One Night at the Lake by Bethany Chase

Author:Bethany Chase
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

16

June

THE NIGHT OF THE JULY Fourth party, I go to bed early, with the pop-pop-pop of fireworks ricocheting around the lake like gunshots. I skipped the bonfire; even had I not been extremely unsettled by the Caleb news, I was in no mood to watch Ollie and Terrance play, or to participate in the singing. I can’t believe they’re still doing it all this year. It’s supposed to be carefree and fun; that is not the case tonight.

“Everyone was asking about you,” Ollie says when he comes to bed, a little after eleven. “I missed hearing you sing.”

“I sing for you all the time,” I yawn, setting my tablet on the night table and switching off the lamp. “Did Caleb and your dad behave themselves?”

“Barely.” He maneuvers across the bed toward me, avoiding Spencer, who has been curled at my feet in fear for his life from the fireworks. I fit my head into the crook of his shoulder.

“Are you going to talk to him tomorrow?”

“Yeah. It’s going to be fine.”

There were six distinct times today when I contemplated looking up the newspaper article about Caleb. I never went through with it, because it felt like the wrong thing to do. Sleazy, or underhanded somehow—even though it would just have been reading a newspaper story. It’s entirely possible that reading it would have made me feel better; perhaps the allegation, whatever it is, is transparently bogus, and realizing that would set my mind at ease. But scavenging for information behind Ollie’s back—any more than I already had—felt like a betrayal.

And then there was the last time, when I got as far as typing Caleb’s name into my search bar, and the autofill suggested “Caleb Burwitz sexual assault” and my stomach almost ripped itself out of my body. Any situation where my brother-in-law’s name pops up shackled to the phrase “sexual assault” on the Internet is not a situation that is going to be fine for a long, long time. But I wouldn’t want to tell Ollie so, even if he’d known I’d heard the rumor. He gets tired of his role of peacekeeper between his father and brother, but I know he takes a certain beleaguered pride in it. Nobody else can manage them. Leslie always intends to help, but winds up getting aggressively defensive of Caleb; Rachel is too torn between them, and always too weakened by her guilt. I don’t want to undercut Ollie’s security on this front.

“Yeah, I’m sure it will be okay,” I tell him. It’s a harmless little lie, but as I sink toward sleep, unease vibrates inside me like the warning rattle of a snake’s tail.

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