“Twinkies aren’t food,” she proclaims. “I keep those in the pantry for my grandkids, but a growing boy like you needs more than just sugar.”
“I don’t think I’m growing much more,” I say, and receive a knuckle in my ribs in response. “Ow!”
“There’s more than one direction to grow in,” she says. “You need some meat on your bones.”
Obediently, I take a bite of the sandwich, closing my eyes in momentary bliss as Mrs. Hanley leans forward to examine the contents of the coffee table. She taps the thin stack of papers with a pointed red nail. “I can find you something better to read if you want. I think my grandson left some books here with some space monsters on the covers. Probably find more truth in those than in here.”
I look up in surprise at the old woman. “So what’s in here isn’t accurate?”
She shrugs, leaning back and folding her hands in her lap over her flowered dress. “I’m sure they think it’s accurate. As much as they think about it at all.”
I look back at the file in confusion, flipping through the pages. I’m not an expert on police files by any stretch, but nothing jumps out at me as obviously wrong.
Mrs. Hanley chuckles, patting my hand. “It’s not anything that’s there, sugar.”
“Are you saying there’s something missing?” I ask, trying to understand. “Like evidence of an intruder?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know what’s missing, and they don’t care,” she says, shaking her head. “Door was unlocked, lighter belonged to me. My grandson was home. Case closed. They acted like they were doing us a favor by not charging him with arson.”
“But even if it was your grandson—which I’m not saying it was,” I amend hurriedly at the look on Mrs. Hanley’s face, “shouldn’t the insurance company still pay, since he doesn’t live here?”
She gives a humorless chuckle. “They figure that I asked him to start the fire while I was out. Or that’s their excuse anyway.”
“You think there’s another reason they’re not paying?”
“Yup. They’re a buncha thieves,” Mrs. Hanley says matter-of-factly. “Well, that’s what they are,” she insists when she notices my eyebrows go up. “First, they don’t want us to own our own homes at all, but then when we go and do it anyway, they say, ‘Well, you have to buy this insurance, too,’ so then we do that, but then when it’s time for that insurance to pay, they won’t. It’s a racket.”
I look over my notes and the police file again, chewing the inside of my lip. “Can you think of anyone who might have a motive to hurt you? Or would want to destroy your stuff?”
Mrs. Hanley spreads her hands helplessly. “I just don’t know, sugar. I’ve lived in this house for thirty years now, and there have always been people who didn’t like that. I’ve known my share of unkindness over the years. But as far as a name, or a reason? Could be anyone, for any reason they like, or no reason at all.” She looks lovingly at the framed family portrait hanging on the wall, her smile a little sad. “I just know it wasn’t my Noah. That’s what I know.”
I don’t know what it’s like to have grandparents, but I think it would be nice to have a grandmother like Mrs. Hanley.
I hope I can help her.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
ROSE
“Do you believe in fate?” Justin asked, staring up at the ceiling of Mrs. Hanley’s guest bedroom, one arm tucked behind his head.
Rose looked up in surprise from where she sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She’d come straight to Mrs. Hanley’s after her first attempt to talk to Michael McMillain after school—not particularly encouraging, but she still had the rest of the week—and she and Justin had gone up to his room to compare notes. Although Justin’s “notes” turned out to just be a rant about how insurance systems were a scam, which was hardly helpful.
“I think kind of,” Rose said, putting down her pencil. She’d been writing up a to-do list for them to follow for the rest of the week, although it had far more blanks on it than she’d like. “Like I feel like there’s meaning in everything, but not everything has to happen the way it does. Does that make sense?”
“I think so,” Justin said. “So kind of like ‘everything happens for a reason’？”
“No,” Rose said, shaking her head adamantly. “I hate that.”
“Really?” Justin sat up, tilting his head so his shaggy hair fell across his eyes. “Isn’t that why you’re so sure that we have to stop this fire?”
“Not exactly.” Rose frowned, trying to figure out how to put her thoughts into words. “So my mom died when I was little,” she said. “Car accident.”
“Oh wow,” Justin said. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
She waved away his condolences, not wanting to linger in those memories. “Anyway, after that, I spent a lot of time at my best friend Lisa’s house. And Lisa’s mom wound up doing a lot of ‘mom’ things for me, like taking me bathing suit shopping and teaching me to braid my hair. And then a few years later, Lisa’s dad died of cancer. And then a couple years after that, my dad and Lisa’s mom got married.”
Justin’s eyes had widened as she explained how her family had come to look the way it did, but he didn’t interrupt or make a stupid comment about how lucky they were, or how everything worked out in the end, or any of the other asinine things people sometimes said without thinking.
He just listened, his blue eyes holding steady on hers, waiting for her to finish.
“So,” she said, blowing out a shaky breath. Talking about this was harder than she’d expected. She hadn’t picked at this old wound for a while and was surprised to find it was still a little sore. Maybe it always would be. “I can believe that there was meaning in all of that, but I can’t believe that the reason my mom died was for my dad to marry Diane. Like, I don’t think fate causes things to happen, but once they do happen, they have significance. Does that make sense?”
He nodded slowly, running a hand through his hair. “That’s pretty intense.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot.”
“I can tell. So where does my whole . . . situation place on the meaning-reason spectrum?”
She sighed. The truth was, she hadn’t completely figured that out yet. Time travel hadn’t factored into her existential calculus until a couple of days ago. “I think there’s definitely meaning in it,” she started slowly. “And the rules of cause and effect mean that there has to be some sort of reason why it happened.”
“And you think that’s to save my grandparents.”
“Yeah.”
“So not everything happens for a reason . . . except for me being here, right now, with you, which definitely did happen for a reason.”
Rose shrugged, spreading her hands. “Maybe? It feels like time travel is an exception to a lot of things. So maybe it makes sense that there would be a reason for this, even if there doesn’t have to be one for everything else.”