He bows his head, closes his mouth, as if he’s reconsidering his initial response. For a long while, there’s just silence and the low murmur of the AA meeting downstairs. Occasionally a motorcycle backfires in the street below, probably snarled in the little knot of traffic that always develops around that crosswalk they just installed between the movie theater and the new ice-cream parlor next door to the center.

“So it’s not the movie,” she says, trying to control her anger. “It’s that I’m not over those letters from Jas—my stalker. It’s this Mask Maker psycho. I mean, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m saying it’s all of them. I’m saying the number of potential triggers in your life is expanding by the day, and it’s expanding because you’re on too fragile a foundation. You live in isolation. You have no meaningful friendships—”

“That’s not true. I have Kayla.”

“I’m not including the lawyer who helped you sue your father. That’s a business relationship. And she lives in San Francisco.”

“We talk once a week.”

“You’ve got all your grandmother’s friends back in Altamira, and you’ve been to visit them how many times?”

“That one’s hard.”

“Why?”

“Because my grandmother’s still dead.”

“She’s still dead whether you visit her friends or not.”

“Jesus, Dylan.”

“You need a breath, Charlotte.”

“Well, I’m not going to get it talking to you right now. And what happened to the bridge? I thought I needed a bridge. What? Are we building a whole city here?”

“You need something that’s going to reduce your anxiety levels so that you can start acting contrary to your instincts right now.”

“And what are my instincts right now?”

“To isolate, self-obsess, and convince yourself of things about yourself that aren’t true.”

“Ouch.”

“I’ve been seeing you for months now, so I’m gonna say this with confidence. Unless you initiate a small-scale change in your brain chemistry, you’ll remain incapable of developing the kind of healthy behavioral patterns that will get you out of this place you’re stuck in.”

“I love my house.”

“You live in a ghost town full of snakes.”

“People are stupid about snakes. And ghosts.”

“Maybe so, but neither make very good friends.”

“It’s beautiful out there. Especially the stars . . . at night, I mean. They’re incredible.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Maybe I’ll ask you to drop by sometime.”

“I doubt it.”

“Is that a no?”

“Does it matter? You’ll never ask.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re not.”

Why is he smiling? Shouldn’t he be pissed? She just stares at him.

“You’re not sorry, Charley, and that’s a good thing. You want to know why? Because it means you’re a fighter.”

“If I’m a fighter, then how come I can’t leave my house?”

“We’ve covered this. You can leave. You just don’t want to. And the more you give in to that urge, the more you’ll come to believe the lies you’re telling yourself about what you are and aren’t capable of. It’s a cycle, Charley. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of mistaken thinking. And we have to come up with a way for you to break it once and for all.”

Even if it involves pills, she thinks.

Maybe if she weren’t so damn tired, this would be it, the moment she stormed out of his office and never came back. But she is tired.

So tired she wasn’t sure she was in shape to make the drive to town, a drive that’s practically a straight shot across open desert on a flat, two-lane blacktop.

He’s mentioned drugs at least once a session. In the beginning she’d figured this was just his way of reminding her he’s an actual psychiatrist who can prescribe stuff. That he isn’t just some touchy-feely psychologist with a degree he earned online.

But he’s never let up on it. And he hasn’t now even though she told him how her father tried to medicate her into silence when she was ten.

And she’s tired.

She likes these sessions, she needs them, and the sense that he’s getting impatient with her, it’s affecting her more than she wants it to. Maybe more than she thinks it should.

Or I’m feeling worn down because he’s right, she considers. Not just because he went to Harvard, or because he looks like all the actors who’ve ever played Superman run together.

What’s that’s AA saying she’s always liked?

Keep it simple, stupid.

And so what’s the simplest question and the simplest answer here?

Do I need sleep?

Yes. Hell yes. Dear God, yes.

“What do you have in mind?” she hears herself say. “Some kind of sleeping pill?”

He lowers his right leg from where he’s braced the ankle on top of his left knee, setting aside the legal pad on which he’s not taken a single note since they started. “No,” he answers. “Not a sleeping pill.”

He gets to his feet, turns to his desk, and opens the drawer. She expects him to pull out a prescription pad. Instead he removes a square of white cardboard, six bright-orange pills encased inside little plastic bubbles.

“What is that?”

“It’s called Zypraxon.” He takes a seat on the edge of his chair and holds the pill packet in between his thumb and forefinger. He’s gazing into her eyes now, the talk therapist replaced by the medical doctor. “And I think it’s going to be just perfect for you.”

5

The first gun is under the sink.

A Beretta M9 in a holster attached to the cabinet’s ceiling, within easy reach of anyone doing dishes or moving about the compact, tidy kitchen.

Jason slides his backpack off one shoulder and digs out the plastic bags.

He removes the gun’s magazine and strips it with one hand, punching the bullets one after the other into the Ziploc he holds open with his other hand. Once the magazine is empty, he seals the bag and drops it inside his backpack. Then he inspects the chamber to make sure he didn’t leave a bullet sitting inside.

He inserts the empty magazine and returns the gun to its hidden holster.

Dark is falling. He needs to work quickly. But the temptation to study his surroundings is almost overwhelming.

The house has two bedrooms along a short, narrow tiled hallway. At the end of the hallway is the door to the small garage. Both bedrooms have only a thin band of clerestory windows; probably to protect them from the heat. The bulletproof glass they’re made of doesn’t have anything to do with the temperature outside. The living room has a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the small courtyard. The glass here is also bulletproof, and he’s willing to bet it replaced what was once a sliding glass door. Now the only entrance to the courtyard is the house’s front door.

It’s the lawsuit against her father that financed this place. He’s sure of this.

The lawsuit was the last time she’d appeared in the press.

Jason kept all the clippings.

In the last interview Trina ever gave, she’d asserted she was asking for only enough money to start a new life for herself, something that didn’t involve profiting off the memories of the Bannings’ victims.

The message boards devoted to her and the killings had exploded with rage. She was a liar who didn’t give a whit about the victims, they’d claimed. And her lawsuit was just another form of self-promotion.

Under a string of aliases, Jason had tried to defend her, to blame Lowell Pierce for caring only about money and filling her head with junk science and never allowing her to tell her own story. But the other posters assailed him. They claimed his statements implied a personal relationship with Trina he couldn’t prove. And when he told them he would prove them all wrong someday, they’d banned him for violating some policy around threats that wasn’t in the forum’s guidelines. He could barely bring himself to care. He wasn’t like the rest of them. They pretended to weep for the victims so they could pore over the crime scene photos. They pretended to hate the Bannings because, like him, they aspired to their purity and greatness; they just couldn’t admit it.

And now he’s here, inside her house.

So fuck those hypocrites.

He’s hard-pressed to call the front room a living room because it looks more like a comfortable office than a place to relax. The desk and giant computer monitors—three of them, all wide-screen, fanned out across an L-shaped desk so that they almost surround whoever’s sitting at it—look like Hollywood’s idea of a NASA workstation. Her desk chair is coated in worn but soft-looking padding that suggests she spends more time there than anywhere else around the house.

It’s the bedrooms that are calling him, but what’s the sense in going through her belongings if he’s going to burn them all anyway?

She’s going to burn them, he corrects himself, once he manages to convince her of their future together.

Because by then she’ll get it. By then they’ll have had plenty of time out here alone together without the distractions of crowds, birth fathers, or restraining orders.

But for now he’s got the other guns to empty.

One down, two to go.

6

She stood up the minute Dylan handed her the pill.

It was a reflexive move on her part, and she’s not sure why she did it.