“Did she tell you she was a virgin?
“What? No way.” He looks at me incredulously. “Seriously?”
I nod. He clearly didn’t know any more than I did. I feel like I’m betraying her by telling him. But I have to tell someone. I have to try to understand. I feel like I’m drowning.
“How is that even possible? She’s a virgin?”
“Not anymore,” I answer.
“And that’s what happened.” He sobers. It’s not even a question.
“That’s what happened.”
“Why would that break you up?” he asks, confused.
“I don’t know. I don’t get any of it. She said she was ruined and she was using me to ruin what was left.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I just shake my head. I have no answers. I asked her the same thing and she never gave me any.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Nothing about her has made sense since the day she got here. She just wanted to pretend it didn’t matter. I did, too.” It’s the most I’ve ever said to anyone about her and when I hear it come out of my mouth I know how it sounds.
“You know she loves you, right?”
“She told you that?” I hate the hope in my voice.
“No, but—”
“I didn’t think so.” I don’t want him taking pity on me with false hope. She either said it or she didn’t. And she didn’t. Then again, neither did I.
“Josh—”
Drew doesn’t get a chance to finish because his mom calls us in for dinner, and I walk out before he can say anything else.
When we get to the kitchen, Mrs. Leighton hugs me and Drew walks away to pull a playlist up on the computer because it’s his turn tonight. Everything is like normal.
And Sunshine isn’t anywhere.
We’re just about to bring the food to the table when Mr. Leighton calls out from the family room where he always watches the news before dinner. Mrs. Leighton yells back that it’s time to eat and he needs to shut the TV off, but he calls her in again, and she must recognize something in his tone because she doesn’t question it this time. She just goes, and we all follow.
And this is the moment before. The moment when everything is still familiar and understandable. The moment before everything shifts. I’ve had a few of these moments in my life. The moment I walk from the kitchen to the family room is one of them; the moment before I see the face on the television in the Leighton living room at Sunday dinner.
I don’t even know why he called us in here until I follow everyone’s eyes to the television screen. And then I know everything. I can’t even hear what they’re saying because the picture is screaming at me so loudly that it drowns out everything else. Mr. Leighton rewinds the DVR and turns it up, but I still barely process the words.
High school student Aidan Richter was arrested this afternoon after confessing to the brutal 2009 beating and attempted murder of, then fifteen year-old, Emilia Ward, affectionately referred to by locals as the Brighton Piano Girl. The crime had gone unsolved for nearly three years until Richter, himself only sixteen at the time of the attack, arrived with his parents and attorney and surrendered himself into police custody earlier today. No other details have been released and so far no comment has been made by either family. A press conference is scheduled to take place at 9:30 tomorrow morning.
“It’s uncanny,” Mr. Leighton says. But it’s not and he knows it. There’s nothing uncanny about it. It’s like tumblers in a lock falling into place. Everything clicks.
brutal… beating… attempted murder… Emilia… Piano Girl
He pauses the TV on a split-screen of a picture of the girl I have been looking at across my garage for months. Younger. No make-up. No black clothes. Smiling. Even with the dark hair and dark eyes, there is nothing dark about her. She’s all light. Like sunshine.
“I remember seeing that on the news when it happened. It was a terrible story. It looks just like her,” Mrs. Leighton says, and I wonder if she can’t make herself believe it, or if she honestly doesn’t.
“It is her.”
We all turn, and standing in the entrance to the room is Sunshine’s brother.
“I knocked, but no one answered the door,” he says, but he’s not really talking to us. He’s staring at the TV. “Where is she?”
The Leightons look at him like he’s a crazy person who just barged into their house. Their faces are carved in disbelief, but there’s already so much shock in the room right now that it’s hard to figure out the source of it.
“Asher, Nastya’s brother,” I say, answering a question no one asked and hearing how wrong that name sounds coming out of my mouth.
“Emilia’s brother,” he corrects. “Where is she? I need to bring her home.” I know the home he’s talking about isn’t Margot’s. He’s taking her home to Brighton. He doesn’t sound angry. Just tired. Like he’s been living under all of this for such a long time and he just wants it to be over.
“She isn’t here.”
“Margot said she would be here. She said to try your house first,” he looks at me, “and if she wasn’t there she’d be here for dinner.” There’s an uneasiness in his voice that matches his expression.
“She didn’t come tonight,” Mrs. Leighton says gently, and then turns her eyes, full of sympathy and questions, on me.
“Why don’t you just track her phone?” I ask bitterly. Mostly because I can tell he’s edgy and nervous and worried and he’s making me all of those things, too.
“She left her phone on her bed,” he answers, like he’s starting to understand that she didn’t just forget it. She doesn’t want to be found.
Asher tells us what’s happened since this afternoon in Brighton. As soon as her parents got the call from the police, he got in the car to pick her up so she wouldn’t have to drive alone. In the meantime, they kept calling, trying to get hold of her, figuring they could get to her before it hit the news here. But no one’s been able to reach her.
Within minutes we’re all on our phones as if we actually believe it will do any good. There really isn’t anybody to call, but it makes us feel like we’re doing something, even if it is useless. If she left, and she didn’t bring her phone, she did it for a reason, and that reason is that she doesn’t want us knowing where she is.