I STARED NUMBLY at the TV, watched with half my brain as the graveyard segment filmed that morning during Lillian’s memorial service melted into a driveway shot of me, standing in front of Greer’s place. I caught only snatches of the things I’d said—He’s my uncle…except that sometimes I feel as though I’m on the verge of remembering…

I couldn’t seem to connect. It was like watching and listening to another person, who looked like me but wasn’t.

I shut off the set, with a motion of my thumb, and just as I did so, my cell phone chimed, from the separate and largely unexplored cosmos inside my purse.

Contact with the outside world!

I dived for it. Didn’t even take the time to check the caller ID first.

“I came home,” Tucker said, without bothering with a hello, “and you were gone. According to your note, you went back to your place. I’ve been there. You, on the other hand, are definitely not.”

Something odd flashed into my mind.

There’s a way into your apartment.

I don’t need a key.

Tucker didn’t have a key; he’d given it back, albeit reluctantly, a month before, when we decided to give each other some space. We hadn’t actually stuck to our guns on that score. I had a key to his place, because I’d been staying there—I’d used it to lock up when I went back with Jolie to get my things. But as far as I knew, it had been a one-sided exchange.

Which didn’t mean Tucker couldn’t have made a copy before the breakup.

Even more disturbing.

How had he gotten in, that morning when I found him in my kitchen, after he’d come back from the dead?

“Moje, are you there?”

“I’m here,” I said, letting out my breath.

There were a great many things I didn’t know about Tucker, like what he did for a living, for instance. The idea wasn’t easy to face, but it was within the realm of possibility that he was the one who’d made those mechanically distorted phone calls. He might even have arranged for the delivery of that almost-fatal chow mein.

But why? What motive could he have had for doing those things?

If he’d laced the chow mein with rat poison, why had he turned right around and helped me save Russell?

Maybe because he was after you, not the dog.

“How did you get into my apartment?”

“I’m not in your apartment. I’m on the road.”

“I mean that morning, when I thought you were—someone else?”

“When you called me Nick,” Tucker said. “Bert let me in. Mojo, what’s going on? Where are you?”

“I’ll ask the questions, if you don’t mind.”

He sighed. “All right. Shoot.”