Amelia debated turning her car around several times on the way to Henry's, but what stopped her from actually doing so was the knowledge that every one of her doubts was orbiting around what Colton would want her to do rather than her own desires. What she wanted was free dinner, so she kept driving.

She was slightly surprised upon pulling up to the address he'd given her over the phone that it was a townhouse rather than an apartment, but she knew she must be in the right place because she could recall seeing the old Jeep that was sitting in the driveway back at the park on Saturday. She walked up to the front porch and rang the doorbell, and it was in those few quiet, solitary seconds that fell between her pressing the button and him answering the door that Amelia realized that she wasn't so sure if she was actually prepared to talk about her feelings if he asked her what was going on. But the nerves dissipated for the most part when Henry opened the door and welcomed her inside with a warm smile.

"Good timing," he told her. "The food just finished."

She couldn't help but glance around as he led her through the living room to the kitchen, though she tried not to be too conspicuous about it. Everything was very tidy, tidier than she would have expected for a twenty-four-year-old boy who lived by himself—unless there was a secret roommate she didn't know about—but it didn't feel disconcertingly sterile, either. She dared to think that it was cozy while simultaneously scolding herself that she shouldn't get too comfortable here. She knew that visits to him didn't need to be a repetitive occurrence.

"Nice place," was the only comment she made aloud as she drifted over to the kitchen table, her hand settling on the back of one of the chairs.

"Oh, thanks. I can't really take much credit for it. The landlord is a family friend and gives me pretty cheap rent," he explained as he walked back over to the stovetop. "I think he always felt a little sorry for my parents."

He said it casually—absentmindedly, really—but Amelia was lost. Her eyebrows furrowed. "Sorry for them?" she repeated, as if she'd perhaps misheard him. "Why?"

As the word slipped out of her mouth, she realized that she was probably being too blunt. She thought she saw his cheeks go slightly pink, or was that just the light playing tricks on her?

"No reason—I mean, it's a long story."

"You don't have to explain anything," she quickly corrected herself. "I shouldn't have asked. What's for dinner?"

Dinner, it turned out, was some sort of chicken and rice concoction that had her mouth watering as soon as she saw it. Amelia took a seat at the table while Henry divided the food evenly onto two plates and poured a glass of water for both of them. She didn't realize how hungry she already was until her stomach quietly growled when he brought her plate to her, but he was either too polite to comment on it or didn't even notice.

"I'm gonna have to steal this recipe from you," she decided after taking just one delectable bite. It certainly put all of her own cooking attempts to shame; he must have been one of those kids who actually pays attention when one of their parents tries to teach them anything about cooking.

Henry was now sitting across from her, and she noticed the way little crinkles formed around his eyes when he smiled. "I'm glad I didn't disappoint," he said.

"Not at all. Seriously, thanks for letting me come leech off of your food. It's really kind of you."

He brushed off the compliment. "Don't worry about it. I enjoy doing things for people. It's just my personality, I guess."

She found herself grinning. "Okay, Saint Caruso."

She hadn't meant to almost make him laugh while he was in the middle of chewing a bite of food, but she saw him struggle to keep his mouth shut as he quickly swallowed it, his lips tilting into a little smirk.

"I'm definitely not a saint," he corrected her. "I've made my fair share of mistakes—I've just managed to get over a lot of them."

Amelia was silently observing him from across the table, taking in the way he always seemed to hold himself with relative ease whereas she was always so tense. His pointer finger was aimlessly tapping on the glass wall of his cup, but the motion didn't come across as an anxious one.

"You seem very self-assured," she noted.

"A little bit, I guess," he shrugged. "I think it's more, like, I had my quarter-life crisis at fifteen instead of twenty-five, so I've already had time to pick myself up and move on."

She couldn't help but wonder what he meant by that, but she wasn't going to slip up again and stick her nose where it didn't belong. Instead, she pivoted back to her own dilemma, the whole reason she was here in the first place.

"You know when something's bothering you and you can't manage to think about anything else?"

He gave her another compulsory smile. "I think I know a thing or two about that, yeah."

She clearly still hadn't thought enough before she spoke. Of course he knew what that felt like—she wasn't the only one who was overwhelmed with the state of her life right now.

"God, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking.

"I'm just teasing you," he assured her. "I'm not mad."

For the next couple of minutes, she tried to identify why a peculiar sensation had settled in the pit of her stomach, and it was only after she replayed that brief interaction over in her mind a couple of times that she realized that she had come to expect even the most minuscule of conflicts to escalate into the fully-fledged, yell and bawl your eyes out kind of arguments. Shouting and hitting weren't the exceptions anymore—they were the norm.

It started to dawn on her then that she was in much more trouble than she'd realized.

"Since you're so wise," she spoke up again towards the end of the meal, hoping her voice sounded as light as she intended it to. He didn't need to know that her mind had gone all dark and twisty. "I have a question for you."

"Go for it."

"Do you ever feel like you're talking to a brick wall? What do you do?"

Henry leaned back in his seat, pensive. "I fortunately don't have a lot of brick wall-ish people in my life. But I definitely feel like I've run into a wall. Come here, I wanna show you something."

He was already getting up as he said it, but since they had both nearly cleared their plates anyway, she followed him to the living room. There was something there that she hadn't noticed before, what appeared to be some sort of whiteboard on wheels facing the wall.

But when Henry grabbed it and turned it around, she saw that it wasn't actually a whiteboard at all. It was a corkboard with all sorts of stuff about the Lily case laid out on it—notes, questions, ideas, photos of her car where it had been left on the side of the road. The two distinct sets of handwriting indicated that Liam had been contributing to it, too.

"Wow. You're...investigating," Amelia observed.

"Something like that," he nodded, but his eyes were still on the board rather than her. "I can't just do nothing, and my brain works better when I can see things visually, but I'm starting to feel like I'm going a little insane. If you happen to have any ideas, please throw them at me."

For a fraction of a second, Amelia felt an urge to reach out and touch his arm, to comfort him somehow. It caught her by surprise, as she so often preferred to keep to herself both physically and emotionally, and she curled her fingers tight to stop herself from doing anything hasty.

"You're not going insane," she told him quietly. "I—I don't know that I have any ideas about Lily that you haven't already thought of yet, but I'm happy to be a sounding board if that helps. Tell me about her. Tell me...everything."

She instantaneously knew that it was a ridiculous request, but he didn't seem horribly bothered by it. He took in a long breath as though he intended to speak.

"I don't even know where to begin," he admitted, his shoulders sinking. "How do you describe someone you feel like you know like the back of your hand?"

Her heart continued to soften for him. "Let me back up. Let's start with the basics."

"Okay, um..." Henry rubbed the back of his neck. "She's twenty-one, she's a senior at Bellevue. But you already knew that."

Amelia's eyes had floated over to a yellow sticky note in the corner of the board, which simply read, parents investigating? "How about her parents?"

"Her parents. Yeah, they're...I don't know, pretty typical parents, I guess? That sounds mean—I'm honestly just not that close to them. They're a little more strict on her than my own parents ever were on me, but..."

He paused. If there was anything else he had intended to say, he was reconsidering. "They're my aunt and uncle. I like them just fine."

"As for that note," he plowed ahead, nodding his acknowledgment towards the sticky tab she was looking at. "They're talking to my parents about everything, but all four of them are keeping Liam and I as far out of it as possible. It sucks, honestly. I usually get along with my parents so well, so it feels wrong to be disagreeing with them on anything. I overheard my dad telling my mom that they're considering hiring a private investigator, though I don't know that they'd admit that out loud to me or Liam."

The cutting edge in his voice wasn't lost on her. "You don't sound super fond of that idea."

"I'm not opposed to it. But the problem is that a private investigator is going to have plenty of reason to believe that there's nothing suspicious going on—nothing criminally suspicious, at least—just like the police."

"Why?" Amelia asked. "I don't mean to be pushy, I just want to understand."

"No, it's not that. I'm just..." his eyes drifted over towards her. "...Nervous that you're going to agree with them."

"I don't know Lily, but it's clear to me that you do. And I trust your intuition, Henry. I promise."

He nodded tentatively, but she seemed to have given him just enough reassurance to nudge him along. "I think everyone is going to point fingers at Lily."

"They're going to blame her?"

"I don't know if blame is quite the right word, but...she has something called schizoaffective disorder, have you heard of it?"

Amelia shook her head.

"To put it simply, the type she has shares symptoms with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder both," he explained. "And when we told that to the cops, they pretty much tried to somehow chalk this up to an intense mood swing or some other mental health episode they clearly know nothing about and convince us that she'll either come back to us before we know it or will stay hidden because she took herself off the grid on purpose."

But what if she really isn't in her right mind, then? Since when are the police mental health experts?

Amelia bit her tongue. Saying that wasn't going to help Henry in the slightest, and he'd surely already had the thought anyhow.

Instead, all she said was, "But you seem to know that's not the reason behind this."

"Lily was diagnosed after her freshman year of high school. She knows how to manage it. And even when it was at its worst, I was there. I was right there with her through all of it, so I know that she wouldn't have just run away like that even back then."

Frustration had inched back into his voice; he stopped for a moment. "I wish I could have been around for more of this past year. I could tell that she was doing really great—seriously, I think it was probably the best year of her life. She and Liam got a dog, she had a really great social work internship over the summer. It's been so long since she had anything even close to a crisis and she knows how to ask for help if she needs it. Liam saw her right before it happened, too. It just doesn't add up. It doesn't look like she did anything, but it doesn't look like a crime, either..."

"It's like she just disappeared into thin air," Amelia murmured.

A sense of relief washed over Henry's features, like she'd found the words for him that he couldn't find himself. "Yeah. That's exactly what it feels like."

She had much difficulty pulling her eyes off of the board, these makeshift scribbles of an investigation. And for a second, it made her own issues feel very, very small. Her call to Henry hadn't been a cry for help—this was a cry for help. A desperate reaching out for whatever tattered threads of sense he and Liam could find in all of this.

"I can't imagine what you must be feeling," she said quietly.

"Like I said, it helps to have someone listen." She got the distinct impression that he was trying not to project too much of his sadness onto her, but she could tell that his gratitude was genuine. She could see it in the weary set of his shoulders, hear it in everything he'd said and wasn't saying. "I'm sorry if it's a lot to absorb."

The corners of her lips tugged upwards. "I'm starting to think you're a chronic apologetic, too."

Her smile was returned. "Maybe I am."

For what realistically could have only been a second yet in some ways also felt like a minute, they were stuck there in place, just staring at each other. He felt...safe. Like a neutral place where she could just air out her feelings without facing judgment for them. But Amelia's pulse noticeably quickened as she observed this effect he was having on her and, scared not of the feeling itself but by her lack of understanding of it, she tried to break herself free from it.

"Can I take a picture of this?" she blurted, trying to revert to logic. "Your notes, I mean. I wanna think on it, see if I can come up with any other paths you might not have explored yet."

He told her that she could, so she pulled her phone out of her pocket and fumbled to take a quick picture. It felt wrong somehow to stay there for too long with her camera pointed at the inner workings of his mind.

"I'll do anything I can, okay?" she told him.

Henry nodded, then quietly added, "You're a good person, Amelia. You seem like you maybe don't hear that enough."

"Thanks. You, too." It hit her that she hadn't been keeping track of how long she'd been here, though surely Colton wouldn't be home by now. "I, ah, I should probably get going though–"

"Yeah, of course. But look, what you said about talking to a wall..." he said cautiously as he walked her to the door.

"Yeah?"

He appeared slightly hesitant, like he was worrying about saying the wrong thing. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then back again.

"I don't want to overstep or speculate about your life, but I genuinely can't tell if you know this or not, so I'm just gonna say it: you deserve a whole lot better than to feel like you're talking to a brick wall. So...what you do with that is your decision. Not the wall's."

He was blunt enough that he sounded like he really meant it, but not so far as to sound accusatory. In the periphery of her thoughts, it occurred to her that the way he was speaking to her wasn't too unlike the way Natasha sometimes did, and it made her question if people felt like they had to behave a certain way around her. Like she was too fragile to be pushed too hard but either too stubborn or too oblivious to see a point unless it was waved directly in her face.

But they don't know even half of it.

Slowly, she nodded. "But what if..." she swallowed. "What if, hypothetically, I was nervous about the wall...falling on me."

His eyebrows scrunched in a concerned way that was also somehow...endearing? But if he had been treading cautiously before, now he was walking on ice.

"We're getting a little too deep into this metaphor for me to keep tracking with it," he said straightforwardly.

She sensed that it was a lie and that he knew precisely the sort of thing she was talking about, but what was he to say about it? It wasn't like he'd want to throw out a wild accusation about a guy he only saw once all because of something vague she said. And she wasn't completely confident that she even wanted him to address it, either, though why she had just spoken up if that was true, she wasn't sure.

He continued. "But, um, hypothetically, if this falling wall was a real concern and you needed to get away from it without being asked too many questions...you have my number."

Relief came over her like a wave. That was what she was reaching out for, what she needed to hear. Somewhere deep in her consciousness, she must have known that this was why she should have told him anything at all. She must have known that he would try to help her.

And, more importantly, that she wanted to be helped.

"Thanks, Henry," she said quietly. "For everything. I'll see you around."

He nodded. "Take care of yourself, Amelia."

"You, too."

Her feet felt heavy on the ground, as if they didn't actually want to leave. But she knew that she had nothing else to say to him right there and then and that she was going to start judging herself if she hovered around this boy she barely knew for too long, so she forced herself to turn away and walk to her car. She slid back into the familiar contour of the driver's seat, allowing the directions on her phone to guide her home and her playlist to wash away her emotion, to numb her.

It was only once she was already back at Colton's apartment, sitting on the edge of their bed and wondering where to go from here, that she noticed that her cheeks were wet.