She looked at Noah trotting toward us with his crayon card, and then she looked back at me, and she said the thing she had crossed three states and ten years of fear to say, and it changed the shape of everything I thought I knew about my daughter’s death.

Chapter 10 — A Powerful Man

“The man who got Chloe pregnant,” Sarah said, her eyes fixed on the grass between us as though she could not bring herself to look at me while she said it, “was not a boy her own age, Maya.

That is the first thing you have to understand.

It was never some classmate, some teenager who panicked and ran.

That was the story she let everyone believe, and it was a lie, and she told it on purpose.”