Page 44 of The Missing Half

“Oh, uh, it’s through there.” I nod toward my bedroom.

She stands and disappears through the doorway.

“Shit,” I mutter, slumping back against the couch. Had I been narcissistic, talking about Kasey, who felt like an extension of me, when Jenna was lost in thoughts of Jules? Or had I sounded flippant when I mentioned the Backstreet Boys? Despite how our relationship started, Jenna is the closest thing I have to a friend right now, but I don’t know how to behave in the face of her grief. Probably because I’ve never dealt with my own.

I stand up and walk to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. I was trying not to drink tonight, but Jenna could obviously use a glass, and this investigation has a way of chipping through my willpower. I take my phone with me, continuing to scroll through the photos ofour car’s interior as I go. As I’m screwing off the wine top, I study the picture of our oil change sticker, then swipe to the next, a photo of our odometer. I’m about to flip to the next when something catches my eye, and I set the bottle of wine down halfway through my pour.

“Wait a second.” I squint at the photo, then flick back to the previous one. “Jenna!” I call.

I hear my bathroom door open, and a moment later she walks back into the living room. She still looks rattled, but her eyes are dry. “What?”

I tap my phone’s screen. “According to this sticker, the last time we got our oil changed was August 2nd. At the time, our car’s mileage—the mileage on this sticker—was 164,021 miles.”

“Okay…”

“In the picture of our odometer”—I swipe to the other photo—“the one that stopped clocking miles the night Kasey went missing, the night of August 17th, the car has 164,589.” I look up at her. “That’s a difference of over five hundred miles in, like, two weeks.”

She hesitates. “Well, a hundred and fifty of those are from driving to Grand Rapids that night…”

“Which leaves…” I look around the room. “Three hundred and fifty miles?”

“That doesn’t sound right?” she says.

“That doesn’t sound possible. There’s no way Kasey and I drove that much in two weeks. Especially because those were the weeks when she was refusing to go out and studying alone in her room most nights. We were going to work and stuff, and I mean, I was still going out some, but I got a ride most of the time. Which means…”

Jenna finishes my thought. “Kasey went somewhere else that night.”

“Or,” I say, “in the two weeks leading up to her disappearance, without telling anyone, she was sneaking off enough to put over three hundred miles on our car.”

But where had she gone?

Chapter Twenty-three

A little after six the following Saturday evening, I pedal up to my old childhood home, drop my feet to the pavement, and pull my phone from my backpack. When I see there are no notifications from Jenna, a small bubble of exasperation swells inside me.

The past few days since I last saw her have been a blur. The end of summer is fast approaching, and Funland is getting its usual surge of parties before all the kids go back to school. And because I missed my regular AA meeting that night Brad gave me a ride home, I had to track down another in South Bend to make up for it. Throughout it all, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Kasey and Brad and those unexplained miles on our odometer. I’ve hardly had time to scarf food down before I fall asleep at night, let alone make time to touch base with Jenna. So I suppose I can’t blame her for her radio silence when I’m doing the same.

And really, I don’t need a confirmation text to know she’ll be here. We made the plan to talk to my dad before she left my apartment on Tuesday night, and she’s more eager to ask him questions than I am.

Because I couldn’t come up with a single believable explanation for randomly introducing a new friend to my dad, we had to think of another way to spring Jenna on him. We decided that I’d show upalone for dinner, then after an hour, I’d say my friend was swinging by to give me a ride home. If my dad didn’t invite Jenna in, she’d ask to use the bathroom and we’d go from there.

I walk my bike to the stairs leading to the porch and lean it against them. I called my dad earlier in the week, so he’s expecting me, but he doesn’t know the real reason I’m here, and my dread builds with every step I take closer to the front door. When I reach it, I hesitate, as if the air in front of me has calcified. My relationship with my dad has grown distant, and barging in seems intrusive somehow. But it feels awkward to ring the doorbell of the home where I grew up, so I do what I always do and split the difference, knocking as I enter.

“Hello!” I call. “Dad? It’s me.”

He appears in the doorway that leads to the kitchen. “Nic,” he says with a genuine smile that cracks me open a little. “Come on in. You hungry? I just got out stuff to make sandwiches.”

We walk through the living room and into the kitchen, and like I do every time I’m here, I marvel at how little has changed. There’s the old plaid couch where Kasey and I used to sit till late into the night, watching movies and sharing a package of Oreos. There’s the ring on the coffee table where my dad left a beer one time, and my mom, when she discovered it, yelled for a full ten minutes. There’s the dining room table that was never used till Kasey went missing and then was transformed into the central hub of our search.

“Ham and cheese okay with you?” my dad says.

“Sure.” I sit at the little kitchen table while he piles slices of ham and provolone onto two pieces of white bread. Once the sandwiches are plated, he spoons some store-bought potato salad next to each.

“Thanks,” I say as he sets a plate in front of me. “This looks great.”

“Well, it’s not exactly gourmet, but it does the trick.” He opens the refrigerator door. “You want something to drink? I have water, orange juice, beer—” His voice cuts out suddenly and he clears his throat.

With his back turned to me, I don’t have to hide my eye roll. Just like Kasey’s disappearance, the DWI is something my dad insists on pretending never happened. “Water’s fine,” I say, then, when I seehis hand hovering over the row of beers, I add, “You can drink, Dad. I don’t mind.”

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