“Yes.” He didn’t open his eyes, but he smiled, a little. His hand squeezed hers a little. “You’re here, aren’t you?” That sounded like a blow-off question, but it wasn’t, she realized. There was something else behind it.

“Yes, I’m here, I’m right here,” she said, and kissed his cheek. His face didn’t have the pinprick stings of the draug on it, but she’d seen them on his neck and chest—they’d suspended him in the water with his face up, the better to keep him alive while they … No, she really couldn’t think about it. Not now. “Michael said you—you might have felt what they were doing to you. Did you? Feel it?”

He took a little too long to answer. It might have been weariness, or it might have been a lie. Very hard to tell. “Not so much,” he said. “It was more like I was … dreaming. Or they were making me dream.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“I don’t think—” He opened his eyes and looked at her, just for a second, then closed them again. “Claire, I don’t think I can talk about it right now.”

That … hurt. It hurt a lot. She had a sudden dread that he was going to tell her something awful, like I dreamed I was in love with Monica Morrell and I liked that better. Or maybe … maybe just that he’d had some happy dream that didn’t include her at all. Because she knew, oh yes, that Shane could do better than her; there were taller girls, prettier girls, girls who knew how to flirt and tease and dress for maximum success. She didn’t fool herself about that. She didn’t know why Shane loved her, really.

What if the dream had shown him that he really didn’t need her, after all?

Michael leaned over to her and whispered, “We’re going to leave you two alone, Claire. If you need us, you know we’ll be close.”

She nodded and watched them go; Eve seemed reluctant, and she made a little call me gesture on her way out the door. Claire swallowed through a suddenly desert-dry throat and asked, “Why don’t you want to tell me about it, Shane?”

“It might scare you,” he said. His voice sounded thin, and a little shaky. “Scares the hell out of me.” After a short hesitation, he continued, “Some of it was good. The two of us, we were good, Claire.”

“Us,” she repeated. The fist around her heart let up, just a little. “The two of us?”

“Yeah,” he whispered, and she realized that there were tears forming at the corners of his tight-shut eyes. Tears. She caught her breath and felt a stab of real pain. “I just—it was good, Claire, it was really good, and I didn’t want to—I don’t want to—I don’t know what I—”

He stopped and turned his head away from her, then rolled over on his side.

Hiding from her.

If it was really good, she wanted to ask, why are you crying? But she didn’t, because she couldn’t stand to see him hurt like this. She was overflowing with questions, all kinds of questions, because she couldn’t understand how if something had been good it could do so much harm.