So, she scrapes together tips to buy Jane a new phone, one that can send and receive grainy photos, and she plucks up the courage to take one in her bedroom mirror. She stares at it on her phone, at the hair falling down her shoulders, the lips painted red, the lace, the fading mark on her neck turned up to the light from the window, and she almost can’t believe it’s her. She didn’t know she had it in herself to be this until Jane pulled it out of her. She likes it. She likes it a lot.

She hits send, and Jane texts back a string of swears, and August bites a smile into her pillow and writes, red lipstick.

In between, she picks the lock on the back office of Billy’s and discovers it hasn’t been used since 2008. It’s no more than an ancient filing cabinet of yellowing paystubs and an empty desk, prime real estate for a secondary caseworking outpost. So that’s exactly what she turns it into, deep in the back of the restaurant where nobody notices if she spends her breaks on science fiction storytime. She pins copies of her maps to the walls and thumbs through the files until she finds Jane’s application from 1976. She spends a long minute with that one, running her fingers over the letters, but pins it up too.

She uses Jane’s real name to finally find her birth certificate—May 28, 1953—and since Jane knows she’s twenty-four, they narrow down the timeframe of the event that got her stuck to between summer 1977 and summer 1978.

She makes two copies of a timeline and posts one in her room and the other in the office. Summer 1971: Jane leaves San Francisco. January 1972: Jane moves to New Orleans. 1974: Jane leaves New Orleans. February 1975: Jane moves to New York. Summer 1976: Jane starts working at Billy’s. Everything after: question mark, question mark, question mark.

She scores a boom box from Myla’s shop, a silver ’80s-era Say Anything–style thing. She hides it in the office and tunes it to their station. When she’s too busy for the Q, Jane sends her songs.

August starts sending songs back. It’s a game they play, and August pretends not to look up every lyric of every song and agonize over the meanings. Jane requests “I Want to Be Your Boyfriend,” and August answers with “The Obvious Child.” August calls in “I’m on Fire,” and Jane replies with “Gloria,” and August thumps her head back against the brick wall of the office and tries not to sink through the floor.

“What, exactly,” Wes asks, sitting at the counter with a plate of French toast and watching August doodle a cartoon subway train in the margin of the Sex Notebook, “are you doing?”

“Working,” August says. She ducks automatically as Lucie passes with a tray over her head.

“I meant with Jane,” he says.

“Just having fun,” August says.

“You’ve never just had fun in your life,” Wes points out.

August puts her pen down. “What are you doing with Isaiah?”

Wes shovels an enormous bite into his mouth instead of answering.

 

* * *

 

Something keeps bothering her about Jane’s name. Her first one, Biyu. Biyu Su. Su Biyu.

She’s repeated it over and over in her head, run it through every database, stared at the cracks in her ceiling trying to pry it out of the filing cabinets of her brain. Where the hell has she heard that name before?

She flips through her notes, returning to the timeline she’s sketched out.

Why does Biyu Su sound so familiar?

If this weren’t so insane, and if she thought her mom wouldn’t drag her back into the black hole of the Uncle Augie investigation, she’d ask her for help. Suzette Landry may not have found what she’s looking for, but she’s good. She’s solved two unrelated cold cases in the course of her work. She plays dirty, she knows her shit, and she never lets things go. It’s the best and worst thing about her.

So when she answers her mom’s nightly phone call—the one she’s been sending to voicemail for a couple of hazy weeks—she doesn’t plan on bringing Jane up. At all.

But her mom knows.

“Why do I get the feeling there is something you’re not telling me?” August can hear the shredder in the background. She must have gotten her hands on some files she’s not supposed to have. “Or someone?”

“I—”

“Oh, it’s a someone.”

“I literally said one syllable.”

“I know my kid. You sound like you did when Dylan Chowdhury accidentally put his promposal note in your locker junior year and then asked for it back so he could give it to the girl two lockers down.”

“Oh my God, Mom—”

“So who is he?”

“The—”

“Or she! It could be a she! Or a … they?”

August doesn’t even have it in her to be moved at how hard she’s trying to be inclusive. “It’s nobody.”

“Cut the shit, kid.”

“Okay, fine,” August says. Once her mother wants an answer, she won’t stop until she gets it. “There’s a girl I met, um, on the subway. That I’ve kind of been seeing. But I don’t think she wants anything serious. She’s not exactly … available.”

“I see,” her mom says. “Well, you know what my policy is.”

“Never go to a second location with someone unless you’ve checked their trunk for weapons first,” August monotones.

“You can mock it all you want, but I’ve never been murdered.”

August could explain that Jane can’t even leave the subway, but instead, she shifts and asks, “What about Detective Primeaux? Is he still a shit?”

“Oh, let me tell you what that smarmy fuck said to me last time I called,” she says, and she’s off.

August switches her phone to speaker, letting her mom’s voice blur into white noise. She goes over the timeline as her mom talks about a lead she’s tracked down, that Augie could have passed through Little Rock in 1974, and she thinks about Jane’s name. Su Biyu. Biyu Su.

“Anyway,” her mom says, “there’s an answer out there somewhere. I’ve been thinking about him so much lately, you know?”

August looks at her bedroom wall, at the photos pinned up with the exact brand of pushpin her mom once used to poke holes in their living room. She thinks about her mom, consumed by this person who can’t ever come back, living and dying by this mystery that doesn’t have a solution. Orienting her entire life around a ghost.

“Yeah,” August says.

Thank God she’s nothing like that.

 

* * *

 

“Does my lipstick look okay?” Myla says, turning sideways to blink at August. Her elbow knocks Wes’s phone out of his hands, and he grumbles as he retrieves it from the subway floor.

“Hang on,” Jane says, leaning across to fix a smudge of bright blue lipstick with the edge of her thumb. “There. Now you’re perfect.”

“She’s always perfect,” Niko says.

“Gross,” Wes groans. “You’re lucky it’s your birthday.”

“It’s my birthdaaaay,” Niko singsongs happily.

“The ripe old age of twenty-five,” Myla says. She kisses him on the cheek, effectively smudging her lipstick again.