B00B9FX0F2 EBOK by Ruth Baron

thick homey mug. Over the racket of the espresso machine, notes of Arcade Fire wafted around the softly lit coffee shop. It had a hipster vibe, but it wasn’t too pretentious. Of course Lacey liked it. Or would have liked it. He still wasn’t sure what tense to use.
    Jenna blew gently on her latte before sipping it. After she swallowed, she looked over at him quizzically. “Do you mind if I ask why you want to know?”
    Jason had rehearsed this part. He hoped he sounded self-assured rather than wooden, the way he had as a kid when he’d been forced to act in school plays. “Well, I wasn’t totally honest with you when we met the other day. I did sort of know Lacey.” He watched her closely, but her face was frozen. “I mean, just online. On Facebook. We’d been in touch.” Lacey had told him he could confide in Jenna, but Lacey wasn’t the one sitting across from her right now, risking everything. If Jason was in danger, he had the right to test the waters before revealing himself to be a complete lunatic.
    “When?” Jenna asked coolly.
    “A while ago. It wasn’t much, but I thought it might turn into something.” She nodded without speaking, as if processing the information. “What?” he asked finally.
    “I thought it might be something like that,” she said. “Part of the reason I came is that I thought you might know something about what happened to her.”
    Jason felt like his blood had suddenly turned to ice. There was something about the way she said “happened to her” that made him fear he was going to get more of Lacey’s story than he wanted to hear. “What do you mean?”
    Jenna’s eyes narrowed. “When did you say you and Lacey started talking?”
    It was his chance to come clean. He’d never liked lying, but he’d played this scene out in his head before he came. Lacey needed to know she could trust Jenna before revealing herself, and Jason did, too — especially if Lacey was right and he was in danger. “It was in the fall,” he answered. It wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. That was when he first Facebooked her. So what if he didn’t hear back until after she faked her own death?
    “I see. And how did it start?” Maybe Jason was just being paranoid, but Jenna was starting to resemble a cop conducting an interrogation on a TV show.
    “Well, we had the same quote on our profiles. When I noticed it, I messaged her, and then she wrote back. I mean, we barely talked, and it was always about normal stuff, like music or movies. I thought there might be something there, but then she stopped writing me. To be honest with you, I didn’t even hear about what happened to her until recently. That’s why I went to the memorial.”
    Jenna didn’t say anything, and Jason began fidgeting in his chair. He couldn’t tell whether or not she was buying what he was saying. Finally, she responded in a tone so hushed Jason had to lean forward to hear her. “Look, Jason, I think there was something going on with Lacey this fall. Before she, you know …”
    “Like, what kind of something?”
    “I don’t know how well you got to know her, but there are things you have to understand about Lacey for this to make sense.” She put down her mug and took a deep breath. “It’s hard to describe your best friend. The words that come to mind, they’re, like, smart, funny, nice . Lots of people are smart and funny. Everybody’s nice. But Lacey wasn’t like a lot of people. She wasn’t really like anyone. She had this energy. It was so magnetic. And when you were friends with her, you felt like the coolest person on earth.”
    She paused to take another sip from her coffee. Warmth had crept into her voice as she talked about Lacey; underneath it, Jason could detect a note of pain. The secret he was keeping tugged guiltily at his heart. “But something changed?”
    Jenna looked around nervously. At the other end of the couch was a frazzled, curly-haired woman rocking a baby against her chest while a