“Just don’t go all Salinger and lock yourself up,” she warned. “Take her into town, to the mall and the movies. Do normal things. I don’t need her any weirder than she already is.”

Lucas bit back a comment, on the verge of blaming their daughter’s strangeness on both Caroline and himself. They hadn’t been able to get their shit together with each other and now their kid was perpetually pissed off. Whatever weirdness Jeanie had wasn’t his fault, it was their fault. But his thoughts were derailed, his defensiveness thrown off-kilter. Kurt Murphy hovered just inside the terminal, watching them part ways through the sliding glass door.

Caroline noticed Lucas staring into the terminal. She looked over her shoulder, lifted a hand and gave Kurt a wave, then turned back to Lucas. “I need to go. I should have checked in twenty minutes ago.”

“Yeah,” he said. “International.”

Her eyes dropped down to the space between them, as if inspecting the tips of her ballerina flats. He had watched her pack a pair of heels into her carry-on. She’d change out of those flats as soon as she stepped off the plane. Overwhelmed by the urge to grab her and kiss her as hard as he could, he wanted to beg her not to sleep with that pedantic prick.

Please, Carrie, don’t leave me. Don’t leave us. Don’t give up.

But before he could make his move, the muffled thud of bass slithered from inside the U-Haul’s cab. Both he and Caroline turned their heads to watch their daughter’s blond hair fly. She was dancing in her seat to a song that had come on the radio—music therapy. When Jeanie was sad, the music was loud. Lucas had a feeling it would only get louder in the coming weeks.

Watching Jeanie through the window, Caroline’s features went somber. Lucas took the opportunity to pull her into an embrace, pressed his lips to her temple, and whispered, “I love you,” against her skin. She relaxed for a modicum of a second, then pulled away from him with a backward step. After all, Kurt was watching. She’d have to talk him down if she expressed too much emotion.

I have to put on a good show for Virginia. You know how it is . . . keep the kid happy, keep everything normal.

“I’ll miss you,” Lucas told her, his throat suddenly dry, his fingers reaching for her hand as if to pull her back, to keep her from going.

Will you miss me, too ?

“Keep her safe,” Caroline said, then turned away, focusing on her bag.

“Carrie.” He was desperate to hear it, he needed to know.

Just tell me you still care, even if it’s just a little bit. Tell me there’s still a chance.

Like an exotic animal displayed behind airport glass, Kurt shifted his weight from one shiny loafer to the other. His sport jacket hung off his well-built frame with a mannequin’s casual elegance. He looked too clean, too well-groomed, the type of guy who had a spa day every two weeks. Facials. Manicures. Waxes. Shiatsu massages penciled in as meetings. Martinis at two in the afternoon and sixty-dollar entrées written off as a business expense.

Don Draper, he thought. That’s why she likes him. He’s Don fucking Draper in the flesh. A cartoon character. He isn’t real. Or maybe Kurt was less Mad Men and more American Psycho. Perhaps, the moment Lucas turned his back, Kurt would filet his wife just like the guys he wrote about; men who had killed countless wayward girls. Poetic justice?

All at once, Lucas grabbed Caroline by the arm, startling her with the sudden contact. “I love you,” he repeated, just in case she hadn’t heard him the first time.

“I know.” She frowned, averted her eyes. “Me too.”

He let his hand fall to his side in defeat.

Caroline walked away, her rolling suitcase hissing along the concrete.

5

VEE WASN’T STUPID. She knew her mother was having an affair. Whoever that Kurt guy was, her parents had refused to talk out their problems. It’s what they had taught her to do—use words, not fists—but they were both hypocrites. And now Vee was on her way to some weird town in a state on the opposite side of the planet. Her summer was completely ruined. Her entire life was a total, hopeless, unrecoverable void of a train wreck. She’d never forgive her parents for this. Never get over it. Never.

She had smelled the creep on her mother’s clothes—unfamiliar cologne clinging to her like a residual ghost. She saw “the other man” in the slump of her father’s shoulders, in the way her dad watched her mom from a distance. His sadness brimmed over so full it was a wonder it hadn’t drowned him completely.

Her parents thought she was weird because they were too busy screaming at each other to pay attention to her. It was her mom, mostly. Vee had heard her blame her dad for Vee “going goth” like it was a genetically transmitted disease. But had they stopped to ask the real reason for her metamorphosis, they would have discovered that all this commotion was not about them but about a boy named Tim.

Her friend Heidi had gotten Vee into melancholy music after hearing her brother Tim play it on his computer. Then Tim showed them the Ouija board he kept hidden at the back of his closet behind a pair of old skateboarding decks, and Vee’s new obsession was born. She had been reluctant at first, but you don’t act like a chicken if you want to impress a guy like Tim.

It wasn’t that ghosts and death and alt-rock hadn’t interested Vee before she had fallen for her best friend’s brother, but Tim’s affinity for the darker side of things helped push her over the edge. She was vying for his attention, and winning the affection of a high school kid was a lot easier when she could talk about the same bands; when she could look the part rather than come off as a poseur. She’d gone so far as to show him a picture of her dad when he was a kid—the dark hair, the trench coat, the killer boots she’d spied in the back of her parents’ closet when she went snooping for money. Tim had taken one look at the high-school-aged Lucas Graham and thought it was awesome that Vee had been raised by a freak. When she dropped that her father wrote about serial killers and unsolved murders, she’d blown his mind and won a full-on “in” with Tim and his high school friends.

But that was all ruined now. And ironically, it was her dad’s fault. The man who had helped her win a plum spot among a group of older kids was the person who was stealing her away from them. And while Vee knew she’d be back at the end of the summer, eight weeks was an eternity. In eight weeks, Tim could discover a dozen new bands and find himself a girlfriend—a girl way cooler than her. Two months was plenty of time for Vee to lose her hard-earned place next to the boy she swore she was starting to love.

“Hey, Jeanie, get the map,” her dad urged.

Vee glared out the window for a moment longer, then grabbed her backpack out of the foot well. She rifled through it as the truck bounced along the highway toward the Pennsylvania border. Her dad had designated her as the official direction-keeper, and she had looked up their route on Google Maps while he had been busy packing up the last of his stuff. His eyes had just about fallen out of his head when she told him it was a forty-two-hour trip. Pulling the printed directions out of a purple pocket folder decorated with black Sharpie swirls, she smoothed their route across her lap and wrinkled her nose at the crooked blue line that cut across its top.

“Eight hundred miles today,” he told her. “We have to keep to the schedule.”

“How long does eight hundred miles take?”