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“To be fair, you got kicked off the team for that one,” she said. “You paid your dues by not being allowed to try out for the baseball team ever again.”
“If that was the only prank I ever played, I wouldn’t be worried,” he said.
“I guess you were a handful back then,” she said. “But you calmed down a lot when we were together.”
“You finally gave me a reason to stay out of detention,” he said. “You were never there.”
“Because I never spoke to anyone, except you,” she pointed out. “I kept my head down and did my work. I did everything I could to deflect attention rather than draw it to me.”
“You were always quiet, but it got worse after Camree Lynn disappeared,” he remembered.
“That’s what happens when your best friend goes missing and no one believes you when you say she wouldn’t run away,” she said.
“I get the part about reading her journal and finding out how badly she wanted to leave Cider Creek, but surely that wasn’t all they had to go on,” he said.
“No,” she said. “There was more. She had been fighting a lot with her parents, who were getting divorced. The whole situation shook Camree Lynn up pretty badly. She threatened to run away a couple of times, but I know for a fact she was only making those threats to get attention. She told me so herself because she decided her parents might try to work things out if they believed the divorce was affecting her badly.”
“Sounds like Camree Lynn to think something like that,” he mused.
“Her parents were too far gone to bring their marriage back,” Reese said. “They sat her down and told her as much and I’m pretty certain she was talking to guys she shouldn’t have been in chat rooms even though no evidence was found.”
“A troubled teen who was known to threaten to run away could have made for an easy mark for a creep,” he said.
“My thoughts exactly,” she agreed. “But the sheriff didn’t think so. Neither did her parents. They got it inside their heads their daughter was making a play for their attention and would come home within twenty-four hours.”
“I remember the case,” he said. “Camree Lynn never came back to school. A body was never found.”
“Because they didn’t look for one,” she quipped. “It’s hard to find someone when you don’t even bother to search for them.”
“Even teachers believed she ran away, from what I remember,” he said. “They were overheard talking about her in the teacher’s lounge.”
“What if she didn’t?”
MUCHMOREOFthis talk and Darren would go pick up his twins and never let them leave his sight again. Like he said before, as hard as this stage was, he feared this was going to be the easy part of bringing up children.
“You mentioned her before,” he said to Reese.
“She was on my mind,” she admitted.
“There could be other explanations than you thinking you’d found her trail,” he said.
“How did you even know that I was thinking that?” she asked.
He shrugged, not really wanting to recall all those little details about her that he’d been trying to shut out of his thoughts for a decade. “But it makes sense that you would be returning home at some point because of your grandfather’s death. Have you been back since he passed?”
She shook her head and then twisted her fingers together. “There hasn’t been a reason to.”
“Family,” he said. Although, she’d made it clear that family wasn’t exactly a priority for her.
“We’ve been spread out until recently,” she said. “My sister Liz is probably the last person who would come home.”
“Do you talk to them on a regular basis?” he asked.
“No,” she admitted. “Pretty much all I do in Dallas is work.”
“Sounds about right,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
