What she sees is something in between the two: order and a lack of commitment and an awkward marriage of his grad school life and his new, uncertain one. But who is she to try to analyze this house and his stuff in this way? She’s not a detective, for Christ’s sake. This thought gives her a second or two of relief before she remembers that if she’s going to survive the mess she’s currently in, she better acquire the skills of a detective, and quick.

“You like Sprite?” he asks.

“Sure. As long as it’s diet.”

Luke nods and ducks into the kitchen. She doesn’t follow, but she’s got a good vantage point from where she’s standing. Almost nothing on the counters. No blender, no toaster. Just a coffee maker and a stack of mail. The butcher-block table’s too small, just like everything in the house is too small.

He didn’t plan to live here, she thinks. That’s all I can figure.

Luke returns with an open can of Sprite Zero and nothing for himself, which makes her feel awkward and like she shouldn’t take a sip. But he wasn’t out of her sight for more than a second, and would he really drug her with Marty outside? If he did, would she be as immune as she’d been to the vodka and wine she’d guzzled the night before? Or is that something that only happens after Dylan’s wonder drug has been triggered? There’s still a part of her that wants to refer to the drug as Zypraxon, but she’d like to know if the name, like much of what Dylan told her, is complete bullshit.

“So what brought this on?” she asks, gesturing to the room around her.

“I needed a place to live. It’s cheap, believe it or not. Silver Shore was renting it out for some of their foremen on the resort project, but when that fell through, they broke their lease, and Emily was desperate to fill the place. Her dad’s been gone awhile.”

“No, I mean, asking to see me like this.”

“Marty didn’t tell you?”

“He said you were with the sheriff’s department now; that’s all,” she lies.

Luke nods.

This is not a secret agent, she realizes, or if he is, he’s super bad at it, because right now I could cut his discomfort with a knife. And he might thank me if I did.

Then she sees the stack of books on the shelf, the guides to criminal profiling and crime scene investigation. On top of them is a file folder, its thick stack of pages perilously close to sliding free, which suggests he shoved them in their current spot quickly. The top page sports a blaring headline. She can’t see the whole thing, but two of the words she can see make her stomach go cold—Mask Maker.

Tell me he’s not writing a book about serial killers, she thinks. Please, God, tell me he didn’t ask me here for some kind of interview.

“So is Altamira Sheriff’s consulting on the Mask Maker killings?”

“Oh, that. No. That’s just a little weekend reading.”

“Weekend reading?”

“Something to keep my head busy.”

“A little amateur detective work?”

“Yeah.” He stares at the floor. Swallows as if it’s painful. “I guess that’s what I am now. An amateur detective.” He says these last two words with such venom, she’s surprised he doesn’t finish them off by spitting on the floor. Whatever his reasons for getting rejected by the FBI, he’s not exactly repressing his feelings about them.

“Figure you’re here because Marty and I had some words yesterday,” Luke says.

“About me?”

“About a lot of things, but you came up.”

“And so he guilted you into this?” she asks.

“Into what?”

“Apologizing,” she says. “You are going to apologize, right?”

“Should I?”

“Yes, you should,” she says and takes a sip of Sprite.

“I didn’t expect this to be this hard.”

“Well, maybe it should be.”

“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” he asks.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You sure you don’t want a beer?” he asks.

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he says.

He ducks into the kitchen and reappears with a bottle of Heineken, wiping the evidence of his first sip from his lips with one forearm.

“You’re enjoying this?” he asks.

“What?”

“You’re smiling,” he says.

“I am?”

Luke nods and takes another sip of beer.

“Sorry,” she says. “It’s been a crazy few days.”

“Is that what the name change is about?” he asks.

“The name change is a year old.” And even that’s more than you should say to him right now.

“I’m gonna do this, Charley.”

“Do what? Apologize?”

“Yeah. I’m just . . .”

“You’re just what?” she asks. “Working up the nerve?”

“Marty, he . . .”

“He what?”

“I don’t know; he told me apologies are all bullshit. That they’re just things we say to make ourselves feel better, and so I guess I’m trying for more here.”

“OK. You know what might make this easier? For you, I mean.”

“What?”

“You could ask me what I think you should apologize for,” she says.

Luke stares at her as if she’s an oncoming train. He swallows. “OK.”

But he says nothing, and the silence between them extends.

“Are you going to ask me, Luke?”

“What would you like me to apologize for, Tr—Charley?”

“Can I sit down?”

“Of course,” he says.

She takes a seat on the sofa’s edge, her eyes level with the file on the Mask Maker.

“Here’s the thing,” she says. She’s not measuring her words, and this makes her wonder if the drug’s giving her confidence. Not through its chemistry but through the knowledge that it’s there, waiting to deploy if she’s attacked. “There was like a day or two, when I first got here, after school started, where I thought things might be normal. I think some of it was ’cause I was older and I looked different from the girl on the book covers. It’d been a year since I’d done an appearance or an interview or anything like that. And I thought, wow. Maybe, just maybe, for these last two years of high school, I’m going to get a taste. A taste of what everyone else has gotten. A taste of normal.

“And then you started up. European History. Last period. I got called on and you didn’t. Then you tried to jump in on me. But you didn’t know the answer, and so Ms. Stockton told you to be quiet, and you got embarrassed. And that’s when it all began. Every day, every time we were together. Every chance you got. Nobody in that school called me Burning Girl until you did, and once you started, they never stopped. And I guess what I want to know is why?”

He’s staring into his beer bottle, circling the rim with one finger. His breaths are labored things that make his chest rise and fall, but it sounds like he’s drawing them through his nose. Right now his jaw’s entirely too tense for him to breathe through his mouth.

“I was afraid of you,” he finally says.

“Jesus. Really?”

“No, I didn’t think you were some serial killer. I could tell you were a good person.”

“Oh. OK.”

“Look, this is going to sound . . . ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?”

“Lame. It’s gonna sound lame, all right? And it’s going to sound like an excuse and I don’t want it to but . . .”

“Just say it, Luke.”

“My mother, before she got sick, she didn’t want me to leave. She wanted me to stay here and take care of her. My brother, we all knew he wasn’t the caretaker type. You have to actually care about things that don’t have circuit boards. Anyway, he was already on his way to . . . I don’t know what. The point is, there was only one way my mother was going to let me get out of Altamira, and that was if I was the best fucking student at Los Pasos High. Ever. And I was. Until you showed up. It was like, whatever you’d been through, it just made you more grown-up. I could memorize anything, but you had this ability to reason through stuff the rest of us didn’t have.”

“I didn’t stop you from getting good grades, Luke.”

“No, you didn’t. But that was just half of it. I needed everyone at that school to think I was the smartest one in the room. I needed the guidance counselor to lean on my mother every day and tell her to let me go. To let me get out of here and make a life for myself. To tell her to stop falling apart every time I talked about going off to a school that wasn’t right down the highway. And then . . .”

“She died,” Charlotte says, as gently as she can.

“Yeah, and part of me thought I was being punished.”

“Punished?”

“For the way I’d treated you.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, well, for a while there after my mother died, that’s what I was. Crazy.”

She’s not sure what she expected him to say, but it sure as hell isn’t this. These are the words of someone who’s been through the pressure cooker of grief and come out irreparably changed. Someone like me.

“How’s your brother?”

She didn’t mean to strike a blow, but that’s how Luke seems to receive the question. His previous admission rendered him vulnerable, and now he doesn’t have the energy to put his guard back up. He’s staring into space, like he’s forgotten about his beer, even though he’s gripping the bottle by the base with both hands.

“Luke?”

“I’m sorry.”