Page 43 of The Missing Half

She lets out a half laugh, half groan. “Why does everything have to be so hard with you?”

“I’m being thorough!” I give her my best innocent look. “You taught me that.”

She rolls her eyes. “God, sometimes you can have serious little-sister energy.” The words swell inside me, warm and golden. But there’s something beneath the feeling too, something like an ache. Before I can look at it too closely, Jenna grabs one of my couch pillows and tosses it at my head, and then we’re both laughing. After a moment, it fades. “By the way,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to ask. Did you ever reach out to that detective? The one who inherited your sister’s case after Wyler’s promotion?”

For a moment, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Then my mind flashes to the other week, after we met with Wyler. Jenna suggested we reach out to his successor, and I said I’d do it. But then we’d met with McLean and Lauren, and I’d been so distracted by all this Brad stuff that it fell right out of my head. “Shit,” I say. “I totally forgot.”

“Do you just want me to do it?”

“No, no, no. I’ll do it tonight.”

“Okay,” she says with a little grin. “So stubborn. Hey, do you wanna go through the stuff you found in your car now?”

“Yeah.” I grab my backpack and pull out the plastic bag. I put the CD case on the coffee table, followed by the nail polish and lip gloss, then turn the bag over and let the rest fall out in a rain of junk.

Jenna plucks one of the receipts from the pile. “Mind if I take pictures?”

I don’t know how a fast-food receipt could possibly solve the disappearances of our sisters, but I just say, “Go for it.” She snaps a photo while I take another from the pile.

“What’s this?” she asks. “Does it mean anything to you?”

I glance over to see her holding a business card, something I hadn’t noticed this morning. I lean over to read the finely printed words:O’Neil’s Auto—Oil, Tires, and Body.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe it’s the last place we got our oil changed? I took pictures of the car’s interior, so I can check.” I pick up my phone, navigate to the photo I’d taken of the windshield, then zoom in to view the oil change sticker. “No, never mind. They don’t match.”

“Hmm.” Jenna takes another picture while I start scanning the rest of the photos on my phone. “Oh my god,” she says, reaching for the big black binder. “Is this all your old music?”

I grin. “Yeah, I had so many flashbacks when I went through it this morning.”

She unzips it and a laugh bubbles out of her. “Spice Girls, of course, classic. And the Killers. God, I loved ‘Mr. Brightside.’ ”

“Who didn’t?”

She flips through the pages slowly, a small smile on her lips. I go back to the pictures on my phone. A few minutes pass in silence until it is broken by an odd, constricted sound like a moan caught in the back of a throat. I glance over and see Jenna’s smile has vanished.

“Jenna?”

She looks up quickly as if she’s been caught shoplifting.

“Are you okay?”

She glances down at the binder and then up again. “Yeah. Sorry, I just— What is this?”

She points at one of our mix CDs, one of the ones Kasey decorated with a marker. In her neat, loopy handwriting are the wordsWe are not two, we are one.Around them are little multicolored dots, yellow stars, pink hearts.

“Kasey burned that one,” I say. “With stuff from the seventies and eighties. She loved all that kind of music. That’s a lyric from one of her favorite songs.”

“ ‘Strangers,’ ” Jenna says. “By the Kinks.”

“You know it?”

“I…” Jenna clears her throat. “It reminds me of Jules.”

I realize then what’s happening. I know because it happened to me only a few hours earlier. A memory of her sister has knocked her out at the knees, like walking along a sidewalk and falling into a pothole she didn’t see coming.

“Kasey liked it too,” I say. “Loved it, actually. She wrote out the lyrics to it all the time. On her homework, her binders, everywhere.” I hesitate. “The one that got me earlier was ‘I Want It That Way’ by the Backstreet Boys.”

I was trying to make her laugh, but Jenna’s face remains stony. Then, abruptly, she says, “Where’s your bathroom?”

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