Page 36 of The Missing Half

“Just go away.” Her plea screws into my chest. I may not like the person she’s become, but I can tell she’s genuinely afraid.

“Lauren, we—”

“Nic, please.”

I shoot a sideways glance at Jenna, then force out the words. “We know about Brad!”

Silence. For a long moment, there’s nothing. Then the slide of a lock, the twist of a knob. The door creaks open a few inches to reveal a sliver of Lauren’s face.

“You know about him and Kasey?”

Chapter Nineteen

Everything inside me drops. Angry tears sting my eyes. I’ve been mad for years, mad at the man who took Kasey, mad at God or the universe or random fucking chance for allowing the person he chose to be my sister. But I’ve also spent that time thinking I knew everything there was to know about her. Whatever this “Kasey and Brad” thing is—it knocks me out at the knees. I may not know the details yet, but I know it is bad. It is wrong.

I can’t seem to speak, so Jenna does. “We don’t know everything, but we do know about them.”

Lauren scans the street behind us, then says, “Fine. You can come in. Just—hurry.” The moment we’re through the door, she closes it and twists the deadbolt. “Here. Come into the living room.”

We follow her, and somewhere beyond my haze of shock and confusion, I register eggshell-colored walls, dark wood furniture, family photos framed in silver. The Tates clearly have more money than Kasey and I ever did, but it’s sterilized, cookie-cutter. As if it were intentionally designed to be the set of some wholesome, universally appealing Midwest sitcom.The Tates: America’s Favorite Family.A clamor of little footsteps reverberates around the house like a tinystorm. Beth Anne. Lauren said Matthew was out of town. I wonder vaguely where Thomas is.

In the living room, bright plastic toys are strewn across the rug and crumbs litter the coffee table. Lauren goes to the window, peers out, and twists the blinds tightly shut. There’s so much we need to ask her, so much I don’t understand.

“How did you find out?” she says once we’re all sitting down, Jenna and me on the couch, Lauren across from us in an armchair. Her back is rigid, fingers jittery. “About the affair?”

Affair.The word slices through me. It doesn’t fit, not when it comes to Kasey and Brad. Kasey, who spent her last summer alive reading textbooks and lying curled up in bed with me on weekend mornings. Kasey, who was only nineteen when she was taken. And Brad who is our dad’s age, who is a dad himself. Something floats into my mind, a memory of Kasey and me lying tangled in her quilt. “They’re such boys,” she would always say when she talked about the guys we hung out with that summer. “I need a man, Nic. A real fucking man.”

“It doesn’t matter how we know,” Jenna says. “But that’s basically all we do know. Can you tell us the details?”

Before Lauren can respond, Beth Anne launches herself into the room.

“Mama!” She’s in gingham shorts and white T-shirt with frills on the shoulders, her blond hair in unruly curls. “Time for pool now.”

“Beth Anne,” Lauren says. “We’re supposed to be having downtime. Why aren’t you watching your movie?”

“Because I wanna go pool!”

“We can’t go to the pool right now. I just put your brother down for a nap.”

“But I wanna,” Beth Anne says with a dramatic wobble in her voice. “I wanna play fishy.”

“We’re not doing that right now. We’re not going outside. Do you hear me? If you don’t wanna watch your movie, why don’t I get you a cookie and you can color in the kitchen while Mama talks for a minute, okay?” She stands, steers Beth Anne into the kitchen, and reappears a few minutes later alone.

Without her daughter there, it’s easier to hang on to my anger, which is what all my incredulity and bewilderment are turning into. How could Lauren have known this and kept it a secret for all these years? “Tell us what happened between them,” I say.

She twists her wedding band around her finger, her eyes darting anxiously around the room. “If I tell you, that’s it. You can’t come back, and you can’t tell anyone I talked to you.”

Jenna and I both nod.

Lauren sighs. “Brad and Kasey were sleeping together that summer, the summer she went missing. I don’t know exactly how it started. I mean, I know your families were friends, but other than that…” She hitches a shoulder. “Anyway, I caught them one day in her car. She was on a break. I was taking the trash out in the alley behind the shop, and I saw her in the back seat with him. I was so shocked I almost didn’t realize it was Brad.”

“How did you know him?” Jenna says.

Lauren looks surprised at the question. “Just from around town. My parents knew him and his wife. And their boys were a little older than us, but before they graduated, I saw Brad and Sandy every once in a while at school functions and stuff. When I confronted Kasey about it, she denied it. But then I told her I’d seen them together, her and Brad—actually, I probably called him Mr. Andrews.”

She lets out a sad laugh, then says, “Anyway, that’s when she finally opened up. She told me they’d been seeing each other basically since the beginning of summer. He worked at Funland, obviously, which was near the record store, and on his lunch break, he’d come over and the two of them would sit in her car and…I don’t know. Talk. Hook up.

“She made me promise never to tell anyone,” Lauren continues. “And I said something like ‘If you have to keep it a secret, it’s probably not a good idea to be doing in the first place.’ She was being reckless. Stupid. If anyone found out, it could destroy his family. But also, you know how it is. If word got out that she was involved with someone like that, people would make it her fault. She’d be a homewrecker. She didn’t exactly take it well.”

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