I didn’t want to consider what the mother and aunt standpoints might have looked like.
“We had to keep it quiet,” Mom went on. “We couldn’t let them know you were in the wind. Alone.”
I blinked, told myself it was the glare and not the words that were causing my eyes to water.
“But we knew how you were trained,” Abby went on. “And we had an idea of what resources you had with you, and…”
“We knew you,” Liz finished, smiling.
Bex sounded significantly less chipper when she pushed past me. “Or we thought we did.”
Macey shrugged. “We didn’t know where you were, Cammie,” she said, stepping away from the van. “But this seemed as good a place as any to run.”
It was, after all, where she had run. I smiled, knowing that at least I was in good company.
Walking toward the porch, I tried to search out something that was familiar, but I’d been to that cabin at least twice before. Once, after the Circle had made its first move—back when we’d thought the Circle was after Macey. And once again when Macey had run there on the eve of her father’s big election. Those memories swirled together, and I didn’t know where the old stopped and the new might have begun.
And there was something else, a worry or a fear tugging at the back of my mind.
“I don’t think I would have come here.” I stopped in the cabin’s doorway and shook my head, as if even then it felt wrong to intrude. “I mean, how can you be sure I came here?”
Abby laughed. “Oh, you were good, Squirt.” She walked to a cabinet and turned on a small TV. “But Joe was better.”
A split second later, a blurry black-and-white picture filled the screen. It was divided into four quadrants, the images flashing, rotating from one camera to another, showing at least a dozen different angles of the cabin and the grounds.
“He had cameras,” I said, unable to hide the awe in my voice.
Abby worked the remote control, and a moment later I was looking at a mirror into the past. My hair was long again, and even in black-and-white, I knew it was the brownish-blond color that had always seemed so boring to me, back before I realized that boring is seriously underrated.
Abby pushed a button, sending the surveillance footage into fast-forward while I stayed perfectly still, watching Summer Me sleeping and pacing. I did sit-ups and push-ups, and the sun rose and set. Rain fell and lightning flickered across the sky. Days passed and I stayed on that screen, alone.
“How long?” I asked.
“Four days,” my mother said. “We think. We don’t know exactly when you left, because…”
Her voice trailed off as Abby slowed the tape to regular speed. On the screen, the girl I’d been stood at the sink washing a plate and fork, staring out at the lake beyond the window, lost in thought. But then something must have caught her eye, because she turned and dragged a chair to the corner of the room and climbed onto it. My face filled the screen as I leaned close to the camera. Then the image dissolved into static, and the eight of us stood silent, no clue as to where Summer Me might have gone.
Abby put the remote down. “Judging from the time stamp on the tape, that was two days before we came here looking for you. But by then, the cabin was empty. We didn’t have any idea where you’d gone until the day you called from Austria.”
I turned to see the plate in the drainer by the sink, sitting exactly where it was in the video. And then for the first time, it wasn’t a question at all. “I was here.”
No one said a word as I walked to the sink. “I don’t feel anything,” I said, reaching for the dish.
“It’s okay, Cam,” Liz told me. “Just…look.”
Turning around in the room, I saw the narrow bed where I had woken after the attack in Boston—the first time the Circle had come for me. I recognized the small table from the video, ran my hands along the shelves of books.
“Why are you just telling me this now?” I asked, and felt something shift inside me. “Why didn’t you bring me here first thing?”
“Cammie,” Mom said, reaching for me.
“I need to remember,” I told her. “I have to.”
Mom looked as if that were the last thing in the world she wanted me to do, but she’d given up on fighting and didn’t say a word.
“Why would you come here, Cam?” Abby asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Not why did you,” she clarified. “Why would you?”
It was just another test, a quiz, a hypothetical. I should know the answer. A Gallagher Girl with a big black spot in her head is still a Gallagher Girl.
I was still me.
“I didn’t know for sure that I was going to leave until the night before I did it. I didn’t have a lot of time to plan or pack. Time. I would have gone somewhere to buy time.”
Mom nodded. “Yes.”
“I couldn’t get any supplies out of the sublevels without someone seeing or suspecting I was up to something, so I didn’t have much I could take with me. I remember packing some clothes and”—I cut my eyes at Macey, whose wallet I had raided—“money. Sorry about that. I’ll pay you back.”
“Oh, I’ll think of some way you can repay me,” Macey told me.
“I needed a safe place off the radar and time to think and…gear. I needed gear.”