And then he had told her the thing that she would carry with her afterward, the thing she wrote down in the notes app that night in capital letters, though she did not need to, because she could not have forgotten it if she tried.
"Nobody made me hide it," Bastian said. "That's what people always want to hear. That some coach made me play hurt. Nobody made me. Coach would've sat me in a second. My mom would've sat me. Everybody loved me. That was the problem. Everybody loved me so much I couldn't stand to let them down. So I lied to every single one of them, and they believed me, because they loved me." He rubbed his eyes. "If he's like me, he's not going to tell anybody. You're going to have to. And he's going to hate you for it. Maybe for a while. Maybe not. But you're going to have to."
When the call ended, Noor had sat with her hands on the steering wheel and not said anything for a long time, and Imre had looked out the passenger window at the dark shape of the dumpsters and not said anything either. Then she had said, "I already told him."
Imre turned his head.
"Not this. Not about Bastian. But I told him, Thursday, that I'd been talking to you. I told him you had a brother who'd been through this and you knew stuff and I'd been asking you questions. I told him I was going to keep asking you questions. And I told him that if he didn't go to Ms. Bettany himself by Wednesday morning, I was going to go with him, and if he wouldn't come, I'd go alone." She looked down at the phone in her lap. "He said okay. He actually said okay. He held my hand and said he understood, and he'd think about it, and he was glad I had someone to talk to. Thursday night, in his truck, in front of my house." She was quiet. "He hasn't said one word about it since. I thought he was just avoiding it. Thinking about it, like he said."
Imre looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, gently, "Noor. I don't think he remembers."
She had sat with that. She had sat with it all the way home, and through a sleepless night, and through Monday, when Gerrit had answered her texts with single words and let her call ring out, and she had thought, he's angry about Wednesday, he's angry I'm pushing, and then a sick small voice under that had said: or he doesn't know about Wednesday at all. Or somebody showed him something, and he doesn't remember that you told him, and he thinks.
She had not known about the photo from his cousin. She would find out about that later. But sitting in the senior lot on Tuesday, with Leilani's text thread still on her mind, she did not need to know about the photo. She could put it together. She was good at putting things together. That was the whole problem.