Chapter 2: What Denny Alcott Knows About Disappearing

The Alcott house was a mile and a half down the county road, past the Dellinger property with its collapsed tobacco barn and the rusted Sunoco sign that nobody had bothered to take down even though the station itself had been a vacant lot since 1979. Mara walked the first half mile before she remembered she had a bicycle, then went back and got it, which cost her twenty minutes she didn't account for and would not have needed to account for if she had slept. She had not slept.

The morning was already pressing down hard, the kind of July heat that didn't build so much as arrive, like something with a destination. By the time she turned onto the gravel strip that passed for Denny's driveway her shirt was sticking to her back and the cicadas were doing their serrated work in the treeline and the world felt both too loud and too ordinary for what she was carrying in her chest.

Denny was on the porch.