Chapter Fifteen. Ingrid
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
INGRID
One day when we were all thirteen, Izzy, Ben, and I played in the woods on the Sherman land, like we’d done a thousand times before. But that summer, things were shifting like a kaleidoscope, colors brighter and everything sharp and tangy as a penny on the tongue.
My foot slipped on a wet rock as we climbed down the riverbank toward The Hollow, and Ben caught me round the waist. His fingers on my sun-warmed skin.
I was hyperaware of his body. Of the maleness of him.
He wasn’t just Ben, the kid we’d always known.
He was a boy, close enough to me that I could count his eyelashes.
But it was Izzy who was bold enough to kiss him that day, while we swam together in the river—one quick whim that had her giggling, spinning away from him in the water, that left him blushing, that led to him taking her to the movies later that week, Abel chauffeuring them around in his truck.
It was inevitable that one of us would have kissed Ben Sherman that summer. And it made sense that it was Izzy. She’d always been the carefree one. The leap-and-never-look one.
When Izzy disappeared, the Shermans did as well.
They never answered their phone again, not for us anyway.
Abel put up barbed wire fences around the property, TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT signs along the river, and everyone believed him.
Even Carol avoided Mom in the grocery store, slipping away before Mom could speak to her, leaving her basket stranded in the aisle.
I waited for Ben. Waited for him to reach out behind his parents’ backs, throw pebbles at our window again, leave a note in the knot of the pecan tree, something, anything. Waited for him to explain how it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t have been him who hurt Izzy.
But the pebbles never came. His parents pulled him out of school with just a few months left of senior year, sent him away to West Texas to work the oil fields. By the time he came back, I’d already left town myself.
If Ben was innocent, he would have reached out to me.
But he didn’t.
Now, the invitation—I KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO YOUR SISTER—burns a hole through my purse as I pull open the doors to Barrel & Branch. The bar is a dimly lit mix of rustic and glitz—deer heads and crystal chandeliers.
It’s not the first time someone has reached out with a theory about Izzy.
Every time a new true crime podcast gets ahold of the story—a beauty queen gone missing in the heart of Texas—my inbox floods with strangers sending blurry photos of “Izzy” in California and links to stories about serial killers who were active in Texas at the time. I learned long ago to delete and block.
And now the twenty-fifth anniversary is coming up, which means the interview requests are back—emails, voicemails, random DMs from producers hoping for a quote.
But Mom never talked to them. None of us did.
After Izzy vanished, the whole town closed ranks.
You don’t feed the vultures. You don’t turn grief into someone else’s entertainment.
But this is different. Whoever sent me this invitation isn’t some internet sleuth in another state. They are here in Anhalt right now.
Light pours in behind me, and I feel like I’m entering center stage.
Heads lift and whispers ripple around the room, like a rumor spreading in real time.
For a moment, I wonder if they think I’m her.
Like maybe Izzy has just strolled back into town to grab a drink and tell everyone the crazy story of where she’s been.
I lift my sunglasses onto my head and scan the room. People I grew up with avert their eyes, and, for each and every one, I can’t help but think: Was it you?
I make my way to the two-seater high-top table in the dead middle of the room, where Kennedy Claire perches like the featured sculpture in a museum: chin lifted so she has to look down the slope of her face to see the menu, zebra-print dress hugging every curve.
In the wild, that pattern is meant to camouflage. Here, it’s meant to stand out.
When I reach her, she rises, air-kisses my cheek, whispering, “If you look back at them, honey, they always wilt away.”
And she’s right. I glance around, and the gawkers snap their attention elsewhere, like nosy neighbors snapping their blinds shut.
“See? It’s a superpower.” She takes her seat again and slides a glass of rosé toward me. “How’s Joel? It’s a shame he couldn’t be here.”
I should tell her the truth. This is where Kennedy Claire would really shine as a best friend, do exactly what I’m always wanting Sheryl to do—trash-talk Joel.
She would remind me that he sucks soda through his teeth, leaves his fingernail clippings on the end table.
She’d tell me I’m a goddess and will be better off without him.
By the end of the night, we’d be planning out my Eat, Pray, Love tour around the world.
But the truth is, I’m ashamed to admit that Joel left me. Because that’s exactly what he did. There was no affair. No dramatic argument. He simply woke up one day, after fifteen years together, and decided he didn’t want to be married anymore. Didn’t want me anymore.
Sheryl says I have a fear of abandonment, stemming from the loss of my sister. As if I needed to pay someone for that brilliant insight. But, I guess, someone has to fund Sheryl’s cardigan addiction.
“Joel’s fine. Just slammed at work,” I say, taking my first sip of wine so she can’t read my face, can’t sniff out the lie.
Luckily, Kennedy Claire has her own agenda. “Please tell me you’re coming to orientation tomorrow.” She flashes me her best smile and nudges me under the table with the pointy toe of her high heel. “It won’t be the same without you.”
I know what she’s really after, though. She has called me no less than a dozen times about the pageant, and every time I’ve told her the same thing, that Mom would love nothing more than to crown this year’s Miss Lone Star Princess, but it all depends on her health.
Whether she’s discharged in time. How the chemo hits her.
You’d think this would be obvious to any reasonable person.
But that’s Kennedy Claire for you: self-centered almost to the point of narcissism.
We’ve been friends for nearly three decades, though. At this point, I don’t expect her to be anyone other than who she’s always been. Isn’t that what real friendship is? Knowing a person fully and loving them anyway.
Besides, a part of me will always be that thirteen-year-old girl, grateful and a little in awe that the dazzling, formidable Kennedy Claire chose—of all people—me.
The start of eighth grade had been hard for me.
When Ben and Izzy started dating, I felt suddenly invisible in their world.
The world that used to belong to the three of us.
They spent time without me, sat close, whispered things I couldn’t hear, told inside jokes I didn’t understand.
I missed them, even when I was with them.
Then, at Oktoberfest that year, I found myself alone with my arms full of paper plates sagging with bratwursts and funnel cakes.
I’d been sent off to spend our tickets while Izzy and Ben held our spot by the dance hall, but by the time I got back, they were gone, their laughter already disappearing into the polka music inside.
I was embarrassed—standing there with all that food and nowhere to put it and no one to share it with—and embarrassment is the worst possible emotion you can feel when you are thirteen.
Then Kennedy Claire called my name. She was in line for the Ferris wheel with the girls everyone wanted to be friends with, her voice bright and carrying.
Ingrid, you’re with me. She plucked a funnel cake right out of my hands and slid me into place beside her as if it had been decided all along.
Nobody complained about me cutting, not when Kennedy Claire was in charge.
And, just like that, I wasn’t invisible anymore. Wasn’t alone anymore.
“I got an invitation,” I say, tipping my glass again, pulse ticking at the thought of that message.
“Oh, good. I left one for y’all at the hospital.” She’s talking about one she must have tucked into that bouquet on Mom’s bedside table.
“When did those go out?” I ask, hoping the question sounds casual, not like I’m fishing for information.
But she is unbothered. “We put them in the registration packets, so the girls can hand them out to all their friends and family. I’m determined to make this our biggest pageant yet.”
So all the contestants. And their mothers. And anyone else they might have invited. It doesn’t narrow the pool much.
“Say you’ll be there. I need you.” She pouts her bottom lip.
I force a smile. “I’ll bring my camera. Take all those candid photos you wanted.”
Back in high school, I was always snapping pictures with that old film camera—of Kennedy Claire and me, Izzy and Ben, the rest of our friends.
I even started developing the photos myself in the makeshift darkroom Dad helped me put together in the storage closet of the garage, falling in love with the way the image would appear slowly, as if by magic.
I haven’t picked up a camera in years, but it’ll give me the perfect excuse to chat with all those pageant mothers and daughters.
Kennedy Claire squeals with delight, because there is nothing she likes better than getting her own way. “Look at us,” she says, shimmying her shoulders. “Reliving the glory days.”
We fall into an old rhythm without even trying. Over a bottle of wine, we trade stories that aren’t new but still make us laugh, the kind of inside jokes that survived college, marriages, cross-country moves. Time is an accordion compressed, and we are seventeen again.
Then she taps her phone to check the time. “Oh, gosh, I better skedaddle. Lots to do to get ready for tomorrow.” She pulls some cash from her crossbody purse, lays it on the table, then stands and gives me another kiss on the cheek. “I’ll see you bright and early, girlie. We start at 9 AM, sharp.”
“See you then,” I say.
And, just like that, she’s gone, and I’m left alone, the soft white light of the chandelier now a spotlight. Without Kennedy Claire as my shield, I’m feeling the eyes of the room on me again. Exposed and stripped down to my bare skin, a dead body on an examination table.
I flag the waitress for the check, but instead, she sets down a cocktail, frothy with grapefruit and charred rosemary.
“From the gentleman at the bar,” she says.
I follow her glance. A man I don’t know is staring right at me.
He’s handsome, with sandy-colored hair and a strong jaw, and far too young for me.
He looks to be in his mid- to late twenties.
He smiles, a warm, mischievous grin that dimples one cheek, like we’re in on the same joke.
I wonder if he’s been watching me this whole time, as I laughed with Kennedy Claire, as I swept my long, dark hair over one shoulder. I guess he liked what he saw.
And something about a man that good-looking seeing me, wanting me—it sends a surprise of butterflies through my abdomen.
Then an alarm goes off on my phone, a rising scale of electronic bells. I don’t need to look to know it’s my spontaneity alert, but I do, YOLO flashing on the screen, a silly phrase for a silly practice.
I want you to practice spontaneity, Sheryl said once at the end of a session.
I like that Sheryl gives me homework. So, I started scheduling in a spot for spontaneity on my calendar.
“Scheduled spontaneity” is ludicrous, I know.
But there is something intoxicating about the practice.
About asking myself: What do you want? Right now, in this moment, what do you want, Ingrid?
I even randomize it, so I don’t know the day or time each week when my phone will send an alert, and I have to do something unplanned.
The first time it went off, I took an hour-long bubble bath on a Tuesday night.
That’s how it started in the beginning, with self-care.
But over time, the guardrails came off. I threw out the salad I’d prepped for lunch and got Taco Bell instead.
I popped into the corner store, bought a pack of cigarettes, which I hadn’t smoked since I was seventeen, took a few drags and tossed the rest. That nicotine buzz kept me floating high all morning long.
I silence the alarm.
When I look back at the bar, the young man is up from his seat. He’s taller than I realized, and he’s already halfway to my table.