Let Them Dare novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Parking Lot

When the exam ended at noon I walked out of the room and went straight to my locker in the lobby.

My phone was where I had left it, face down on top of my bag.

I opened the photos first.

I scrolled to last March and found nothing.

I scrolled to the day of the report and found a gap of four days, with no pictures between them.

I opened my messages and searched for Dane's name.

The thread was there, and it went back to the fall before last.

Every message from that March was gone, and every picture was gone.

Where they had been, there was an unbroken stretch of Dane saying good morning.

I stood very still.

In the recently deleted folder there was nothing at all.

Somebody had emptied it, and the date on the empty folder was Wednesday night.

It was the same night as the password.

"Selah?" Pia said, coming up beside me with her jacket over her arm. "You look like you want to hit somebody."

"I do."

"Great. Can I watch?"

I put my phone in my pocket.

The class was coming out through the double doors in clusters, loud and light and relieved.

Out in the lot they were all gathering around bus three again.

Dane stood at the bottom of the bus steps with his back to the sun, and a crowd had already collected around him.

Delaney was a few feet from him, with her purse in both hands.

She had stopped playing for the room.

I watched her see me, and she did not smile, and she did not cry.

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