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“I don’t think you would. Because you know they wouldn’t want your life to become about them and only them. You know they wouldn’t want you to stop living just because they might’ve.”
Bram froze with his fork halfway to his mouth.
“You’re right.”
Zachary nodded. If there was one thing he felt confident about it was his ability to determine who would and would not become monomaniacally fixated on the cold case of someone they loved.
Too bad there wasn’t much call for that.
“My dad wanted to move. After Sarah. He didn’t want to be in the house where she’d disappeared from. It was too hard for him. My mom refused because what if Sarah came back and we weren’t there.”
Bram winced.
“They fought about it for a year. Then my dad lived in a hotel for six months until he could convince her to move.”
“And you came to Garnet Run. Do you have family here or something?”
Zachary huffed out a dark laugh.
“Nope. My mom thought Sarah might have come here at some point. A psychic told her so.”
Bram nodded as if psychics were a commonplace source of information, so Zachary went on.
“She’d consulted a few but she became friendly—kind of—with one. I’m not sure what she said the connection was. I know my mom told us, but it’s been a long time.”
After the fact. She’d told them after the fact—months after, in fact. Once their Cheyenne house had been sold and Zachary had started school at Garnet Run High.
He woke early one morning. Hours before school. To them arguing in bitten-back voices in the kitchen.
“That’s how we ended up in this nowhere town? A goddamn psychic? This is still about Sarah and all I wanted was the chance to be a family again.”
“We’ll be a family again when Sarah comes home!” his mother had snarled.
Zachary had pulled the blanket over his head and wondered if he’d ever not be haunted by the sister who was more a part of his life now that she was gone than she’d been when she was there.
But Garnet Run had turned out to be good for Zachary. The students at his new school knew him as the new kid, and there were few enough new arrivals to Garnet Run that this made him an object of curiosity rather than approbation. They were interested in him coming from “the city.” Interested enough, anyway, that he was able to make a few casual friends and not dread going to school so much that he was consumed by constant dread.
It helped that no one here knew about Sarah. And he certainly wasn’t going to tell them.
That had been one of the strangest things: the first day after Sarah’s disappearance at his old school, the people who had tormented him didn’t know what to do. Nothing about him had changed. All their insults were still relevant. But as they opened their mouths to sling them, they remembered that something tragic had just happened to him and they didn’t say them. It was as if some higher, greater power than they had bullied Zachary, so they didn’t feel they had to.
It had worn off, of course.
So, yeah, Zachary didn’t care how they’d ended up here; he’d just been glad to leave Cheyenne.
“Sorry,” Zachary said into the awkward silence. “I know this whole conversation is kind of a downer.”
Bram shook his head. “It’s your past.”
And that, of course, was undeniable.
Chapter Eleven
Bram
Can I make dinner up to you? the text from Zachary had said. They’re showing The Wolf Man at the Odeon on Saturday. It’s a total classic (and not too scary, I swear). What do you say?
Bram had smiled at “and not too scary.”
I’m in, he’d replied.
The idea of Saturday Nights at the Odeon seemed to be recapturing the glamour of a bygone era of moviegoing. Or so the website suggested, with patrons encouraged to dress up and leave their phones at home.
Bram knocked on Zachary’s door at precisely 7:20 p.m. Zachary had been very specific. Bram grinned. He was strangely charmed by the other man’s attention to detail. Time had been a flexible and relative thing in his house growing up. It’d kind of had to be, with so many people jockeying for cereal and showers and the spot closest to the fire. Life with animals and gardens was about rhythm and sun and rain, not numbers on a clock. Left to his own devices, that was still how Bram preferred it—rising with the sun and letting the elements shape his day.
Zachary opened the door and Bram’s eyes got wide.
He always wore a suit on weekdays, and that was what Bram had assumed he’d wear tonight. In fact, he’d dressed to match. But Zachary was wearing wool trousers, a long-sleeved button-down, and a tight-fitting vest that exaggerated his slim build.
His curly dark hair was parted on the side and slicked back unsuccessfully, but Bram rejoiced at its resistance.
