The Night He Said No One

Nothing Happened

For about two weeks, nothing happened.

That was the strangest part. Brody acted exactly the same. He talked to Kenzie every night on speaker in the kitchen. He drove to the airport in Omaha to pick her up when she flew back, and he brought flowers, and she posted a picture of the flowers with a caption about how lucky she was. He went to her nephew’s T-ball game. He came home and asked me if I wanted to go halves on a new grill.

I kept waiting for him to bring it up. Some kind of “hey, about that night.” Some kind of explanation, or a request, or even a threat. He never did. It was like if neither of us said it out loud, it would stay in that driveway forever.

I tried to bring it up exactly once.

We were in the garage. He was changing the oil on his truck and I was handing him things.

“Hey,” I said. “Memorial Day.”

He was lying on the creeper under the truck, and he went very still.

“What about it?”

“You good?”

“I’m great,” he said. “Hand me the filter wrench.”

I handed him the filter wrench.

What I didn’t tell him then was that I already knew more than he thought. In the days after, I had quietly asked around. Ryan knew. Ryan’s girlfriend Tess knew, because she had seen them walking to the Equinox. Two of the guys from the beer pong table knew. Danielle had apparently told her cousin, who told Ryan’s sister. By the end of that June, I think half the people at that party knew Brody had left with Danielle and hadn’t come back.

But they knew what everybody knows at a party: who left with who. I knew where he went. I had a map with a timestamp on it, and the address of a duplex a woman had told me about by a cooler in March, and five hours of a dot that never moved.

I was the one who had been holding the keys. I was the one he had asked to keep him out of trouble. I was the one who had told Kenzie, on a phone screen, “I’ve got him.”

And I was the one who lived with him.