Once they’d finished making the video, Kayla drove to a gas station and came back with a box of wine and two bottles of vodka. Charlotte has always been a lightweight—one glass of wine usually makes her powerfully dizzy. And the hard stuff makes her sick to her stomach after a few swallows. Given her past, and her grandmother’s genes, she’s always figured this for a blessing. Her weak stomach and delicate sense of balance are probably what kept her from self-medicating over the years. But they also ruled out evening libations as potential sleep aids, which made her more vulnerable to Dylan’s plot, so maybe she shouldn’t be so grateful for these metabolic quirks. Not yet anyway.

But with Zypraxon thundering through her system, she was able to drink two glasses of straight vodka without so much as a wince. Same story with the wine. As Marty and Kayla looked on in astonishment, she metabolized both bottles like they were iced water with lemon. The pill doesn’t give her just strength but a kind of temporary imperviousness to any physical limitation.

Except flying, she thinks, laughing under her breath. But maybe if I ran fast enough to get started . . .

There’s a knock on the door. It’s Marty, checking to make sure she’s OK.

A few minutes later, she’s toweling off, realizing she’s got no idea where she’s headed next and wondering if she should have been giving more thought to that than to Dylan’s deceptions and magic pills.

Is she spending the night here? The choice makes her feel suddenly exhausted, in the way everything she did while on the drug should have made her feel but didn’t.

What would the AA folks say?

One step at a time.

Which in this particular instance means it’s a better idea to change into a real outfit and not pajamas.

Kayla and Marty are waiting for her in the living room. They’ve got steaming cups of coffee, which they’re taking absent sips from as they watch Jason’s disposable phone do absolutely nothing on the coffee table between them. They’d bought a charger for the thing when they bought Charlotte’s change of clothes.

Neither of them looks the slightest bit tired, even though it’s after two in the morning.

“I don’t mean to be blunt,” Marty says, “but should you really be carrying around the cell phone of a guy who tried to rape you?”

“It’s a disposable,” Kayla said. “I looked it up online. It sells for about twenty bucks.”

“Guess that’s why it looks a decade old,” Charley says. “He probably bought it for cash. And it’s Dylan’s only way of getting in touch with me.”

“Which he hasn’t done,” Marty says. “Which is strange.”

“He seems like a pretty resourceful bastard psychopath asshole,” Kayla says. “Something tells me he’d find a way to get in touch with you even if he lost the number to Briffel’s burner.”

“We’ll get you a new phone on the way to Altamira,” Marty says.

“Altamira?” Kayla says. “Hiding out in her former hometown? That sounds like a good plan to you?”

“She doesn’t even know who she’s hiding from. How’s she gonna figure out the best place to hide? He might know where she is right now. I don’t know.”

“He knows everything,” Charlotte says quietly. “He knows everything about me. For three months, I met him once a week, and I told him everything. He knows how I lost my virginity. He knows everything I’m afraid of. He knows what my favorite movies are, my favorite books. There’s no hiding from him. There’s no hiding from what I told him.”

“You’re not just saying this because you want to go home again?” Kayla asks.

“What am I going to do? Change my name again? Go off the grid again? Look how well it worked out the first time. I mean, here we are in the middle of . . . whatever the fuck this is. He found me before. He’ll find me again.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Kayla says. “We don’t have any evidence he targeted you because of your background. He could have been stalking that health center for anybody he thought was right for this plan of his. Any damaged, frightened woman who walked through the door. And with your background, you just turned out to be the supercharged version of what he was already looking for.”

“Which explains why he put in three months of work on you,” Marty offers.

“Maybe,” Charlotte says.

“Or maybe not,” Marty adds quietly. “Look, all I’m saying is, there’s no perfect decision here, so she might as well make the one that’s best for her.”

“And you think that’s going back to Altamira? With you?”

Kayla’s not giving in easily, but there’s less bite in her tone, and it feels to Charlotte like she’s transitioned into a cooler, analytical mode.

“The one time that Briffel asshole tried to make trouble for her in Altamira, we showed him to the freeway, and he never came back. A lot of the guys that helped me that night, they’re still there, they’re still sober, and they still do what I say.”

“Charley?” Kayla asks. “What do you want to do?”

“One thing, though, if you do decide to come back,” Marty says. “There’s something I need to take care of first.”

“Oh, Lord,” Kayla says. “What does that mean?”

Shaking his head, Marty says, “Just something weird I gotta figure out.”

“Weirder than everything else that’s happened tonight?” Kayla asks.

“I just gotta find out if it’s a coincidence or not.” To Charlotte he says, “You remember a guy named Luke Prescott?”

“Luke Prescott.” The name comes out like an involuntary grunt. Hearing it now, in the midst of all this, is like waking from a coma to be told your dog tore apart the living room.

Luke Prescott. The guy who’d treated her like she was some dark force invading their pristine small-town high school, all because she got called on more in class than he did, which was because she knew the right answer a lot more often than he did. He was a slick bastard, even at seventeen. Sometimes his strategy against her worked; other times it got his ass called to the carpet. By constantly accusing her of trying to work her past for sympathy, he was able to hang that past around her neck like a scarlet letter. Years ago she would have called him a bully. Now she thinks back on his bullshit and just finds it competitive and desperate. Luke tried to be smarter and better at everything than anyone. With her, he had just had big, obvious targets to use.

Whatever his motives, Luke was the primary reason her life in Altamira didn’t turn out to be quite as normal or pristine as she would have liked it to be. As Luanne would have liked it to be. The guy made it his job to constantly remind everyone of what had happened to her and where she’d come from, and always in a way that hinted she might have been perverted by the darkness she’d been exposed to at such a young age.

“Why are we talking about Luke Prescott right now?” Charlotte asks.

“He’s back in town,” Marty answers. “And the circumstances of his return are a little weird. And they sound a lot weirder now in light of all this.”

“Slow down. You think Luke Prescott is working with Dylan? I thought that guy would be some asshole lawyer by now.”

“Hey,” Kayla whispers.

“For the bad guys. You work for the good guys. Marty, what are you talking about?”

“Prescott’s one of Mona’s deputies now.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Apparently, he went up to San Francisco State, learned a couple different foreign languages, graduated with honors, got an MBA. Was all prepped to ace his interview for the FBI. Then for some reason he doesn’t get past the front door, and he’s back in Altamira, hanging his head and asking Mona for a job.”

“Nothing against Altamira, but that’s a pretty long fall,” Kayla says.

“Exactly,” Marty says. “And it’s suspicious.”

“You don’t think he interviewed with the FBI?” Charlotte asks.

“No, I think he did. What if the FBI’s involved in this somehow? What if he’s working for them?”

“That’s a reach, Marty,” Kayla says.

“You want to know where I was when you called me? I was at the Copper Pot with Luke. Who was asking me for your contact information so he could apologize. When’d you say this Dylan guy first approached you? About three months ago, right?”

Charlotte nods.

“That’s around when Luke first got in touch with Mona. She had a deputy set to retire, Bill Poindexter, so Luke had to wait until early this month to start.”

“That’s still a reach,” Kayla says.

“About twelve hours ago, this would have all seemed like a reach, Kayla.”

“Still,” she says, “guy comes crawling home with egg on his face. Knows he’s going to be seeing folks he was a dick to back in the day. Makes sense he would try to make amends.”

“Look, I knew Prescott. Charley knew Prescott. That kid thought he might run the FBI someday. Now there’s only two ways an arrogant know-it-all like that’s going to come crawling back home on his hands and knees. One, he knows he’s never got a shot in hell at a government job. Or two, he’s made some kind of backroom deal that guarantees him one if he does something else first.”

“I need a nap,” Kayla says. “This is making my head hurt.”

“And,” Charlotte says, “I should add that Marty also believes that space aliens have infiltrated our government at the highest levels.”

“My personal beliefs about our country’s strained relationship with extraterrestrial life is a complicated conversation for another evening,” Marty says. “The point here is that I need to make sure Luke isn’t trying to set some kind of trap with this apology business.”

“No,” Charlotte says, “I do.”

“You going to take one of your pills before you do it?” Kayla asks.