I stayed up for about an hour after Salman went to bed that night, wishing I had someone to talk to. Twice, I tried calling Aisha, but she must have been at work—according to my watch, it was three p.m. in Phoenix.

I didn’t know what I had been expecting when he walked me to my room, but I hadn’t been expecting this. He had gone waltzing off to his room as if he had entirely forgotten the purpose of my visit. I had to leave in the morning, and it was upsetting enough knowing that I may have just blown my one chance to get the book back.

I had been dreading the encounter for so long that the disappointment came as something of a shock. I wasn’t supposed to be falling in love; that wasn’t why I had come to Qia. And yet, the chaste kiss he had given me in the doorway left me with a lingering sense of dissatisfaction. It was supposed to be the prelude, not the nightcap.

Maybe he had been playing the gentleman, I decided as I began to drift off. Maybe he had been waiting for me to initiate the first move, and that was why he had invited me up to the hot tub. Maybe I ought to have been more forward, and when I’d made no attempt at intimacy, he had been disappointed. Maybe that accounted for the injured look I had thought I’d discerned on his face as we were heading back into the stairwell.

I finally fell asleep at around two a.m. and slept fitfully. I dreamt of my dad’s funeral, and Icarus’s threatening, sneering face. I dreamt of Salman being killed by a hitman hired by Fire Cloud, with me never having the chance to tell him that I thought…maybe…I was falling in love with him.

There’s no lonelier feeling than waking up in the middle of a night from a nightmare and not having anyone to comfort you. Aisha still hadn’t returned my calls; Salman’s room was on the other side of the house, but might as well have been on the other side of the moon.

Dawn was creeping in from between the balusters on the balcony and the deep purple of early morning was lightening to pale gold. The loss of the book stung, but I consoled myself with the thought that I would be flying home soon—home to my best friend, and my aunt, and the job I had been neglecting.

I didn’t know that I had awoken out of one nightmare and into another.

* * *

I arrived back in Phoenix after a twenty-one-hour journey. Back in Qia, Salman would have just been waking up. But here, for the first time in almost five days, my wristwatch and the time were in sync: it was just after 8:30 p.m.

I had planned to take a cab home from the airport. But as I turned on my phone to pull up the ride-sharing app, I was surprised to find that I had six new voicemails.

Two of them were from my boss saying she wanted to speak to me immediately. The other four were from Gage.

“Cassie, I’m sorry,” said the first. “I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know if you can ever forgive me, but just know that I did what I thought was right in the moment.”

Suddenly, I wanted to hit Clay over the head for giving him my number. Unnerved, I moved to the next one.

“Cassie, I can understand if you don’t ever want to speak to me again. I get it. I wouldn’t want to speak to me, either. But at least give me a chance to see you in person and explain why I did what I did.”

What was he talking about? Was this a ploy to get my attention, or had he done something during my absence that I was only just now finding out about? My stomach gave an uneasy flip as I moved to the third message.

“I can see that you’re ignoring my messages,” Gage said in a tone of desperation. “I guess I can’t really blame you, and I’m sorry if this costs you your job. If you’re even still listening, just know that I acted with your best interests in mind.”

I didn’t even bother listening to the fourth one. As soon as I made it out of baggage claim, I called him.

He picked up on the first ring. “Cassie?” He sounded dazed, like he had only just woken up.

“Gage, what the hell’s going on?” I demanded, heedless of the curious stares I was drawing. “You leave these bizarre voicemails and don’t even have the decency to explain yourself. I swear to you, if this is some kind of trick—”

“I really thought you knew.” If Gage had sounded scared before, he was panicking now. “I’m sorry—”

“If you say you’re sorry to me one more time—”

“I thought for sure your boss had already talked to you.”

I pushed through the revolving door into the pickup area, where I was immediately welcomed by a blast of late-summer searing Arizona heat. The air was a shimmering wave that made the dark parking lot wobble in front of me like smoke.

“Gage, I’ve been out of the country all weekend,” I said slowly. “I haven’t spoken to my boss since Wednesday morning, and I’m not sure what any of this has to do with you.”

“Did you just land?” he asked, a new eagerness creeping into his voice. “Maybe we could meet somewhere and talk about it.”

“What is there to talk about?” I said angrily, wishing I had called Garcia before I called Gage. I strove to remain calm, but couldn’t keep a surge of panic from inching into my voice. “Did you…did you do something?”

“I think it’s best if we don’t have this conversation over the phone,” he said. I knew, in that moment, that it was going to be a long while before I made it to bed. “Let’s meet at Durant’s on Central. They’re open until eleven, and I find the old-fashioned aesthetic very calming. Maybe you will, too.”

“Fine.” My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the phone. “See you in about half an hour.”

“See you,” said Gage, and hung up.

In the cab, I tried calling Garcia twice but got no answer. Gage’s apologies had been ominous and cryptic, and in the absence of an explanation, my imagination hastened to fill in the blanks. In one version, he had gone by the office and embarrassed me. In another, he had pulled a gun on someone and cited me as the reason. Any number of things could have happened, because Gage’s eccentric nature and lack of inhibitions made him willing to do things that most people would never dare.

I found him seated in a quiet corner of Durant’s, a traditional pub and steakhouse with brass pumps, hardwood paneling, and garishly red upholstery the color of a rum punch. I felt like I had wandered into one of those vivid, feverish-looking Technicolor noirs from the 1950s.

Gage had been playing a game on his phone while he waited. Now, as I took the seat opposite, he rubbed his hands together briskly, as though cold. “How was your f-flight?” he stammered.

“Gage, you’ve got about three seconds to explain yourself.” I tapped the face of my wristwatch. “I don’t have all night.”

“Yeah, so…” He seemed to be looking everywhere in the room except at me. “I don’t know how else to say this without sounding like a horrible person, so I’ll just come right out and say it. I got in touch with your boss this week and told her some things that you probably didn’t want her to know.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. Gage quailed beneath the sternness and severity of my tone. “What do you even know about me?”

“Well, I was reading through your emails, and I found out some things—”

“You were what?!” I yelled loudly enough to draw the attention of the bartender. “Back up. How did you even get into my email? Gage, if I find out you’re lying to me…”

But of course, I almost hoped he was lying, at this point. What could he have read in my emails? What had I even written lately?

“Last week.” He held up a shaky hand, as if to stop my fury. “Last week when I rescued your purse from that vagrant in the park, I asked you to look through it and make sure you weren’t missing anything. But you were. You were missing your passwords. I had taken them.”

“You—” I stopped, breathless. If I could have flayed him with my nails, I would have. “You took them out of my purse?”

Gage nodded gravely. “When I caught up with the guy, he had the purse half-open. Inside, I saw a sticky note with some letters and numbers on it. I was overcome by curiosity. I had to know what they were. So, of course, I took them home—”

“Of course?” I didn’t even care who heard me, now. “Gage, you had a choice. Literally any other person in your position would have left the note where it was.”

“I realize that, now—”

“I couldn’t care less. I’m not interested in whatever epiphany you had yesterday or the day before that made you realize that stealing out of my purse and hacking into my personal email is wrong. You idiot. You absolute, sneaking idiot! You should have had that realization a week ago.”

While Gage sat there biting his knuckles, a waiter came striding over from the other side of the room. “Is there a problem here?” he asked in a voice of feigned politeness.

“Yes, there’s a problem,” I said, motioning across the table. “This cretin, this sentient lump of matter, hacked into my emails—and what? Did you email my boyfriend? My boss?”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said the waiter. “But I’m going to have to ask you to lower your voice. Now, are you ready to order something?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Nor am I,” said Gage with a timid shake of his head.

“May I remind you that this restaurant is for paying customers only,” said the waiter, “and that if you’re not ordering anything, you need to leave?” The exasperated tone in his voice suggested that he rather hoped we would choose the second option.

I flipped open the menu and selected an item at random. “I’ll have the crab cake with chipotle aioli.”

“Same,” mumbled Gage.

“Please don’t order the same thing as me,” I said with a stony glare. “It’s creepy.”

Gage sighed and opened the menu to the appetizers. “Fried calamari,” he said, handing the menu back to the waiter. “Sorry for the noise.”

“Just try to keep it down,” he said cheerfully. “You’d be the third or fourth fighting couple we’ve had to remove from the diner just in the past week. Maybe the weather’s gotten everyone in a bad mood lately, or maybe I need to go work for a new pub.” Smiling to himself at the happy thought, he took the menus and left.

While we waited for our appetizers, I pressed Gage to tell me what he had done with my emails.

“I was scrolling through your emails, and I saw this woman’s name—Irene Quick. I said to myself, ‘That’s like the name from the Get Rich Quick movie.’ So, of course, I decided to investigate. And I came to find out that you’d been outsourcing your work to a ghostwriter. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it. You mean to tell me that Cassie Renault, winner of two Peabodies, has been paying someone else to write her articles? ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I wouldn’t be doing my duty as a public servant if I didn’t inform the relevant parties that they were being defrauded.’ So, after a long argument with myself—”

“Gage, what did you do?”

“Weighing the pros and cons—”

“GAGE!”

At the back of the room, the waiter made a menacing scowl. I didn’t care. Let him throw us out; let him throw the food to the dogs.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” Gage said. “I wish I could go back and undo what I did. But I forwarded all your correspondence with Ms. Quick to your employer. I used your email to do it, so she probably thinks you sent them…”

By now, I had stopped listening, and Gage’s voice drifted in and out, like an old radio being repeatedly turned to the same station. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Maybe she hadn’t read the emails. Maybe she had read them and hadn’t understood what she was looking at. Maybe she assumed they were spam and had sent them to the trash bin.

Yes, this oaf had tried to sabotage my career. But it didn’t necessarily follow that he had succeeded.

At least, that was my hope. But why else would she have called me twice, both times stating that I needed to call back immediately? Unless there was some other pressing emergency—unless I was just being paranoid?

Once, when I was fifteen, I had “borrowed” Aunt Patricia’s car for a few hours while she was sleeping and driven it over to a friend’s. She never found out, but for the next week, my heart had leaped into my throat whenever she said we needed to talk. I would never forget the sheer panic of that week. But it was nothing to the terror I felt now, wondering why Garcia wanted to talk and whether my job was on the line.

Somehow, Gage had been talking this whole time. “I’m sure in a year or two, this whole situation is going to seem riotously funny,” he was saying. “We’ll go out for frozen yogurt and have a good laugh over it.”

He shimmered before me for a second as my vision came back into focus. Somehow, the universe had willed that this person, who was beneath my contempt, would be the one to destroy my career. The injustice of it all was galling.

“Gage,” I said slowly, “I’m only going to say this once, so listen closely. I don’t ever want to see you again. Do you understand? Ever.”

“But—”

“If you even come near me,” I said loudly, “I’ll file a restraining order so fast that you’ll wish you had worn a seatbelt. This isn’t a threat. It’s a promise.”

Gage attempted to put in a word, but I wasn’t done.

“Why would you do this?” I asked. “Were you trying to get my attention, or was this some kind of punishment? What possible excuse could you have for humiliating me like this and potentially getting me fired?”

“All I can say,” said Gage, “is that it made sense at the time. I warned you that there would be consequences for ignoring me, and so there were.”

I rose from the booth just as the waiter was returning with our orders.

“You’re not even worth the time I’m wasting having this discussion,” I said, “but I hope, one day, you swallow a toad. A huge, honking, live toad. And I hope the toad sits in your throat and hops out whenever you talk to a woman. And I hope you die without ever being kissed.”

And, leaving him with the check and a plate of uneaten crab cake, I marched out of the restaurant to find my cab.