Chapter 20: Closer

Keira's POV

The deputy's lights came through the dust a little before ten.

By then I was sitting on the diner step with my knees pulled up.

Drew had texted me from the shoulder: She's safe. Her father's coming.

He texted again when the deputy put Keeley in the back of the cruiser, wrapped in a foil blanket.

She did not fight him.

My mother had gone to Tegan's house to sit with her parents.

She had left me the key and a plate under foil.

"Lock the door, and don't be stupid," she had said.

At eleven, Drew's truck turned into the lot.

He climbed out slowly, and the dust fell off him in sheets.

It was in his hair and his eyebrows and the creases of his jacket.

He stopped at the bottom of the step.

"She's with her father," he said. "She's going to the hospital in the morning to be looked at."

"Did you touch her?"

"No. You said no."

"I didn't say that about her."

"I decided it was the same rule."

I looked at him for a long time.

I had asked him to find her and call the deputy.

I had expected him to come back proud of it.

He just stood there with the dust drying on his face.

He had called first and gone second.

He had stayed beside the girl who shoved me to my death, and he had let her choose, and he had not told her what to do.

He had moved first, and he had not asked me to notice.

"What did she say?" I asked.

"I'll tell you tomorrow. It's not for tonight."

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