I’ve seen dead bodies before. People I’d known my entire life. Some of them had held me as an infant, changed my diapers. There was one woman, Loraine, a former advertising executive who, I would only learn once her life prior to Massasauga was made public during my father’s trial, had faked her own death in the autumn of ’91. She taught me to play gin rummy and how to do that bridge trick for shuffling cards. Loraine was a beast at Pictionary and Scrabble. At Halloween, she told ghost stories. In the winter, we made snowmen.

The authorities concluded, after her body was identified among the victims of the massacre, she had deliberately wandered away from a campsite while on vacation in the Finger Lakes National Forest, leaving behind bloody clothing and her wedding ring along the way, in an effort to escape her abusive husband. The reports revealed, upon her supposed death, she had accumulated considerable savings, stocks, and other wealth—a nest egg she had hidden from her husband in preparation for her departure, and she willed it to a close friend with whom she had orchestrated the ruse. My father managed to swindle the money out of her, as he did to others who had any wealth to speak of, when Loraine eventually found herself among the inhabitants at Massasauga. But how or why she fell into my father’s sphere of corruption was never determined. Like the other victims, she took the secret to her grave.

I cried for her the night my mother and I escaped, and many more nights thereafter.

Standing in a hallway outside the morgue of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, I look through the glass of a reinforced window at the pale, lifeless body of Patrick Turner Murphy on a metal slab—and I feel nothing. A white sheet covers him from chest to ankles. His skin is the color of cinderblocks, the deathly hue darkening to shades of purple that peer around the backs of his shoulders and feet.

“Lividity,” Ethan says beside me. “His blood is pooling to the bottom.”

My father has a woolly gray beard that absorbs much of his face—somewhere underneath must be the scar from his suicide attempt—and a receded hairline exposing a mole off-center on top of his head. He’s massive on the table. A fat, hulking brute with arms like ship canons and a whiskey-barrel stomach. This man must have eaten three of my father.

“Are they sure it’s him?” I ask. “I don’t even recognize him.”

“I do,” Ethan says. “He’s maybe twenty, thirty pounds heavier than the last time I saw him, and the beard is longer, but that’s Patrick.”

And yet, it’s not. That cold corpse is not the man whose face Echo sees when she closes her eyes. He’s a stranger. Some distorted, disfigured imposter. I realize, studying the disturbing stillness of the cadaver, that my father withered away years ago. Unbeknownst to anyone outside these walls, he grew slovenly and obese. His interests stunted, activities curtailed by incarceration, he simply sat down to collect moss, becoming embedded in the floor, rotting away.

The staff physician told us he suspected a heart attack as the cause of death based on a preliminary exam. As a matter of procedure, the body will be transferred to the coroner’s office for a complete autopsy, a requirement for all inmate deaths.

“Why do you think he never gave an interview until you?” I ask.

Ethan watches the body. Hands tucked in his pockets, he absorbs the scene he’ll describe later in his article. The flickering fluorescent light tubes. The stench of bleach and ammonia. The almost abandoned austerity of the morgue’s interior visible through the window. Or maybe he’s just trying to imprint on his mind the idea that the man who launched Ethan’s career no longer exists.

“I asked him that question—several times. Rather than answer, he usually had a segue ready about the grand media monopoly and how the freedom of the press died in the bloom of the blogosphere. When anyone can call themselves a journalist, no one is. More than once he suggested I give it up, move out to Hollywood, and become a television writer. I’ll admit, there are days I wonder if he was right.”

“I think you might have picked up the same habit of dodging questions.”

He gives me a chastising side eye. “If I had to guess, I’d say he was ashamed. Getting caught, I think, is the greatest embarrassment of his life. Patrick never felt remorse for his petty crimes, much less for the murders. But being mocked and humiliated through the course of the trial, getting locked in a cell where he shits in full view of another man, I think it left him in a deep depression. When his arrogance met with the reality of imprisonment for the rest of his life, he crawled deep inside himself.”

If I’d never seen what had become of my father, I wouldn’t have believed he was capable of anything nearing shame, embarrassment, or depression. His lack of humility was arguably what made him such an effective con man. He approached his prey with intellect, appealing to their sense of longing, confusion, dissatisfaction, or malaise through academic calculation rather than true empathy. I’m not sure he ever considered another person as a living thing. We were pawns on a chessboard. A means to an end.

“How’d you get him to agree?” I ask.

An abashed smile cuts across his lips. He scratches his fingers through his hair like he needs the time to decide if he’ll give me an answer.

“Patrick was writing a book,” he says.

Of course he was.

“It was more of a manifesto, really. He’d already spent hundreds of hours scribbling it by hand on loose sheets of paper. He wanted someone to read it and give him feedback, teach him how to be a writer. So I made him a deal: five pages for two hours; as long as he answered my questions, I’d read his stuff.” He offers me a reassuring glance. “It was garbage, of course. Meandering and inarticulate. It was like he tried to shove a dozen thoughts into every sentence. Mostly, it was a last-ditch effort to defend himself to history.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know.” Ethan shrugs one shoulder, indifferent. “After eight weeks I had everything I needed, so I stopped coming. That was it. Not sure if Patrick ever finished it.”

That must have infuriated my father. Used up and tossed aside by some young, arrogant upstart. When he realized Ethan was never coming back. That this kid could just walk away without a second thought. My father had shared something material and sacred of himself, only to find he’d been the victim of Ethan’s con. Discarded.

I admit it makes me feel a little better.

“Miss?” A guard approaches us from the end of the hall. “The superintendent can see you now, if you’ll both follow me.”

“Let’s go,” I say, and turn my back to the body. “I’m done here.”

During a perfunctory meeting, I sign the forms necessary to release my father’s body, and I refuse his personal effects. His lawyer can deal with whatever’s left of the man. A guard then escorts me to the visitors’ waiting area while Ethan hangs back to conduct a few interviews for his article. I’m ten pages into a three-year-old magazine when the first reporter arrives, then another and another. Reuters, AP, New York Times—they’ve all come to pick over what’s left of my father’s legacy. Behind the cage that houses the reception desk, the guard’s eyes flick to me as each new press badge is flashed in his face with an inquiry about Patrick Turner Murphy. A second and third guard are called to corral the growing number of reporters milling about.

“Ash is already here,” one of the reporters says to another. They stand below a TV mounted to the wall, both staring at their phones. “Saw his truck in the parking lot.”

Ethan drives a Land Rover Defender. It’s an absurd green thing meant to carry tourists on safari or UN peacekeepers through Eastern Europe. Not exactly a commuter’s car, but he loves it. So do I. When I saw it sitting along the curb outside my apartment, big and conspicuous on a Manhattan street, the truck became my favorite thing about him. Before that, it was his eyes. Like crashing waves on a black-sand beach. But everyone has eyes. Not many people still drive Defenders.

It suits him. On our drive up here this afternoon, I caught a momentary image of him as I glanced out the window at New Jersey across the Hudson. Like something Loraine in her first life might have pitched in a Madison Avenue conference room. Wearing a pair of Aviator sunglasses, V-neck shirt hugging his athletic frame, wavy hair swept back from his face and afternoon stubble along his jaw, Ethan was a living television ad. The camera finds him cruising down the highway, Manhattan skyline in the background, then cut to mud flying under the tires as he traverses rocky forest terrain. Cut to an orange dust cloud, the truck and its handsome, rugged pilot racing across the desert. Next, he’s slicing through the surf on the shore of a white sand beach. Finally, it’s dusk, and our hero arrives in the pristine paved drive of his modern mountain mansion.

Hell, I’d buy one.

No matter how savvy the consumer, there’s always that voice that says, Hey, maybe that guy knows something I don’t. If I had that car, that watch, that suit, people would look at me the way I’m looking at him. It’s the art of the con. The optimism of aspirational consumerism. Telling ourselves, Once I own this thing, I’ll have attained some secret knowledge reserved for a select few. The mystique of the In Crowd.

It’s always a lie.

But on Ethan, it just fits. Classic, but not pretentious. An analog man born in the digital age. Ethan is the scent of fresh hardcover books. He’s the Oxford comma.

Two more reporters enter and mingle with their competition. They take no notice of me. All the same, the waiting area is getting a little crowded, so I take my cue to slip out to the parking lot. As I’m walking to Ethan’s truck, I see a man in a pressed dress shirt and creased slacks standing beside it. He’s on his cell phone, squinting into the low sun dipping toward the horizon. There’s nowhere else to go. It’s either this or back inside. So I erase all trepidation from my face and approach the truck. When the man notices my shadow stretching toward him, he looks up. There’s a moment of confusion on his face as he realizes I’m not Ethan.

“Who else is in there?” he asks.

“Wire services and the Times,” I say. “Local NBC and Fox affiliates.”

He nods and slides his phone into his pants pocket. “I guess Ash beat us to it. This is his truck, right? I’m guessing you’re his new intern.”

The man makes no attempt to hide his coded smile. The one that says, It’s okay, sweetheart. We both know you’re screwing him.

“Yep,” I lie. Better to let people underestimate you at their own expense. “Ethan’s inside wrapping up.”

He’s in his late twenties, maybe, with an artificial tan that makes him look mid-thirties. Short cropped hair and a clean shave. I’d guess cable news. A junior segment producer, maybe. His bosses figure there’s nothing about this story he can screw up. Just get the cause of death, a couple of sound bites from the superintendent, and roll the archive reel while the on-camera reporter does a voice-over. Throw in some B-roll footage outside the gates, and call it a day.

“My crew’s stuck on the parkway,” he says, fishing his phone from his pocket to type out a text. “What do you hear?”

I don’t know where it comes from. An expulsion of spite just flies off my tongue before I consider my words. “Murphy got fat. They think it was a heart attack.”

The man’s head jerks up. “You saw the body?”

Shit. Fuck me.

“Um…well, I—”

“Is the body still in there? Have they contacted next of kin? Has the daughter been here?”

The questions come rapid fire, one on top of the other before he’s finished the last syllable. I start backing away, but he’s following me step-for-step, getting closer.

“Wait. You look—” The suspicious gaze of a journalist scrutinizes me up and down. He catalogues the curly red hair and green eyes—just like Enderly. Like Echo. He takes a guess at my age and does the math in his head. “What’s your name?”

Then I see the pieces click into place.

“Are you the daughter of Patrick Turner Murphy? You’re her, aren’t you?”

He holds up his phone like he’s trying to get a picture. I cover my face, turning away, shrinking from his onslaught, but I’m trapped. There’s nowhere to hide under the guard towers armed by officers with rifles. Inside, more reporters. Hot, rushing panic burns through my body.

“And you came here with Ethan Ash? Will there be a funeral? Are you planning to—”

I flinch and nearly scream when I feel Ethan’s arm wrap around my shoulder. The man’s questions come in a relentless barrage as Ethan shields me with his body while he unlocks the passenger door and shoves me inside. I’m out of breath, heart racing. Once the door’s closed, he turns to the man and pushes him, both hands against his chest, back, back, several feet before pointing a finger in his face and issuing a threat I don’t hear. Then Ethan stalks back to the truck and climbs in. Engine started, he peels out of the parking lot.

“Fuck him,” Ethan says. “Brian’s an asshole.”

Everywhere, my skin turns hot and excited. The way it feels when you almost miss the next step going down a flight of stairs and grasp for the handrail in the split second you see your own death.

“It’s my fault,” he says, hands tight on the steering wheel. “I shouldn’t have left you by yourself.”

Noise like a train speeding through a tunnel fills my ears. A lump of air sticks in my throat as my eyes sting and blur, colors beyond the windshield washing into streaks.

“…to prepare yourself. He’s going to run with the ‘elusive daughter’ story.”

Tears trickle down my face. I try to stifle the quiet eruption, but they come unbidden down my cheeks to splatter dark spots on my shirt.

“Hey, are you okay? Did he touch you?”

It’s mostly anger at being accosted, and a release of the stress that’s been building not only today but maybe all of my life. Like when a runner finally limps and crawls their way to the marathon finish line. A boxer’s hand raised at the end of a fight. The outburst of pent-up emotion when a victim’s family hears the jury say guilty. That’s what my father’s death means to me.

Brian will take his pound of flesh, but it’s nothing I can’t live without.

From the corner of my eye, I see Ethan glance at me, and I turn toward the window to shield my face. He says nothing, sliding one hand to cover mine on the armrest. It’s unexpected, the sudden contact, crossing the line between colleagues and…what? Have we tripped over ourselves and become friends? Would that be so bad? His hand is warm and comforting, like it’s always been there.

Unlikely as it is, Ethan’s become the one person with whom I feel most myself. He knows who I am, understands where I come from. There’s no pretense or pressure to maintain a discreet distance between him and who I was. I can be honest without fear of exposure. Even with Kumi I perform a choreographed attempt at normalcy. Not because I think one day she might write a tell-all, but because I’ve heard it in her voice that my past makes her uneasy. She doesn’t know how to relate to that person. Echo is alien and off-putting the way a cancer patient makes people nervous. Or how there’s always an empty seat on the bus next to the guy with the tracheostomy.

I suppose the idea of Ethan is growing on me.

“Thank you,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt as Ethan parks along the curb outside my apartment building around eight. “For the ride, and everything.”

He tilts his head toward me but his eyes remain fixed toward the street ahead. “Are you sorry you went?”

“No.” Patrick Turner Murphy was pronounced dead today, but my father died a long time ago. Maybe now I can make peace with that. In any case, that’s not what he meant. “You were right. Not going was just an excuse to ignore the issue, and it’s not like I wouldn’t have been sitting at home thinking about it anyway. At least now I feel like I accomplished something.”

His response is a sad smile. A slight lift to the corner of his lips. I don’t know if it’s the thought of his brother that’s grabbed him by the ankles, pulling him down, but he’s only half-here.

“Are you sure you’re okay? Brian—what exactly happened back there?”

Nothing I haven’t experienced before. But it’s that sensation of someone piercing the veil, thinking they have some right to me with no regard for my privacy or basic human dignity. All my life, other people have tried to own me.

“In college,” I say, looking out the window. “My first roommate was a film student. She imagined herself the next Werner Herzog or something. She hid cameras in our dorm room to record me with the intention of putting together some stupid documentary. Kept a journal about me.”

If you’ve ever been robbed, you know the feeling. Someone’s violated the sanctity of your home, defiled it. Nothing can take away that sting of invasion. From that moment, nothing feels safe anymore.

“Two months of every moment of my life inside that room saved on a hard drive before I discovered what she’d been up to. I don’t how she figured out who I was. I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Because I was a minor when my father’s trial convened, my name was redacted from case files. The police and prosecutors went to great lengths to protect my identity. It was the only thing that gave me any chance at a normal life.

“She was expelled and made to turn over everything she’d collected on me. In exchange, I didn’t press charges. I wasn’t mad at her, you know? Just…hurt. All I wanted was an apology, but I never got one.”

“People are assholes,” he says.

“I don’t mind talking about it. If she’d asked, said she was curious, I probably would have talked to her. But it was the way she did it. People read about you, and they get this idea that you belong to them somehow. You’re not a person anymore.”

“I wish I could say that guys like Brian are the exception in this business, but it seems like there are more of them coming up every day.”

“If their audience wasn’t drooling over shit like that, they wouldn’t run it. Guys like Brian just give them what they want.”

“Still,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

“No,” I say, realizing this a bit late. “I apologize. I was awful to you earlier. I’ve been in a shit mood since the day we met. That hasn’t been fair to you.”

“Don’t sweat it. I’ve been told I have that effect on people.”

“Nevertheless, I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. So, yeah, I’m sorry.”

“Avery…” His eyes shift to mine. In profile, illuminated by the streetlamps and neon signs of restaurant windows, he is quite striking. Yet there’s a darkness in him, deep and quiet. Something that dulls the shine on the world he observes. “You don’t ever have to apologize to me for being who you are.”

His statement takes me off guard. How do I respond to such spontaneous generosity of what might be among the nicest things anyone has ever said to another human being? Because isn’t that what we all want? Acceptance. The reassurance that we’re enough. Not just despite our flaws but because of the sum of who we are as people, dismissing all caveats and mitigations.

Silence builds between us, tight and compact. A star collapsing in on itself. I notice for the first time he smells faintly of eucalyptus and mint. And that he has a small birthmark under his left eye and an indentation of a scar under his chin. It makes me wonder, what does he notice about me?

Which are thoughts better left unexplored.

“Well, thank you again,” I say, climbing out of the truck. “Good night.”

There’s more he wants to say, written in the tension of his jaw. “Good night, Avery.”

But he settles for getting me home in one piece.

The apartment is dark and empty when I get inside. Kumi’s got a job for the summer, interning at her uncle’s law firm. Being the boss’s niece, she can’t leave the office until he does, lest there be any appearance of favoritism. He made her apply and sit through three interviews before she was hired, squashing any notions she had about quickly making partner once she graduates from law school.

After I’ve showered the prison stink off me, I change into my pajamas and order a pizza for dinner. With the TV on for background noise, I sit on the couch in the living room with my laptop to look through my work emails. There are five from Cyle, two sent after Ed kicked me out of the office. His demands amount to grunt work. Fact-checking, light copyediting—the kind of stuff he would otherwise assign to his beloved interns if some tabloid Dumpster fire who fancies herself a writer hadn’t come along and stolen his budget. But it’s work, and since I haven’t produced anything else of value this week, I’m not above spending my exile catering to his spiteful needs.

There is something in the final email that catches my attention. The Riot Street website has an obscure, almost hidden section that’s become quite popular over the years among the site’s most loyal readership. According to lore, the page began in response to a phenomenon that occurred not long after the site’s launch in the late nineties. At the bottom of the original FAQ page was an email address that allowed readers to send questions—intended for queries about subscriptions, circulation, and other pertinent information about the magazine. Instead, in the infancy of magazine websites, readers used the address to send in news tips, complain about articles, and occasionally, ask questions entirely unrelated to the magazine or its coverage. These questions ranged from minor borough concerns like road construction or subway delays, to general questions like “Is Y2K a hoax?” and “What’s a google?”

No one would have blamed the poor soul on the receiving end of that email address for simply ignoring and deleting the messages. Instead, something remarkable happened. The questions were answered, first via email responses directly to the reader, and later in an expanded and continually updated FAQ list. The page gained a sort of cult following as a place the Riot Street diehards went to see what absurd questions were posted that week, or maybe learn something new. Like what’s the difference between a road, a street, and an avenue. Eventually, the library of responses grew so large it was moved from the FAQ page, which still had a legitimate job to do for those who just wanted to know what day the new issue came out or whom to call about a billing discrepancy, to its new home under the heading of “Infrequently Asked Questions,” where it remains to this day.

According to Cyle’s email, he’s designated me as the new IAQ elf. No byline. No credit. Just looking up inane facts for people too lazy to Google it themselves. Out of curiosity, I use the log-in credentials he sent me to check the IAQ email account. Three hundred and fourteen unread emails. If I drank, I’d be about ready to jump knee-deep into a bottle about now.

In any case, I’ve had a long day, so I find the least brain-intensive assignment on Cyle’s list and start with that. I’m not ten minutes into fact-checking a movie review of the first summer box office bomb when there’s a knock at my door. Either pizza delivery around here is on point, or Kumi’s already lost her keys.

“Yeah,” I say, uncurling myself from the couch, “coming.”

In my haste, I catch my foot on the coffee table and fall on a stack of boxes we still haven’t unpacked. Dishes, from the sound of it. We’ve got to get on that. It’s starting to feel like we’re squatting. I then hobble through the kitchen with a bruised toe.

Opening the door, I forget all about the pain.

“Uh, hi,” I say, wearing an old T-shirt too big for my body and pajama pants too long for my legs. I suddenly feel like a fucking four-year-old, and now I understand why people on TV are always fully dressed at home, even when just sitting around the house. “What are you doing here?”

“Rats?” Ethan says, peering around me into the apartment.

“What?”

“I heard a noise. Sounded like you were killing something in there.”

“Oh, no.” I cross my arms over my chest like that’ll hide the rest of me. “Just, uh, tripped. Too many damn boxes.”

“Hey, so, listen…” He combs his fingers through his hair, pensive, his eyes on the floor. “I’m sorry to wake you up—”

“I wasn’t asleep.” That comes out quicker than necessary. “Catching up on Cyle’s to-do list.”

“Ah, okay. Well…” His hands adjust the strap of his messenger bag, then they brace against the doorjamb. “See, the reason I came by—I should have called, now that I think about it. I’m not really sure why that didn’t occur to me.”

He fidgets, unsure what to do with his hands or where to look. Ethan’s nervous, which is sort of making me nervous. My father already died today, what else could he have to tell me that even approaches that level of uncomfortable conversation?

“Ethan?”

He looks up. “Yeah?”

“Spit it out.”

“Right.” He clears his throat and stands up straight, now determined to at least make an attempt at getting to the point. “I came back because I lied to you earlier, and I couldn’t leave it like that.”

His nervous shuffling is less cute now. “Okay…”

“The reason Patrick agreed to the interview,” he says. “He also asked me to find you.”

Once it’s out of his mouth, Ethan finds his sturdy footing again. He leans in against the frame. I don’t miss that he nudges his foot across the threshold, in case I try to slam the door in his face.

“I agreed because, hell, I would have agreed to anything back then. As long as it got me the interview. But I swear, Avery, I never gave him anything. I spent eight weeks convincing him you might have changed your name and left the country. Frankly, if I’d told him you were still in the state, he might not have believed me.”

“But you did look for me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” This part he isn’t contrite about. “He made me curious.”

“And you found me.”

“I did.”

Ernest, unrepentant. Ethan has the kind of self-assured confidence my father must have recognized and admired. I guess I do, too. Though I haven’t yet decided what to do with this new information. On the one hand, I appreciate that he respects me enough to turn around and knock on my door, not content to let the omission stand. On the other, had I not asked the question, he might never have revealed the truth. That for the better part of two years, he’s been following my ghost.

“But what I saw,” he says, like he senses the door closing, “was a normal, bright young woman trying to move on with her life. I never had any intention of taking that away from you. I think, like the rest of the country, I wanted to know you’d turned out okay. You’d survived.”

What would he think if he knew what really became of Echo? Detox isn’t pretty. Ravaged by drug addition, she died kicking and screaming and shitting herself on a bare cot in a state-funded rehab facility. I’m what’s left when she emerged.

Yet, painful as that experience was, I learned a few things about forgiveness. They’re big on that in rehab. Making amends to those we’ve hurt isn’t worth attempting if we can’t forgive ourselves first.

“Answer me one thing,” I say, “and I’ll let you off the hook.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“Was it Cara’s idea to offer me the job, or yours?”

“It was Ed’s.”

He’s fucking with me. “You’re fucking with me.”

“Ed read your essay, called me into his office, and said, ‘Get me that girl.’ Cara was indifferent until she saw the viral lift it had after only a few hours. I had nothing to do with it.”

This time I believe him. Though it does make me look at Ed in a new light. Was he so absent in our interview because he’d already made up his mind? I suppose he’s just a distant person. In any case, with one notable exception, I don’t make it a habit to hold grudges, so Ethan was never in any real danger. And now that he’s here, I don’t entirely want him to leave. I admit, there was the slightest sting of excitement when I answered the door. Like Enderly said, he’s new. And new is interesting.

“Hey,” I say, “if you haven’t eaten yet, I’ve got a pizza coming. My roommate’s out, and I’m not going to finish it by myself, so…”

“I still have to write this article. Ed’s going to be waiting up for it. He’ll start calling every fifteen minutes until I send it in.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, no problem.” I start pushing the door closed to shield myself from the embarrassment of being a dumb-ass. “Good—”

“But—” He stops the door with his foot. “I’m starving. If you don’t mind me working while…”

“Sure, yeah.” Stepping back from the door, I let him in. “I was just working on the couch. But, uh, sit wherever. Sorry about the mess.”

“I’ve lived in my place for a year.” He follows me to the living room and sits on the couch beside me to pull his laptop out of his bag. “I still haven’t unpacked everything.”

Propping my feet up on the coffee table, I wake up my laptop and return to Cyle’s to-do list. We fall into a comfortable silence together, not unlike at the office. Except now there isn’t a fabric-padded wall between us. And like his hand covering mine while I cried, it feels familiar. Like we’ve been here a hundred times.

A few minutes later we get up when the pizza arrives and pause to eat and watch a little TV, skipping over the news channels.

“Christ,” Ethan says, opening the box in the kitchen while I get us some paper plates. “Is there anything you don’t put on your pizza?”

“Meat.” My signature order is mushrooms, onions, tomatoes, goat cheese, spinach, basil, black olives, and green olives. “But I feel like you already knew that.”

It isn’t stated outright, but Enderly reads as a vegetarian.

“Patrick told me a story about how you cried and went on a hunger strike the first time they slaughtered a cow.” He takes the box back to the coffee table and pulls out a slice. “I extrapolated from there for the book.”

“No, it’s fine.” I curl up beside him on the couch with my plate in my lap. “You’re like my own polite stalker. It’s only a little creepy.”

“There it is.” Taking a bite, he reclines and stares up at the ceiling. “She said the S-word.”

“Really. I mean, I get it. I’m fascinating. You’re obsessed with me. Just as long as you don’t let it interfere with doing our jobs.”

He laughs, shaking his head. “You’re such a brat.”

“Creeper.”

Later, I mention the IAQ duty, to which Ethan explains that it isn’t so much Cyle’s attempt at torture but more a rite of passage. Every new member of the staff, even Banana Republic Andrew, takes a turn manning the helm. It does make me feel better, like part of the team rather than the redheaded stepchild, even though the sheer number of emails is a bit overwhelming.

“You don’t have to answer every one,” he tells me. “Just pick a few every week, only what you can comfortably handle, and write up a paragraph or two at most. Some only need a short answer. Just be sure to search through the archive to see if it’s a question that’s been answered before. The fun part, really, is that everyone who runs the IAQ has their own sort of flair. They pick different sorts of questions. Have fun with it.”

Fun. I can do that.

By ten we’re both engrossed in our laptops when his phone rings. The sudden noise startles me from my productivity trance. Ethan yanks his phone out of his pocket to look at the screen, then he jumps to his feet.

“Sorry. I’ve got to take this.”

“No problem,” I say, and point toward my room.

He’s been in there for ten, fifteen minutes, by the time Kumi gets home.

“Hey,” she says, coming through the front door with two arms full of grocery bags. I get up to help her and move boxes from the counter to give her a place to set them down. “I just grabbed some essentials. How was work?”

“Got sent home early. You?” I unpack sodas and iced tea from a bag and line them up in the fridge while Kumi puts stuff away in the pantry.

“What, why? Something happen?”

We hear “What the hell does that mean?” come from my bedroom. Kumi’s eyes perk up.

“You have a guy over?” she asks.

“Ethan. He doesn’t count.”

She drops a loaf of bread on the counter and corners me against the kitchen table. “Ethan Ash is in your bedroom?”

“He was sitting at this table earlier. Next to your bra.”

I hold it up and twirl it at her. She snatches it and tosses it aimlessly across the room. The woman has no shame.

“So…” Her eyes get big and excited. “Fill me in.”

“My father died. The boss sent me home early, and Ethan took me to the prison.”

“Whoa. Okay.” All humor leaves her face, and she grabs me by the wrist to drag me to the couch. “Serious time. How are you feeling? Is this an ice cream thing or a—well, you don’t drink, so—or a smash some plates then sit alone in the dark thing?”

“I’m fine.”

Her response is a dubious frown.

“Really. I made my peace and cried it out. I’d like to move on. Now, if possible.”

Sure, I admit, the topic of him and all the ways he ruined my life will never be fully resolved. If not tomorrow or the next day, then at some point sooner or later I’ll still feel the occasional pang of resentment and anger. I’ll probably still have a nightmare that seems brought on by nothing in particular. When I haven’t thought of him in days, something will trigger an anxiety attack and I’ll count back from ten and breathe through my nose and tell myself it’s all in the past. But for today, I’m just tired.

“Okay,” she says. “No more daddy issues tonight.”

I sort of love her tactlessness.

“And that being the case…” Kumi brings both knees up to her chest like a kid ready for story time. “Tell me more about why you’ve got Ethan Ash locked up in your bedroom. Are you going to do sexy times to him?”

She needs a therapist.

“No.”

“Can I?”

“Settle down, kitty.” This is how she ends up falling in love with the first rebound that comes along. She’s ruled by her libido. “We’re working. I invited him to stay for pizza after he dropped me off.”

Well, dropped me off, drove around, came back…not important.

“Oh, see…” Her lips screw to the left in a second-place-Olympic-gymnast sort of way. “You don’t do pizza on a date if you’re planning to hook up. Nobody wants garlic breath and bloated pizza farts in bed. That’s not hot.”

Though her logic is sound, I can’t have her using Ethan as a scratching post or making winking insinuations every time he comes over. Because I guess I’ve decided that this doesn’t have to be a one-time occurrence.

“Promise me you won’t—”

Her attention darts over my shoulder. I turn to see Ethan walking out of my bedroom. He pauses, noticing Kumi.

“You must be the roommate,” he says, and comes to the coffee table to grab his laptop and shove it in his bag. There’s tension in his shoulders, in his hurried steps. With the bag slung over his shoulder, he holds out his hand to Kumi. “Ethan, nice to meet you.” Then to me: “Thanks for dinner. Sorry, but I’ve got to head out.”

“Everything okay?” I get up to see him to the door.

“Yeah, yeah.” But he’s practically running ahead of me. “Just something I’ve got to take care of.”

He opens the door and only pauses on the other side as an afterthought. “I’ll see you.”

I lock up behind him and turn to see Kumi’s puzzled expression staring at me from across the room.

“What was that about?”

“No idea.”

Whatever it was, Ethan looked spooked.