Guilty by Norah McClintock

over what I see out there right in front of my eyes. And for some reason that I can’t explain, I want to tell her. I want to tell Lila.
    â€œShe wasn’t happy,” I say. “She was tired a lot.”
    â€œWas she sick?”
    â€œI don’t think so.” I realize that I don’t actually know. “She told my dad she needed some time alone.”
    â€œYou mean, like a trial separation or something?”
    â€œ What? ” Where did she get that idea? “No! No, she was just tired, that’s all.”
    Lila stares at me. She’s thinking something, but I can tell she’s not going to come out and say it.
    â€œShe loved my dad,” I tell her, just to make it perfectly clear. “She married him even though her mother was against it. She was a snob. My grandmother, I mean. She thought my dad wasn’t good enough for her daughter. But my mother didn’t listen. She married him. She helped him with his club. It was his big dream, and she backed him every step of the way.”
    â€œOkay,” she says. But her eyes say something different. She’s agreeing with me so that I’ll stay calm. She doesn’t want an angry stranger in her crappy little house.
    â€œDamn straight, okay!” I say. “You don’t know anything about my parents. She loved my dad. Why would she want a separation?” Except that now that Lila said it, I hear voices, hushed but angry. I see my mother glance through a doorway and see me and then reach out and close the door before continuing to talk to my father, still in a hushed voice. I hear them at night, long after I’ve gone to bed, probably when my father gets in from the club. “She loved him.”
    â€œOkay,” she says again in that same tone of voice. She’s not agreeing with me. She’s placating me, using the word to try to calm me down. Okay, sure, anything you say.
    I’m on my feet, and, boy, am I angry.
    â€œYou don’t know what you’re talking about,” I shout at her.
    Her feet slide out from under her. She leans forward a little and looks up at me.
    â€œI didn’t mean anything by it,” she says. “I was just trying—”
    â€œI don’t care what you were trying to do.” Why did I even come here? What was I thinking? I don’t know this girl. I don’t know anything about her. For all I know, she’s some kind of ghoul who gets off on funerals and the grief of others. “I have to go.”
    I’m out of the living room and then out the front door before she can get off the couch to stop me—assuming she even wanted to stop me. Maybe she’s glad that I’m leaving. After all, she never wanted to see me in the first place.

Eighteen
    LILA
    I never wanted him there, but he tracked me down anyway. At first I was scared. At first I thought he knew who I was. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t ask me for my full name. He doesn’t ask for my father’s name. Or maybe he thinks he knows. He said his friend looked up our phone number; that’s how he found the address. But the phone isn’t in my name or my dad’s name. It’s in the name of the last person who lived here and who forgot to tell the phone company he was moving. My father had it on his to-do list: inform the phone company. But he never got around to it. In fact, he’d been thinking it over. Why not just pay the bill when it came and keep the phone. That way, we’d avoid any special connection fee, which, my father said, usually involved a credit check, which he probably wouldn’t pass.
    Finn doesn’t know who I am, but I know who he is. That means I have a chance to find out what happened.
    Except I don’t keep my mouth shut, which would have been the smart thing. Instead, I decide to ask questions and give unasked-for opinions. In other words, I blow it. He freaks out when I ask if his mother wanted to separate from his