“Pretty bad. The den too.” He shook his head. “I’m going to call this in. The sheriff needs to open a case, and we needto make a statement and document all this so we can file an insurance claim.” Bobby reached for his phone, but after another, considering look, he took his seat next to me. He caught my hand and laced his fingers with mine. He looked into my eyes, and a heartbeat passed, and then another.
“I’m okay,” I told him. “Really. I’ll be okay.”
He nodded. And he kept looking at me.
And because Bobby is a very good listener, I told him the rest of it. Everything my parents had said. Everything I’d said. Everything I’d wanted to say.
When I finished, he said, “I’m so sorry, Dash.”
“It’s fine. I mean, being burgled isn’t fine. But the stuff with my parents is—it’s whatever. It’s not going to change. I don’t know why I let them get under my skin like that. Any time my writing comes up, this is what happens. And they only ever want to talk about my writing. And that’s why we basically never talk about, well, anything.” I blew out a breath. “Do they have a thing like a reverse adoption? Can I reverse-adopt my parents?”
Bobby rubbed my leg.
“I think I’m just extra sensitive,” I said, “because they’ve been out of my hair for so long. I mean, I had to send my dad that story, but that was almost a year ago. See, that’s the beautiful thing about my parents: they’re so self-involved most of the time that I can pretend they’re polite, normal, emotionally unavailable authority figures—like some minor nineteenth-century aristocracy who shipped me off to boarding school. The kind of parents every child dreams of.”
“So much to unpack there,” Bobby murmured.
“But then they come roaring back into my life—literally, in this case, with that stupid RV—and it’s like I’m sixteen all over again, and we argue about everything, and everything is writing, and I feel like I’m going insane.” I took a deep breath and tried for calm. “I spent so much of my life wanting them to notice me.To remember I existed. And eventually, I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Not in the way I wanted, I mean. And for the most part, that’s fine. I’m okay. I’m reasonably well-adjusted. I have people who love me. I have you. I’m happy. Which is why it drives me insane that the instant they show up, I find myself—I find myselfwantingagain. Wanting them to—to be my parents, I guess. And instead, all we do is fight.”
Bobby nodded. He rubbed my leg some more. After a while, he said, “I don’t want to say I understand, but some of this sounds familiar. I mean, my parents are over-involved, you know.”
I did know. I knew personally, as a matter of fact, because Bobby’s mom had followed me on every social media platform where I had an account. She had also slid into my DMs (am I using that right?) to send me two typos she’d found in “Murder on the Emerald Express.”
“But,” Bobby continued, “I do have some firsthand experience with, well, feeling like I’m disappointing them, and wishing things were different. I’m definitely an expert on the whole ‘we don’t communicate’ thing. Oh, and the ‘we don’t have feelings’ thing—that one too.” He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles absently, not even seeming to think about it. (Ladies and gentlemen, that’s real romance.) “I’m sorry, Dash. I know nothing I say will make it better.” He thought some more and said, “Do you want me to ask them to leave?”
“Are you insane?”
“You’re an adult—as you insist on telling me when I catch you eating cereal out of the box instead of using a bowl.”
“Bobby, they wouldn’t make those liner bags milk-proof if they didn’t want you to put milk in them! Keme gets it!”
He didn’t take the bait. “If you need some time and space from your parents, you have every right to ask them to leave.”
“I know you’re trying to help, but if you were me, would you ask your parents to leave?”
“God, no,” he said with that big, beautiful, goofy grin. “My mom would murder me.”
I surprised myself by grinning back. I touched his cheek, kissed him, and said, “Thank you. It’s all going to be fine; I just have to survive a few more days.”
“Uh huh.” He furrowed his brow—it was a bit dramatic, if you ask me, even for a ham like Bobby—and held up my shoe. “Want to explain this?”
So, I told him about Mrs. Shufflebottom’s office—
“I’m sorry,” he interrupted. “Are you saying you broke into her office?”
“Uh, Keme broke in? For both of us? That makes it better, right?”
“That makes it worse.”
I decided not to ask why, and instead, I told him about the paper trail I’d followed, and then catching Stewart listening at the door, and then my parents following him into the stacks, and getting trapped in the genealogy room.
“Millie said someone had put a bookend between the handle and the jamb,” Bobby said. “That’s why you couldn’t open it.” He frowned. “So, someone wanted to keep you out of the way while they—”
“While they went through my house like a Vandal horde?”
“But why?” Bobby asked. “I mean, they’re looking for the diary—or I assume they’re looking for the diary. But why would they think it was here?”
“Because it’s Nathaniel Blackwood’s house?”
