Have I really forgotten her this easily? I spend the rest of the ride staring out the window, trying to make sense of all the green. I imagine whales swimming in the air between the trees, the forests of Orman rising up with their dark branches to mingle into the Michigan landscape. I pretend I am not real; Wally and Alex are not real. The world is one giant story and I’m only a figment of some author’s imagination, a discarded character that never made it onto a page. Strangely, it makes me feel a bit better.

Alex maneuvers the truck through an iron gate that’s been propped open on each side with stones. There’s a sign saying the beach is private, but the rocks are deeply embedded in the soil and I get the feeling that the gate never closes.

Lake Michigan is back in full glory, stretching out toward the horizon in leisurely strokes of blue. Alex stops the truck near a narrow dirt path that leads to the water’s lapping edges. When he shuts off the engine, Wally squeezes himself back through the window and out of the truck bed, his sprint only slightly slower than his coffee-fueled efforts as he rounds a clump of trees and disappears from view.

My ears are still adjusting to the relative quiet when Alex sighs. I think he’s about to tell me where to find Endsley, but instead he closes his eyes, leans his head back, and breathes, “He’s my best friend.”

I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.

“He’s my best friend and I don’t want anything to hurt him.”

I watch as the world of Alex comes into focus. Alex is everything kind and good and naive without being stupid. His insides are a carnival full of possibility and wonder and intelligent machines that do not detract from the quaintness of his old-fashioned bizarre. Everyone is welcome here, everyone given first and second and third chances to enjoy the bounty of cotton candy. Nobody is too poor or too odd or too anything to be excluded. Alex is whimsy and hope, but he is not ignorant. Encircling the carnival are tall walls decorated with murals of smiling children and hot air balloons—bright and joyous, but walls nonetheless. They are meant to keep the bad things out.

He is wondering if I am one of those bad things.

I don’t blame him.

I want to tell him that the bad things will find a way in, no matter what he does. I want to say that I, too, thought I was safe because I loved friends and stories and life more than I liked material possessions, but it turns out that even the safest things can be ripped from you between one heartbeat and the next.