Chapter 9: Southbound

I read Griffin's statement four times.

I could not mistake her.

He'd held my hand across every street until I was ten.

At one in the morning I knocked on Bo's door.

He opened it in a T-shirt, hair flattened on one side.

I held up the phone.

He read it standing in the doorway, and his jaw worked.

"He's lying," he said.

"He's very good at it. He's been practicing on me since I was eight."

Bo handed the phone back.

"When's the train?"

"Thursday night. You don't have to come."

"I'm your alibi, Tilden. The alibi comes."

"You hate trains."

"I hate being told what I hate."

The captain gave us both leave. The cook packed us a grocery bag of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, each one labeled in marker.

Dad cut my phone off Tuesday.

Wednesday, Bo dropped an old phone on my desk in the lab with a new number already in it.

"It was my mom's," he said. "She upgraded. Don't make it weird."

I took the memo screenshot off the dead phone and put it on the new one first. Before my contacts. Before anything.

The southbound train left the harbor town at eight on Thursday night.

Bo ate three sandwiches before the lighthouse was gone.

"Tell me about him," he said. "Griffin."

So I told him.

The driveway. The handkerchief. The peppermint.

Good girl, I'll protect you from now on.

How the words had turned into a leash so slowly I never felt it tighten.

Bo listened without interrupting. He's bad at that, normally.

"Give me your knee," he said when I was done.

"What?"

"The one he wrapped. You keep touching it when you talk about him."

I hadn't known I did that.

I pulled up the leg of my jeans.

The scar ran across my kneecap, pale and ragged, the size of a thumb.

He looked at it a while.

He didn't touch it.

"Does it hurt?"

"No. It's just the only thing about me that's only mine."

He looked up at me.

Then he got up fast and said he needed air.

I gave him two minutes.

Then I followed him.

The vestibule between the cars was dark and loud and cold.

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