Ten days after the boys went missing, Bree’s dog Antonio disappeared. Byron had left the living room window above the couch wide open while he showered for his late shift at work. The dog slipped out then, and he’d been unable to find him anywhere. When Bree arrived home from her afternoon kickboxing class, Byron was sitting in the kitchen, dressed in his Subway uniform, waiting to tell her the news. She trudged into the kitchen, her neck and forehead glistening with sweat, humming. Byron plucked at a toothpick from the duck-shaped holder that had been there all their lives and chewed on it. While his sister drank a glass of water from the tap, he told her he’d lost Antonio. His sister calmly said, “Let’s go look some more,” but she put the glass down with a slam.
They patrolled the streets for the dog. Usually they found him within twenty minutes, but now they’d been searching for an hour with no sign of him. Nobody had seen him and Crolley hadn’t sat out on his porch since the day Byron threw pebbles at him. They returned home.
“You couldn’t close a damn window,” Bree said. “After all these years, you couldn’t do that one thing for me.” She wouldn’t look at him, but walked quietly into their house. She wouldn’t cry—the woman across the street had lost two sons. She felt she couldn’t be upset, because Miranda Shifflett and all the women like her would forever have a monopoly on grief.
“He’ll come back,” Byron said, following her inside. “And if he don’t, it’s just a dog.”
Bree turned on him. “But he’s my dog, Byron,” she said. “Mine. Anything I’ve ever called mine, you either take it from me or lose it. My food, my money, my time, my dog,” she said. “Hell, I was Miranda’s friend first, and you even took her away from me.”
Byron stood there, his brow furrowed. He held out his arms, and pulled her close. “I love you, Sabrina,” he said.
Bree pushed him away. “Go to work,” she said. “You’re two hours late. You’re manager. You’ve got to set an example.”
She lay down on her bed and curled into a ball, hugging a pillow. It only smelled of her.
It was dark when Crolley showed up at her front door. A streetlamp lit her porch from across the street, silhouetting the man, so it took her several moments to recognize him. He didn’t need to ask to come in, Bree just knew. He sat on the couch and refused a glass of iced tea. She sat waiting on the other end of the couch, her feet folded under her. Light from the kitchen fell into the otherwise dim room and Bree could barely see his face. He’d never been in her house before, but he didn’t seem curious, didn’t look around at the furniture or decorations, only stared at her mother’s worn green carpet beneath his boots. Then, in his soft crackly voice, like a dozen Popsicle sticks breaking, he confessed.
That day that Byron tried to give him a check, he’d been infuriated. He’d wanted to do something to get back at them because he was tired of being taken for granted, of being waved at from across the street. He decided to do something for himself, something he hadn’t done in a long time. He left his porch and walked down to the 7-11, got himself a Blue Raspberry Slurpee, and walked back. It was stupid, he reckoned, just plain silly, but it was his one act of vengeance. Just knowing that he’d done that—let Miranda’s house out of his sight for ten minutes—had made him feel in control again, like maybe he hadn’t loved her after all. But, in those ten minutes that he was at the 7- 11, the boys disappeared. It had to have been then. He hadn’t thought anything would happen to them, but something had, and he couldn’t sleep or eat, and he’d vomited blue for hours. He was confessing to her—Bree—because he trusted her and he thought she trusted him.