LITMIR.BIZ

       head upstairs and slip into my bedroom. The room smells like evergreen trees. We didn’t have a tree for Christmas this year—obviously, since there aren’t exactly trees to go around—so Jared and Struz dug up some old evergreen-scented candles and lit them all over the house.

      I light the candle on the nightstand and peel off my jeans and change my T-shirt, then reach under the bed for a manila folder before crawling under the covers. The file is worn and a little frayed from overhandling, but that doesn’t stop me. It was already overhandled before it was passed to me.

      Lying back on my pillow, I look at her name—Emily Bauer. The blue ink is faded, as if time is trying to erase her existence completely. For a minute, I imagine what Emily was like, if she was anything like I am now. I wonder where she’d be and what she’d be like if she hadn’t gone missing seventeen years ago.

      Then I open it up—the one case file of my father’s that I refused to throw away.

      I don’t even need to read it—every word has been burned in my memory at this point.

      The file is an unsolved case from 1995, from one of my dad’s first years on the job, back when he worked missing persons—ironically, the same job I’m working right now.

      A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family with a dog and a white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her possessions were untouched and in their rightful place. No forced entry, no signs of a break-in, no one who heard or saw anything unusual—it was like she just disappeared.

      Except for a bloody partial handprint on her wall.

      I know the case is cold now; it’s been cold for the past seventeen years while it sat on my dad’s desk, and now that the world is changed, I know there isn’t any hope of solving it. But this case isn’t that different from the ones we have now. Maybe something will help me solve them. Besides, if my dad were still here, he would still be looking over the file every night, still looking for something he missed.

      Once, when we were twelve, Alex asked my dad why he held on to the case. He said, “Why haven’t you given up?”

      It was a Saturday in the summer. We’d just played in one of those coed Little League softball games, and we were sweaty and starving, and my dad was pulling pizza leftovers from the fridge. But when Alex asked that, he stopped and turned around. His face was so serious that, even then, I knew whatever he said would be something I never forgot.

      And I haven’t.

      He said, “Giving up on something is like admitting you never wanted it in the first place. I won’t ever give up on that girl. I’ll always be looking for her. Even if everyone else in her life has moved on, I won’t rest until I figure out what we missed and we’ve gotten her back. Until she’s safe.”

      He’s not here to look for her anymore, but I am, and I’m not going to give up on her either.

      Who knows—maybe something will help me with the people going missing right now.

      Or that’s what I tell myself. The other reason I reread this file every night is because I need something to focus on right before I go to sleep—something to think about—because that’s the moment when my mind is at its worst, when if left to its own devices, it won’t stop remembering.

       The gunshot, Reid’s and Alex’s hands on the gun, blood pouring from the hole in Alex’s neck, his eyes glassy, my hands covered in blood.

      I can’t shake these images. I see them every time I close my eyes. I dream about that night almost every time I fall asleep. In the dreams, I try to make different choices, but the end result is always the same.

      My dad is still dead. There won’t be any more X-Files marathons or bad Syfy movies. Alex is still dead—his blood still staining the ground just outside Park Village—and he’s never going to drag me to another terrible action movie with no plot. He’ll never have the chance to defy his mother and go to West Point instead of Stanford. He’s never going to follow his dreams.

      And Ben is still gone.

      

      

he next morning I’m up early and then gone all day, delivering rations from the base to different neighborhoods. When I get home, Struz is out. Jared launches into a story about his Monday before I even get inside, something about a guy diving out of a skyscraper or something. I know I’m not hearing him right, but all day this terrible feeling has been welling up inside me, the kind that reaches through your veins and down into your bones. My whole body is practically vibrating with it.

      Like my body knows something bad is about to happen.

      “Dude, if you’re not going to listen to me …”

      “Jared, I’m sorry, I spaced out.”

      I look at my brother—he’s got Monopoly set up, and he’s playing against himself. He sees me looking and says, “I set it up so you could play with me when you got back, and then I got bored. But we can set it up again.”

      “Sure, that works,” I say. I suddenly feel like I’m too old. Not physically, but just that I’m too tired, too stressed, and too anxious. Even though there isn’t any danger of Wave Function Collapse and there’s no Oppenheimer counting down to the end of the world, it’s like I’m waiting for something else to go wrong.

      I sit on the floor with him, and he launches into a story about his class field trip to the movie theater down the street from the school. “It was so cool. Mr. Hubley totally broke into the theater and we went in the biggest one, and he had the other teachers all sit with us while he set up a projector and we watched Mission Impossible 4.”

      I’m not sure if it’s considered breaking in now that the theater has been abandoned, although I guess it’s still private property. “How was the movie?” I ask, even though I’m sure it was just as bad as the first three.

      My eyes burn with that thought, because it’s something I would have said to Alex.

      “It was so awesome. There’s this really cool part where Tom Cruise flies down the side of this building. Maybe Cecily can get that for the next movie night?”

      “I’ll ask her,” I say truthfully, as we clear the houses off the board.

      “What’s for dinner tonight?” Jared asks. “No spaghetti, right?”

      We try to have something special on Mondays. I’m not sure if it

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