Chapter 16: Before Midnight

I read it sitting up in bed with the quilt around my shoulders.

"Should Mommy get a copy?"

Mommy was downstairs making cinnamon rolls.

I could hear her singing along to the radio, off-key.

The door between our rooms was still open a crack.

Corey was standing on the other side of it with his phone in his hand.

He'd seen it too.

"There's nothing on that camera," he said quietly. "There can't be. That was the desk."

"I know."

"So they're bluffing."

"Maybe." I got out of bed. "And maybe at midnight my mother watches a blurry video of you on my bed and some stranger tells her what it means."

He rubbed his face with both hands.

"What do you want to do?"

"Tell her first."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"All of it?"

"All of it."

I took my phone out onto the back step in my socks and called Crew.

He picked up on the first ring.

"You saw," he said.

"I saw. There's something else first."

I told him about the laundry room.

I didn't make it pretty and I didn't make it small.

I said I'd asked.

He didn't say anything for so long I checked if the call had dropped.

"Did he ask?" Crew said finally. "Every time?"

"Every time."

"Okay."

"Crew."

"I said okay." His voice was rough. "Give me a minute to mean it."

I watched my breath go white in the yard.

"I'm telling my mom and him at nine," I said. "Before that account does."

"About him?"

"About both of you."

Another long silence.

"Then I'll be there," he said, and hung up.

At nine I asked my mother and stepfather to sit down at the kitchen table.

My mother took off her oven mitts.

My stepfather kept his coffee.

Corey stood behind my chair with his hands on the back of it.

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