I have been a claims investigator for nineteen years. My whole job is that people tell you a version of an accident, and the version is usually not a lie, exactly. It’s a true thing standing in front of a truer one.
Three parts didn’t sit down.
Ava had said don’t ever touch me again, which is a sentence about a pattern, not about a shoulder.
Ava had said when nobody’s looking, and I have never in three years been alone in a room with that girl for more than four minutes, because she leaves.
And Ava had been shaking before I ever came out of that kitchen. I replayed it twice and I was sure. She had come off the deck stairs backward, away from the group, laughing at her phone, and the laugh had been loud, and she had been moving away from the grill.
Away from where Daniel was standing with his brother.
I sat in that driveway for eleven minutes.
Then I went inside and stood in the kitchen and put both hands flat on the counter, because for eight months I had been keeping something Daniel knew nothing about, and I had promised a sixteen-year-old girl that I would keep it until she told me otherwise.
