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Her mom cries. Of course she does.
“Sometimes… sometimes you just have to feel it,” August tells her. She looks out over the water as her mom hugs the file to her chest. It’s over. It’s finally over. “Because it deserves to be felt.”
Her mom sleeps on the old air mattress that night, tucked in on August’s bedroom floor, and in the dark, she talks about what she might do with her time now that the case is solved. August smiles faintly at the cracked ceiling, listening to her toss around ideas.
“Maybe cooking,” she says. “Maybe I’ll finally learn how to bake. Maybe I’ll get into ceramics. Ooh, do you think I’d like kickboxing?”
“Based on the number of self-defense classes you made me take when I was thirteen, yeah, I think you would.”
She reaches for August’s hand where it’s dangling over the edge of her mattress, and August pictures her doing the same when she was a kid and shaking through a nightmare. She has always loved August. That’s never not been true.
“One thing, though,” her mom says. “This… Biyu person. The one who lived with Augie. Could I meet her?”
And suddenly August’s throat is almost too thick to answer.
“I really wish you could,” she manages. “But she doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Oh,” her mom says. She gives August’s hand a squeeze. “That’s okay.”
And, somehow, it actually sounds like she’s done asking questions.
August lies awake for another hour after her mom falls asleep, staring at the moonlight on the wall. If, after all these years, Suzette Landry can let the case go, maybe one day, August can let Jane go too.
There are a lot of impossibilities in August’s life. A lot of things that transpire despite the odds, despite every law of this world and the next saying it shouldn’t work out.
It’s November, and Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes is still $14,327 dollars away from shuttering for good, when her mom calls to tell her that her grandmother’s estate has been settled and she should get a check in the mail next week. She doesn’t think much of it—after all, her mom said there hadn’t been that much left.
She has to sign for the envelope when it arrives, and she gets so distracted arguing with Wes over what to order on tonight’s pizza that she almost forgets to open it altogether.
It’s light, thin. It feels inconsequential, like a tax return when you work minimum wage and you know the IRS is sending you a bullshit check for thirty-six bucks. She slides her finger down the seam anyway.
It’s written out to August. Signed at the bottom. Right there, in the total box: $15,000.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”
Three months after Jane vanishes, August’s grandmother’s money—the money from a woman August met twice, who paid her tuition for thirteen years in adherence to tradition but who couldn’t be fucked to look for her own son—silently makes up the difference.
She holds the check in her hands, and she thinks of the box her mom found in her grandparents’ attic, all of the unopened letters from Augie, and it feels dirty. She didn’t earn it. She doesn’t want it. It should go where it can be transformed into something good.
So, she digs the account numbers up from the office in the back, and she wires the money to Billy anonymously, and she clocks into work just like she does every day. She takes her table assignments, fixes herself a coffee. Slaps palms with Winfield when he clocks in. Puts in an order of pancakes for table seven. Stares at the spot on the wall by the men’s room where she’s returned the opening day photo she stole.
The front door flies open, and there’s all six-feet-something of Billy filling the doorway, eyes wide, a sheen of sweat across his expansive, bald forehead.
Lucie freezes halfway out the kitchen door when she sees him, plates of pancakes balanced up and down each arm.
“What?” she asks flatly. “What happened?”
“God happened,” he says. “We got the money. We’re buying the unit.”
And, for the first time in her career, Lucie spills an order on the floor.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, but they finish up their tables and close the restaurant, Lucie nudging the last customer out the door with a free takeaway dessert to get them moving faster. The minute they’re out, she shuts the door and flips the OPEN sign around.
“Closed for private party,” she says, and she crosses to the bar and yanks Winfield into a furious kiss.
“I’ll drink to that,” Jerry whoops through the kitchen window.
August grins, joy swarming in her stomach. “Cheers.”
