“I don’t remember seeing any DMs.” I squeeze the phoneharder. This doesn’t make any sense. If anything, Kenya overcommunicates. I’ve known this woman for fifteen years, worked with her on the yard sale for eleven, and she’s never met a Google Doc, Excel spreadsheet, or SignUpGenius that she hasn’t blasted my way. During the run-up to the yard sale, it’s not unusual for me to wake to five separate emails from Kenya, a few texts, and a voicemail about trivial matters.
No way she wouldn’t have told me about getting multiple messages regarding a stolen bracelet.
“This is my fault,” Kenya says. “I saw them and put reaching out to her on my list of things to get to, but it slipped my mind.”
“So you did see her messages.” I press harder, hungry for the truth.
“Yes, there were a couple of them, if I recall. I was going to circle back, but then—” Kenya lets out a hearty laugh. “You know how life is. Noah graduating and everything. Parents of seniors should never do the Eastbrook yard sale, am I right? What were we thinking?”
“I guess that clears it up,” I say, unconvinced.
“Yeah, sorry you got sucked into all this. I just dropped the ball.”
I get off the phone to see a frowning Miguel. His face has hardened into a look of distaste.
“Why were you talking to Holly Stone?” he asks, measuring each word carefully.
“What?” I ask, momentarily confused. Then I realize he was listening to my conversation with Kenya. “Oh. I bumped into her outside Wagshal’s. Don’t make it sound weird.” A defensive edge has crept into my voice. “She told me that she reached out to us several times about the bracelet, but no oneever responded. Don’t you think that’s odd that Kenya never told me?” I search his face for a flicker of agreement but there is none.
“Maybe she never got the emails. Maybe they went to spam or junk.”
“She admitted she got them, on Facebook.”
“Admitted?” Miguel knits his eyebrows together. The skepticism in his voice rankles. “Caren, why does this whole bracelet thing matter so much? It’s over.”
“I don’t know, I feel like it’s connected to what happened to me on Saturday night.”
He nods, as if considering this. “True, they both happened to you this weekend, but it doesn’t mean there’s some deeper connection. You’re becoming a little fixated on the bracelet.”
“I’m not fixated.” I sound defensive even to myself.
“Well, what did Kenya say?”
I shrug. “That she saw the messages but forgot about them. She said she dropped the ball.”
Just then Rachel comes bounding in with her phone in one hand and one of the Berger Cookies I bought today in the other. “Sorry, I am starving. Hey, do you guys want to see photos?”
“Sure,” I say, patting the bed next to me.
As I look over my daughter’s shoulder, trying to focus on images of the lush Green Mountains that flicker across her small screen, it hits me—I don’t believe Kenya. That woman has never dropped a ball in her life.
But why would she lie? What is she hiding?
Noah.
The answer comes to me without having to search. She’s protecting Noah. It’s the only thing I can think of that wouldmake her act so irrationally. Make any of us parents do so. It’s what we have in common in Eastbrook—we might be different religions, races, ethnicities. We might have grown up in the mountains, on farms, or in cities. But we all agree on one thing—we’d do anything to help our children, to protect them. I squeeze Rachel’s shoulder hard. When Yumi told me that she thought that she’d seen Rachel with Van, skulking around the backyard, my first thought wasHow can I protect her from her own mistakes?I would do a lot. I would certainly tell a little white lie to Kenya.
But that only raises another question—what is Kenya protecting Noah from? What exactly has he done?
ONE YEAR AGO
A week after the break-in, Tori sat across from her worried Bethesda mom client, trying to coax the conversation back to the Allards. The woman was a successful vice president of marketing at a tech company, and at this moment was weeping because her daughter had received a B in physics.
“There goes Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford,” the woman said between sobs. “I’m not even sure she can get into Tufts with a B. And I have worked so goddamned hard.”
Tori nodded mechanically, forcing her attention back on her client’s words, though her own thoughts raced ahead, lining up questions she wanted answered about Jo Allard.
“The worst part is I can’t get her a decent college counselor anywhere,” the woman said, sniffling. “We’ve basically been blacklisted if you can believe that.”