As I said it, I realized how true it was. Even if I was a fugitive. Even if my mother was missing. Beneath all that, being with the other Girls had changed something in me, and I didn’t want to go back to the way it was before.
But Cate was silent. Isabelle looked from one of us to the other.
The aggressive air-conditioning in the restaurant brushed cold against my shins. “Are you upset with me?” I asked Cate, ready to get it all in the open.
Sensing something in the air, Isabelle rose abruptly, wandered across the length of the restaurant.
Cate sighed. “Why do you think I came along with you in the first place?”
I knew the right answer, but my heart was in my throat. “Your house burned down. You didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“You know that’s not the reason,” Cate said, narrowing her eyes at me.
“Because you wanted to find out what your mother was going to tell you.”
“That was part of it,” Cate said, acknowledging this with a tip of her head. “But I also was happy to let her secrets go with her. I liked my life in Goulding. Still do.”
“I’m not sure,” I lied, and felt my heartbeat everywhere in my body. Cate was sitting in a slant of hot sunlight. Her breasts beneath her thin tank top, her dark curls shot through with caramel, visible only in direct light. Her specificity was so beautiful it almost hurt me.
“Then you’re an idiot, Morrow.” Hearing that name again, in Cate’s voice—even when she was frustrated—was a relief. Everything in me let go in one long exhale.
“Nothing happened between me and Junior that night, by the way,” I said. “We just had a few drinks. That’s it. If you were wondering.”
“Why would I be wondering?” Cate asked, but she looked down into her cup, swirling the coffee inside. I saw a small smile flash over her face. “Poor Junior. He’s been panting after you like a puppy dog since the first time I met you two.”
“He was never the one I wanted.”
Cate waited, still watching her coffee cup instead of me, biting her lip.
“I like you, Cate,” I said, letting it out in a rush. “And I don’t know exactly what that means. I’ve liked the men I’ve been with. Most of them. Some of them. But I—I like you too. I like you more. A lot more.” It was frustrating and giddy, fumbling to express something that was so big and intricate and yet was delivered to other people in the kind of silly phrases you’d doodle in the margins of a notebook. I like you.
I expected Cate to say something back. I expected her to break open with gratitude, to return the sentiment. She was the one who was good at this; she was the one who was practiced in saying the right things to women. It only seemed fair.
“It doesn’t have to mean anything more than what you want it to mean.” Cate stood. “But if you’re going to say things like that, I need to know you’re serious.” She wasn’t accusatory, just focused. “You don’t owe me anything at all, Morrow. I just wish you’d give me any of the trust you gave to Junior. You trusted him, no questions asked, no matter how many times he let you down. Don’t you see that?”
“I do now. I wasn’t thinking of you. No,” I corrected, “actually, I did think of you, but I’ve never—and like I said, nothing happened between me and him.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to be smart about myself too. Even if I am heartless.” She lightly touched her chest. “By now you must know I’m nobody’s experiment.”
* * *
We did not find the Grassis. Not that day. Not the next day, or the next. We stayed in Freshwater, and we tried to cover the place systematically, on foot. All three of us were nervous about splitting up. Somebody was still coming after us, an unknown threat: not Bonnie’s attacker, not the Bellanger boys. Our strange specter, a fear that kept changing form. As a compromise, we broke the group apart but stayed close, meeting at the ends of blocks or on quiet cul-de-sacs. We tried not to draw too much attention to ourselves. My mother’s face was still appearing on the news, and now Patricia’s too. I assumed even I could be showing up in headlines. Josephine Morrow, vanishing mysteriously at the end of her first year in med school, another echo of Bellanger’s own long-ago failure.
Nobody had seen Angela or Gina. There were no friends-of-friends, no neighbors, no colleagues, nobody at the homeless shelter who’d taken them in, nobody at the county jail who’d booked them. The Grassis had dropped right off the face of the planet and, apparently, taken my mother with them. Some people would talk about the birds when we asked—strange business—but most of them seemed to treat it with a rote discomfort, a bizarre but unrepeated incident that everyone could put behind them now. We heard occasional anecdotes about housecats eating the birds, or disconnected power lines. Nothing helpful to us.