Page 52 of You Belong Here

Trevor had been gone for at least three hours by the time he returned. I’d been waiting for him, pacing the house. Everything was spiraling outside my control, and I couldn’t pull it back together. I couldn’t see the way out.

I swung open the front door while he was still halfway up the porch steps. “Where have you been?” I asked. “Delilah’s going to be here soon.”

He remained silent until he was fully inside the house, the door firmly locked behind us. “I was out for a drive,” he said with eerie calmness.

“Yeah, I got your note, ” I said, unable to temper my tone. “You can’t just leave the door unlocked. The police were here earlier, and I found Adalyn’s things in the attic… I think she was staying here.”

Trevor’s eyes went wide.

“Everything’s drawing the police back here. If they looked inside,” I continued, “if they saw—”

“I took care of it. It’s gone,” he said, hands deep in his pockets. It looked like he hadn’t slept. Neither of us had, and the cracks were showing.

“ What’s gone,” I said.

“The phone. It’s gone. So it doesn’t matter how it got here anymore.”

My eyes widened. “How could you not tell me first?” When, really, what I meant to say was: How could you not ask me first?

Of course he had a plan. A plan that didn’t involve me or my input.

“I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to be part of it.” He swallowed. “To be guilty of it.”

“The police are watching us,” I said, hand going to my mouth. “They basically told me that. They could’ve been following you.”

The wrinkles around his eyes deepened. “No one was following me.”

“They already think…” And then I stopped.

“They think what?”

I chose my words carefully. “The police think Adalyn was killed in the quarry and someone moved her. More specifically, they seem to think one of us moved her.”

He laughed once, loud and harsh, then turned away, slipping off his sneakers. “Okay, well, that’s clearly ridiculous.”

But all I could hear was the pounding of my own heartbeat in my head as I watched him move through the house with ease.

He’d just disposed of a phone. He’d just disposed of something that could’ve been evidence.

He’d already crossed a line—and one that surprised me.

How well did I really know him? I knew the man he was nineteen years ago, but hadn’t we all been changed by time?

I knew he was a good father to Delilah. That she adored him. That she called him when she needed help—

I thought of her reaching out to Trevor instead of me when she needed money. I thought of him out in the woods near campus when he was looking for Delilah. The way I lost track of him. The panicked sound of his voice when I finally reached him.

And then he’d been gone in the middle of the night, when I woke. The same night the body had presumably ended up on campus.

“Trevor,” I called, and he slowly turned around. “Did you see something? Did you do something?”

He shook his head slightly. “I don’t understand what you’re asking me right now.”

“Did something happen? Did she ask you to help her?”

He flinched but moved closer. “Are you actually being serious? How could you think I could do that…”

He trailed off; maybe he understood why I had asked him.

Because I could imagine doing it myself.

Maybe that was my fault with Trevor all along.

I had always expected him to see things from my point of view, with no explanation.

I’d never told him the full truth, my full story.

Wouldn’t let myself believe in a future with him.

He stared back at me silently. Maybe he was truly seeing me for the first time.

“You went off-grid,” I said. “You disappeared for so long. And when I reached you, you sounded panicked, like maybe you saw something—”

“Yes, I was panicked!” he said, clearly upset. “My daughter was missing, and I was out in the woods. I kept calling her name, kept thinking I heard something. Someone . I kept following the sound, and it almost got me lost, too.”

There were other people out there. I knew this now. Sierra had been out there, searching the woods. Presumably there were others, too.

“Where were you later that night, when we were sleeping?” I whispered.

He dropped his head, then slowly raised it again, his eyes haunted. “I was walking. And then running. And trying to figure out how I’d let my entire life get away from me.” He took a step closer. “I was thinking about how close I came to losing everything I’d ever cared about.”

I shook my head quickly, trying to undo it. Trying to take back the accusation. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“So, to answer your question, Beckett,” he said simply, “I did not put a woman’s body in a car and dump it in the student center pit so that it could be found there.”

A knock at the front door cut through the silence lingering between us. Trevor swung it open, obviously expecting Delilah, but it was Maggie standing on the front porch, running her hands through the ends of her auburn ponytail, like maybe she’d heard everything we’d said.

“I’m so sorry. Is this not a good time?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I said, grateful for the break in the tension. “Delilah’s on her way.”

Maggie looked tentatively between the two of us, then took a step back, like she’d already changed her mind. “I was coming to tell you… I wasn’t sure if you knew yet…”

“Adalyn?” I said, and she nodded.

“It’s not the type of thing you want to put in a text.” Something caught her eye off to the side then. “There she is,” she said, smiling as Delilah slowly strode up the street, the empty plot behind her. “I’ll leave you to your family time.”

“Wait,” I said as Maggie started to turn. “Do you think it’s possible that Adalyn set that fire? Cliff seems to think he might’ve been the target.”

She frowned, and her eyes slid to the site of the fire. “You didn’t hear this from me. But Bill says the report is very inconclusive. Insurance doesn’t want to move on it.” She raised one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “So I guess it’s possible.”

Apparently the plan, as orchestrated by Trevor, was to eat dinner and feign normalcy, listening to Delilah’s day.

“I moved back into the dorm,” she said, twirling pasta on a fork. “There’s so much security around right now. It seems like the safest place.”

I froze, a bite of chicken Parm hovering on my fork, halfway to my mouth.

“I really think we should go back home for a while,” I said.

I needed to get her away from here. I needed to get us all away from here.

I understood the impulse my parents must’ve felt, faking a letter from the school to get me to go—

“I’m not leaving in the middle of my first semester, Mom,” she said calmly, flexing her adulthood in front of me. “It’s not really up to you.”

Hadn’t I done the same, always claiming I don’t need your help to my parents. To Trevor.

Delilah and I stared at each other, at an impasse.

“The police came back this afternoon,” I said. If she wanted to be treated as an adult, it was time for an adult conversation.

Delilah slowly looked up from her plate. “Why?”

I dropped my fork, couldn’t force myself to eat another bite. I wasn’t sure how Trevor and Delilah were managing.

“Apparently they think Adalyn drowned,” I said. “And they think someone moved her after.”

I watched Delilah’s eyes go wide, watched the fork start to tremble in her hand. My stomach sank. I knew then. I knew something horrible had happened out in the woods that she didn’t want to say.

“Delilah, we found your phone,” I continued. I looked at Trevor, who was staring back, hollows under his eyes, waiting. It seemed so ridiculous to have this conversation over spaghetti and chicken Parmesan. The whole situation seemed absurd.

“Where?” she asked in barely a whisper. Like she was testing us.

“Hidden in the dumbwaiter,” I said.

She shook her head fast, repeatedly. She leaned back in the chair. “I didn’t do that. I didn’t. I lost my phone—”

“Delilah, please.” I closed my eyes, couldn’t take the lies.

“Do you not believe me?” she asked.

“It really doesn’t matter,” I said in a painful nonanswer, sounding like my mother again. “It matters if the police believe you. And they don’t. Delilah, they don’t believe your story.”

She looked terrified; but then so was I.

When I pictured her sitting on the basement floor now, I could see only the remnants of a struggle.

I saw someone scratching her face, her skin caught under their nails.

I saw an accidental call before the phone slipped from her pocket, colliding with a rock—shattering.

I saw her fall to the ground, knees bruising, as someone else fell to the water.

I saw her run. I saw her rush to destroy the evidence.

Most of all, I was scared that she was like me. That my traits had only grown stronger in her. A penchant for darkness. A capacity for secrets. A split-second decision that could send your life into a tailspin, never to recover.

She looked quickly from me to Trevor, eyes welling with tears.

“I did lose my phone. I lost it sometime during dinner that night or after. I’m not sure.

I was out in town with Sierra, and when I got back, I couldn’t find it.

I spent half the night searching for it before I remembered I could track it.

I tracked it from my laptop to its last known location. ”

I felt a buzzing in the room. Felt something just under the surface, about to emerge.

“Where?” I asked.

“It was this place behind the deli that I’d been to with Sierra before.”

“Cryer’s Quarry,” I said.

“Right. I thought maybe it was part of the game.” She swallowed, and my gaze went blurry.

“Part of the howling. We could all hear it that night. It was all anyone was talking about. The old tradition that used to happen until the fire… I thought it was happening again.” Her eyes flicked to me and then away.

“You went out there alone ?” I asked. Of all the things I thought I’d taught her about the night and the woods.