“Shit. Are you okay?”

“I’m all right,” her mom says in the tone she gets when she’s leafing through evidence, half-distracted and clipped. “She’d already made arrangements after your grandfather died, so it’s all handled.”

“I meant, like.” August tries to speak slowly, deliberately. Her mother has always been about as emotive as a mossy boulder, but August feels like this should probably be an exception. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m—I’m okay. I mean, she and I had said everything we were ever going to say to each other. I got closure a long time ago. It is what it is, you know?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m really sorry, Mom. Is there anything I can do? Do you need me to come down for the funeral?”

“Oh, no, honey, don’t worry about that. I’ll be fine. But I did need to talk to you about something.”

“What’s up?”

“Well, I got a call from the family lawyer last night. Your grandmother left you some money.”

“What?” August blinks at the wall. “What do you mean? Why would she leave me something? I’m the shameful family secret.”

“No. No, that’s me. You’re her granddaughter.”

“Since when? She’s barely spoken to me. She’s never even sent me a birthday present.”

Another pause. “August, that’s not true.”

“What do you mean it’s not true? What are you talking about?”

“August, I … I need to tell you something. But I need you not to hate me.”

“What?”

“Look, your grandparents … they were difficult people. It’s always been complicated between us. And I do think they’re ashamed of me because I decided to have you on my own. I never wanted to become the trophy wife with a rich husband they raised me to be. But they were never ashamed of you.”

August grinds her teeth. “They didn’t even know me.”

“Well … they did, kind of. I’d—I’d keep them updated, sometimes. And they’d hear from St. Margaret’s how you were doing.”

“Why would St. Margaret’s talk to them about me?”

Another pause. A long one.

“Because they keep the people paying a student’s tuition updated on their student.”

What?

“What? They—they paid my tuition? This whole time?”

“Yes.”

“But you told me—you always said we were broke because you had to pay for St. Margaret’s.”

“I did! I paid for your lunches, I paid for your field trips, your uniforms, your extracurriculars, your—your library fines. But they were the ones who wrote the big checks. They’d send one every birthday.”

August’s childhood and teenage years flutter into focus—the way kids used to look at her in her Walmart tennis shoes, the things her mom said they couldn’t afford to replace after the storm. “So then, why were we broke, Mom? Why were we broke?”

“Well, August, I mean … it’s not cheap, to pay for an investigation. Sometimes there were people I had to pay for information, there was equipment to buy—”

“How long?” August asks. “How long did they send money?”

“Only until you graduated high school, honey. I—I told them to stop once you turned eighteen, so they did. I didn’t want them to keep helping us forever.”

“And what if I had wanted help?”

She’s quiet for a few seconds. “I don’t know.”

“I mean, based on the will, they would have, right?”

“Maybe so.”

“You’re telling me, I’m sitting here on a mountain of student loans that I didn’t have to take out, because you didn’t want to tell me this?”

“August, they—they’re not like you and me, okay? They always judged me, and they would have judged the way we lived, the way I raised you, and I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want to give them a chance to treat you the way they treated me, or Augie.”

“But they wanted—they wanted to see me?”

“August, you don’t understand—”

“So, you just decided for me that I wouldn’t have a family? That it’d be just you and me? This isn’t some Gilmore Girls fantasy, okay? This is my life, and I’ve spent most of it alone, because you told me I was, that I should be, that I should be happy about it, but it was only because you didn’t want anyone to come between us, wasn’t it?”

Her mom’s voice comes back sharp, with a bitter, defensive anger that August knows lives in her too. “You can’t even imagine it, August. You can’t imagine the way they treated Augie. He left because they made him miserable, and I couldn’t lose you like that—”

“Can you shut up about Augie for once? It’s been almost fifty years! He’s gone! People leave!”

There’s a terrible moment of silence, long enough for August to play back what she said, but not long enough to regret it.

“August,” her mom says once, like a nail going in.

“You know what?” August says. “You never listen to me. You never care about what I want unless it’s what you want. I told you five years ago that I didn’t want to work the case with you anymore, and you didn’t care. Sometimes it’s like you had me just so you could have a—a fucking assistant.”

“August—”

“No, I’m done. Don’t call me tomorrow. In fact, don’t call me at all. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to talk, but I—I am gonna need you to leave me alone for a while, Mom.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m sorry about your mom. And I’m sorry they treated you like shit. But that didn’t give you the right.”

August hangs up and throws her phone onto the floorboards, flopping back on her bed. She and her mom have fought before—God knows two hardheaded people with a tendency to go icy when threatened in only seven hundred square feet of living space will go at it. But never like this.

She can hear everyone in the living room laughing. She feels as separate from it as she did the day she moved in.

Her whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to her. No matter how well she knows someone, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances she knows someone might make for her—that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for her to see any of it. It frosts over the glass. She never had anyone to begin with, so she let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have her around.

She slides her hand over the bedspread and her knuckles brush something cool and hard: her pocketknife. It must have slid out when she threw her bag down earlier.

She scoops it up, turns it over in her palm. The fish scales, the sticker on the handle. If she wanted to, she could twirl it between her fingers, flip the blade out, and jimmy a window open. Her mom taught her. She remembers it all. She shouldn’t have had to learn any of it, but she did.

And now she’s using everything she learned to help Jane.

Shit.

You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from scratch, bring yourself to every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to expand to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there’s a place at the foot of the bed where your shoes hit the floor, and it’s the same.