Page 69 of Dear Debbie

Lexi takes my phone and shows me that if you click on the icon of Debbie’s face, there are three dots that pop up. She clicks on them, and it brings up a series of locations.

“See?” she says. “It shows everywhere she’s been for the last week if she has stopped there for at least ten minutes.”

Holy crap. I didn’t know the app could do that. My wife is very talented.

I scroll through the list of places she visited before turning off her location sharing. Most of them are easily recognizable and not concerning. There’s the school. The plant store. The grocery store. Titan Fitness. That house in Weymouth where Robert Pike lives. The Hingham Shipyard.

And then two other locations that don’t fit into any of those categories.

Oh shit. Oh no.

“Dad?” Lexi says when she sees the look on my face.

I bring up the list of my contacts on my phone and click on one of my favorites. I say a prayer to myself that I’ll hear someone pick up on the other end of the line, but it’s not a surprise when it goes to voicemail. Even so, I call one more time for good measure.

This is very bad.

I stand up abruptly from the chair, and it rolls several feet out of the way, crashing into our sofa. “I have to go.”

Lexi and Izzy exchange looks. “Go where?” Lexi asks.

“I’ll be home as soon as I can.” I pat my pockets to confirm my keys and phone are there. “And if your mom calls or comes home, call me right away.”

“Dad, where are you going?” Lexi presses me.

I can’t tell them though. What I suspect is too awful for words.

“I’ll be back soon” is all I can say.

I can only pray that I’ve got it all wrong.

56

DEBBIE

The boy steps aside to let me enter the fraternity house. He has an open, friendly expression on his face, because he has no idea what I’m planning to do. If he knew, he wouldn’t let me past the front door. Actually, he’d probably be calling the police.

“My name is Lennox,” he tells me. “I’m the president of the fraternity.”

“Is Lennox your first name or last name?”

He laughs. He seems sweet and earnest, but so did Hutch. “First name. My last name is Newberry.”

“Like the comic store.”

He nods. “No relation.”

I look around the small space of the living area. It contains a few ratty sofas that look like they came from the curb and a coffee table with books stacked on it. The top one is labeled Statistical Thermodynamics. This place looked so different on that night that changed my life. If somebody transported me here and didn’t tell me where I was, I never would’ve known. I suppose it looks different when it’s nighttime, filled with loud music and the stink of alcohol and cigarettes in the air.

“So what’s the article about?” he asks me.

“It’s just a profile of fraternity life,” I explain. “We picked Zeta Pi randomly, and we just want to know what it’s like to live here.”

I expect him to remark on the fact that it sounds like a very boring article, but instead he nods like this is completely reasonable.

“Do you want a tour?” Lennox offers.

I hesitate. I do want a tour. That’s part of the reason I’m here, but part of me is scared that I might get triggered, remembering what happened to me that night. The last thing I want is to have a panic attack in this frat house.