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When 17-year-old Arbor Hayes' best friend turns up alive after a mysterious six-month disappearance, she must piece together the fragments of her story to make sense of what happened. But as clues e...
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I stand on the front porch and breathe in, the air musky with the scent of autumn. Emma pauses, waiting for me to move, but my feet are rooted in place. Hanging out with her is the last thing I want to do.
My muscles tense, and my breath comes out in a shallow huff. "So what do you want to do? We could go to Mey's house. She asks about you all the time." Plus, there's safety in numbers. Emma will be less likely to twist my words if someone else is around.
"I'm not ready to see friends yet." Emma twirls her dark hair around her fingers before tossing it over her shoulder. "What about that Amish place? The one with the pies?"
My brows arch. "You mean Yoder's?"
"Duh. We go there every summer."
Emma and I have been going to Yoder's since pre-school and we always order the same thing. For me, it's their chocolate cream pie, but Emma prefers the chocolate peanut butter, even though I've told her a million times the smell makes me want to gag.
"If that's what you want." She follows me down the steps to my car, and pours herself into the passenger seat. I slip in next to her and buckle my seatbelt.
"I take it you had no idea about this?" Emma asks as I pull out of the driveway. Her fingers look unusually long and skeletal as they pull the safety strap across her chest and fasten it into place.
The sun glares through the trees. I slide on my sunglasses but keep my eyes on the road. "I knew."
"Sure you did." Her tone is sarcastic. "You keep forgetting that I know when you lie."
On the surface I stay composed, but my stomach turns inside out. Of course, she's not going to make this easy. Nothing's been easy since she came home. "My mom's been talking about us getting together for a while now. I didn't know it would be today, but I knew it was coming."
When I pause at a stop sign, I drag my gaze from the road and find Emma staring at me. Her eyes are outlined in a heavy, black eyeliner that comes to a point at the outside corner of her lids. The style gives her features a tougher edge, but it matches her black leggings and cropped sweater, the shiny leather combat boots laced half-way up her calves. It's a look she would have never attempted before, but it flatters her newly slim frame—even if it is a tad dramatic.
And that's when I remember. "Mom said the police found your missing shoe in the woods." I turn back to the road as my car lurches across the intersection.
From the corner of my eye, I see her turn away. "Yep. Don't know how they missed it the first fifty times they looked."
"So, that's where you were then? Because your shoe must mean you were there at one point, right? It wouldn't have ended up there on its own."
Emma's quiet, and I realize now how it must have sounded. Like I'm picking apart her story. When her eyes shift back to me, a shiver of unease works its way up my spine.
