothing to tell. This would all be over soon. My mom cried. This made my dad frustrated.

“Hello? Indy?”

“What?” I asked, snapping out of my thoughts.

Caroline was out of the car already, leaning inside to talk to me. “Are you going to be cold?”

I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I’d forgotten to grab a hoodie.

I pointed to the beach. “There’s a fire.”

“You know that’s mainly for show,” Ava said from where she stood beside the car. “Unless you’re sitting on it, you will not feel any of its warmth.”

She was right. The ocean was too big to let a puny fire steal its glory.

“I’m okay,” I said, opening my door. When I tried to step out of the car, though, I was stopped short by my seat belt.

Ava laughed at me. “You sleepwalking tonight? It’s not even that late.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I shut the door behind me.

Caroline hooked her hand around my elbow as we walked from the parking lot, down a rocky retaining wall, and onto the beach below. “Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” I lied.

“I don’t want to go back to school on Monday,” she said.

“I do,” Ava said. “This week has been boring. You both have been too busy to do anything.”

“What do you call this?” Caroline asked.

“The first thing we’ve all done together,” Ava answered, as if it wasn’t a rhetorical question.

“I heard you went to Beau’s for Thanksgiving,” Caroline said to me.

“Yeah.”

“How was it?”

“Fine. Nice,” I said.

“Was it super-fancy?” Ava asked. “Crystal and chargers, everyone dressed up, King Grandpa there?”

I chuckled. “Yes. And Harper was there.”

“That made it better or worse?” Caroline asked.

“I just thought she’d be with her family. She has a family, right?” Maybe I was still bitter that I hadn’t been able to talk to Beau on Thursday. I thought about telling Ava and Caroline—I trusted them, but there were two of them. That was already a riskier scenario. They’d talk to each other when I wasn’t around, like they always did. And if I told them, I’d have to tell Beau, because he was my person. Then that would be three people. And three people was not the zero my mom had made me promise not to tell. Odds were that three people would end up as more than three people.

“Of course she has a family,” Ava said.

“I mean a family she does things with,” I said.

“Ask Beau,” she said.