Page 49 of The Missing Half

She lifts a hand. “It’s my mom. It’s the cancer.”

“Oh.” It’s so unexpected, for a moment, my brain can’t process it, as if she spoke the words in a foreign language. “Oh, Jenna. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve been so wrapped up in it all, I’ve just been letting everything else fall by the wayside. But I’m sorry for not texting you back. And about tonight…with everything going on, I honestly just forgot.”

“Oh. No. Of course. That’s okay.”

“With the cancer, you know, she has good days and bad days. Butrecently there’ve been more and more bad ones, and this past week has been the worst I’ve seen.”

I don’t know what to say. “Is she in the hospital?”

Jenna shakes her head. “She refuses to go. I don’t blame her, really. She’s been through a lot these past few months.”

“Is there anything I can do? You know, to help?”

“No. But thank you.”

I nod. Hesitate. Eventually, I say, “You were right. About Brad. I talked to my dad earlier and his alibis are worthless. Both of them. And I found something else too. In Kasey’s old room.” I feel like an asshole bringing up all of this right now, but I think Jenna would want to know what I discovered tonight no matter what else is going on in her life.

It must be true, because she says, “What’d you find?”

I tell her about the picture of Kasey at Nyona and the receipt from the day she went missing with the address scrawled on the back.

“You were right,” I say again. “I was being delusional because, you know, Brad’s like an uncle to me. At least he was. But he’s a bad guy, whether he was the one who took our sisters or not. And I’m finally ready to talk to him. He’s at the lake right now for that reunion they do every summer.” As I say this, the coincidence of the timing strikes me. Almost seven years ago to the day, Kasey was taken. “I think we should go.”

“Nic, it’s almost nine at night. We can’t go now.”

“In the morning, then.”

“I need to go to my mom’s tomorrow,” she says.

“Okay. No problem.” But I get the feeling that there’s something I’m missing, something she’s not telling me. “We can go after you’re done.”

“Nic,” she says. “Maybe it’d be best if we put a pin in all of this for a bit.”

“Wait—what?”

“With everything going on with my mom, this just doesn’t feel like the best timing.”

I study her face. Three weeks ago, Jenna would have given anorgan for answers about Jules’s disappearance. Now she doesn’t want to talk to the man who could be responsible for it? Something has to have happened this week that changed that—something other than her mom’s cancer.

“Jenna,” I say. “If something else is going on, you can tell me.”

“Look, I’d be lying if I said what happened to Lauren didn’t rattle me. I mean, approaching a kid on a playground is a pretty messed up thing to do to get someone to stop talking. So, yeah, I’m also worried that we don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.”

Something’s still not adding up. We were both unnerved by Lauren’s story, but afterwards, Jenna was nearly rabid to confront Brad.

“I get that,” I say. “But it also means we’re getting closer to the truth. I think we just need to talk to Brad. We’ve come this far. We need to find out what happened between him and my sister.”

“You’re not listening, Nic. I don’t have time right now. So…” She hesitates. “If you’re dead set on talking to Brad anytime soon, you’re just gonna have to do it on your own.”

My chin jerks back. “But—Jenna. I mean, I know how much you want to be there. Why don’t I just wait for you? It’ll be better with the two of us.”

It’s true, but the other truth is that I don’t want to do this on my own. If someone had told me three weeks ago, when Jenna first approached me in the Funland parking lot, that my friendship with her would turn into the best part of my life, I wouldn’t have believed it. But sometime when I wasn’t looking, that’s exactly what happened.

She sighs. “I don’t know how long this rough patch with my mom is gonna last. This one’s bad, and she has no one else. I can’t just leave her alone. So, like I said, if you wanna talk to Brad, that’s fine, but I’m not going to be able to do it with you.”

It occurs to me then that she might be bluffing. After all, I haven’t done a single thing on our sisters’ cases without her. Maybe she’s counting on me not taking her up on it.

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